ot as a Divinity, but as a son of God, as
we to-day are sons of God, of the most high! Oh, that we could carry
that "faith" into our beliefs, and the determination to be stopped at
no obstacle which may bar the progress of truth, which must conquer in
the end!

The favorite theme in the writings of Shelley is "Eros," love of the
individual, of the race, of nature, and in this he follows Christ, in
whose system of Philosophy, Love is ever the pre-dominating idea which
permeates mankind with its beneficial effects, and will, when the
bastard tinsel with which the truths of the Nazarene are hidden, be
replaced by that pure gold which it is impossible to trace in the
enunciations of any previous philosopher. This subject is always
present to Shelley, and he thus appeals in one of his poems to the

"Great Spirit, deepest Love!
Which rulest and dost move
All things which live, and are."

In another place he inquires--

"What is love? Ask him who lives, what is life? Ask him who
adores, what is God?"

And in the same essay he describes love as

"The bond and sanction which connects man with man, and with
everything which exists."

Elsewhere he points out that the attainment of love

"urges forth the power of man to arrest the faintest shadow
of that without the possession of which there is no rest nor
respite to the heart over which it rules, (and that) so soon
as this want or power is dead, man becomes the living
sepulchre of himself, and what yet survives is the mere husk
of what once he was."

Of such was Shelley's philosophy of love, and I would ask if it be
conceivable that the abominable calumny prompted by theological virus,
that he kept a seraglio, as his friend Leigh Hunt informs us was
reported, had any real existence. Shelley was too pure for any such
idea as that of promiscuous sexual intercourse to be acted on by
himself; his life, which lies open before us, refutes the diabolical
invention. The fact was, that at the early age of nineteen he married
Harriet Westbrook, the daughter of a retired tavern keeper, a woman
without soul and that congeniality of disposition which a man
overflowing with the pulses of genius should have chosen. After a
wretched existence without intellectual sympathy, and on the advice of
her father, who did not agree with his ideas on religion, they parted
by mutual consent, never to meet again. Shelley about this