ughout his
writings, every thought and every feeling is subdued and chastened by
a spirit of unutterable and boundless love. The poet meets us on the
common ground of a disinterested humanity, and he teaches us to hold
an earnest faith in the worth and the intrinsic Godliness of the soul.
He tells us--he makes us feel that there is nothing higher than human
hope, nothing deeper than the human heart; he exhorts us to labor
devotedly in the great and good work of the advancement of human
virtue and happiness, and stimulates us

"To love and hear--to hope till hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates."

It is observed by Shelley that

"The exertions of Locke, Hume, Gibbon, Voltaire, Rousseau,
and their disciples in favor of oppressed and deluded
humanity, are entitled to the gratitude of mankind. Yet it
is easy to calculate the degree of moral and intellectual
improvement which the world would have exhibited, had they
never lived. A little more nonsense would have been talked
for a century or two; and perhaps a few more men, women and
children burnt as heretics. We might not at this moment have
been congratulating each other on the abolition of the
Inquisition in Spain."

The vast impetus, which these extraordinary geniuses gave to freedom
in metaphysical strongholds, led to a corresponding degree of liberty
in the political and social relations.

Shelley was not one who

"beheld the woe
In which mankind was bound, and deem'd that fate
Which made them abject, would preserve them so."

but on the contrary was aware of the progressive character of the
race, and threw himself with all his heart and soul into the cause of
Republicanism, and never slackened in his efforts till death took him
from his work. His noblest endeavors were directed toward the cause of
suffering humanity, crushed under the weight of despotism; and his
tuneful lyre was ever struck in behalf of the Goddess of Freedom, to
whom, in that soul inspiring "Ode to Liberty," he offers chaplets of
the most glorious verse to rouse the nations from their apathy. He has
given us his reflections on the English Revolution, when Cromwell
crushed royalty under his feet in the person of the tyrant Charles
Stuart, and which, notwithstanding, rose again to befoul, in the
profligacy and debauchery of the second Carolian epoch; on the French
Revolution, whe