is still at play, save only that his
play is such as manhood stops to watch, and his playthings are those
which the gods give their children. The universe is his box of toys. He
dabbles his fingers in the day-fall. He is gold-dusty with tumbling
amidst the stars. He makes bright mischief with the moon. The meteors
nuzzle their noses in his hand. He teases into growling the kennelled
thunder, and laughs at the shaking of its fiery chain. He dances in and
out of the gates of heaven: its floor is littered with his broken
fancies. He runs wild over the fields of ether. He chases the rolling
world. He gets between the feet of the horses of the sun. He stands in
the lap of patient Nature and twines her loosened tresses after a hundred
wilful fashions, to see how she will look nicest in his song.

This it was which, in spite of his essentially modern character as a
singer, qualified Shelley to be the poet of _Prometheus Unbound_, for it
made him, in the truest sense of the word, a mythological poet. This
child-like quality assimilated him to the child-like peoples among whom
mythologies have their rise. Those Nature myths which, according to
many, are the basis of all mythology, are likewise the very basis of
Shelley's poetry. The lark that is the gossip of heaven, the winds that
pluck the grey from the beards of the billows, the clouds that are
snorted from the sea's broad nostril, all the elemental spirits of
Nature, take from his verse perpetual incarnation and reincarnation, pass
in a thousand glorious transmigrations through the radiant forms of his
imagery.

Thus, but not in the Wordsworthian sense, he is a veritable poet of
Nature. For with Nature the Wordsworthians will admit no tampering: they
exact the direct interpretative reproduction of her; that the poet should
follow her as a mistress, not use her as a handmaid. To such following
of Nature, Shelley felt no call. He saw in her not a picture set for his
copying, but a palette set for his brush; not a habitation prepared for
his inhabiting, but a Coliseum whence he might quarry stones for his own
palaces. Even in his descriptive passages the dream-character of his
scenery is notorious; it is not the clear, recognisable scenery of
Wordsworth, but a landscape that hovers athwart the heat and haze arising
from his crackling fantasies. The materials for such visionary Edens
have evidently been accumulated from direct experience, but they are
recompo