294 LANDSCAPE 



about you, are objects it is impossible to conceive without seeing them ; 

 and though we had heard many strange descriptions of the scene, none 

 of them at all came up to it. 



Sixty years had elapsed between these descriptions by 

 Gray and the lines on the Simplon Pass by Wordsworth. 

 What a change there is in the way of feeling nature ! It may 

 be objected that I am comparing prose with poetry. But 

 Gray's Latin verses on the Grande Chartreuse and the touch on 

 nature in his English poems at large have the same quality 

 of appreciative observation from a point external to the object, 

 whereas Wordsworth's lines are distinguished by sympathy 

 with things that speak intelligibly to his soul because they 

 form a part of that in which he lives and moves and has his 

 being. The prasens deus of Wordsworth quis deus incertum, 

 tamen est deus finds no place in Gray's philosophy. 



Shelley's poetry, more than any other in our language, is 

 imbued with a mystical Platonism, which displays itself, so 

 far as our present subject is concerned, under a twofold 

 aspect. In nature Shelley seems to have divined an omni- 

 present, all-sustaining, vitalising spirit, which assumed for 

 his imagination the specific attributes of intellectual or ideal 

 beauty. In Alastor he describes the fate of one who is for 

 ever haunted by this beauty, burning dimly through things 

 of sense, and eluding the neophyte in every appearance which 

 takes form and fascination from the immanent splendour. In 

 vain Alastor pursues his vision across the world : in vain the 

 fairest creatures and sublimest scenes are offered to his gaze : 

 it is only in sleep that his soul is comforted by the divine 

 intuition ; and he dies unsatisfied, to blend with that which 

 lured him through far lands disconsolate. 



He, I ween, 



Kad gazed on Nature's naked loveliness, 

 Actseon-like, and fled affrighted. 



This is one side to Shelley's Platonism. But not the less 

 is there a Spirit of Life, an anima mundi, the power and 

 vital heat of which is felt in thunder and the voice of birds, 

 in the choral dances of the planets, in herbs and stones, in 



