distilled through the same over-refining and unrealizing alembic. Having
started as a teacher and reformer of the world, at an age when he could
know nothing of the world but from fancy, the persecution he met with on
the threshold of this boyish enterprise only confirmed him in his first
paradoxical views of human ills, and their remedies. Instead of waiting
to take lessons from those of greater experience, he with a courage,
admirable, had it been but wisely directed, made war upon both.... With
a mind, by nature, fervidly pious, he yet refused to acknowledge a
Supreme Providence, and substituted some airy abstraction of 'Universal
Love' in its place. An aristocrat by birth, and, as I understand, also
in appearance and manners, he was yet a leveller in politics, and to
such an utopian extent as to be the serious advocate of a community of
goods. Though benevolent and generous to an extent that seemed to
exclude all idea of selfishness, he yet scrupled not, in the pride of
system, to disturb wantonly the faith of his fellow-men, and, without
substituting any equivalent good in its place, to rob the wretched of a
hope, which, even if false, would be better than all this world's best
truths.

"Upon no point were the opposite tendencies of the two friends more
observable than in their notions on philosophical subjects: Lord Byron
being, with the great bulk of mankind, a believer in the existence of
matter and evil, while Shelley so far refined upon the theory of
Berkeley, as not only to resolve the whole of creation into spirit, but
to add also to this immaterial system, some pervading principle, some
abstract nonentity of love and beauty--of which, as a substitute at
least for Deity--the philosophic bishop had never dreamed."

The difference existing between their philosophical doctrines was that
which existed between the two most opposed systems of spiritualism and
pantheism.

I said that Shelley, notwithstanding his originality of mind, was
destined, through the mobility of his impressions, to be easily
influenced by what he read. The study of Plato and of Spinoza had
already given to his metaphysical views a different bent. But before his
transition from atheism to a mystical pantheism, before finding God in
all things, after having sought him in vain everywhere, before
considering himself to be a fragment of a chosen existence, and before
shutting himself up in a kind of mysticism which did actually absorb him
at