198 ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



Wc would not exclhange the erring, impulsive, generous-minded 

 Shelley for some timid yet wholly respectable counterpart, and still it 

 must always remain a matter for regret that the poet's Judgment 

 was ever clouded and his sense of reality darkened by such an 

 emasculate and unpractical philosophy. Shelley, with all his human- 

 itarian ardour, never succeeded in being thoroughly human in his 

 poetry. He is the master, of course, of certain human passions 

 in a lyrical way. Exquisite tenderness for the oppressed, burn- 

 ing wrath against the oppressor have never found more eloquent 

 utterance, and he is one of the great love poets of our language. 

 But always there is something hectic and unreal in his verse, and the 

 human beings of his early poetry are the shadows on a wall, or at the 

 best the incarnation of a single passion. Julian and Maddalo, The 

 Cenci, Charles I., and the poems To Jane moiimfully point the way to 

 a new growth of power in which Shelley would have preserved the ideal 

 grace of his youthful verse combined with the human depth it lacks. 



The doctrinaire and the ideal Shelley are subtly blended in the 

 Queen Mah and Laon and Cythna. .The point where idealism shakes 

 itself free from materialistic dogma is indicated in the prose fragment 

 on Love. The development of his own speculative faculty and the pro- 

 gress of his Platonic studies had then given his nature its true direction, 

 dissolved the material universe in a mist of beaut}^, and turned him to- 

 wards the contemplation of human life as an emanation of a supreme 

 controlling power, whose image was ever dimly present in his mind. His 

 formal abnegation of ma-terialism is first avowed in his brief Essay on 

 Life (1815), although the change dates back to 1814 at least: — "The 

 shocking absurdities of the popular philosophy of mind and matter, its 

 fatal consequences in morals, and their violent dogmatism concerning 

 the source of all things, had early conducted me to materialism. This 

 materialism is a seducing system to young and superficial minds. It 

 allows its disciples to talk, and dispenses them from thinking. But I 

 was discontented with such a view of things as it afforded; man is a 

 being of high aspirations, ' looking before and after,' whose ' thoughts 

 wander through eternity,' disclaiming alliance with transience and 

 decay; incapable of imagining to himself annihilation; existing but in 

 the future and the past; being not what he is, but what he has been and 

 shall be. Whatever may be his true and final destination, there is a 

 spirit within him at enmity with nothingness and dissolution. This is 

 the character of all life and being. Each is at once the centre and the 

 circumference; the point to which all things arc referred, and the line 



