296 LANDSCAPE 



All new successions to the forms they wear ; 

 Torturing the unwilling dross that checks its flight 

 To its own likeness, as each mass may bear ; 

 And bursting in its beauty and its might 

 From trees, and beasts, and men, into the heaven's light. 



It is apparent that, for Shelley, the beauty which hunted 

 Alastor to his death on this earth, the beauty which in the 

 mind of Asia was as a keen flame shining through the 

 alabaster of the universe, has become the attribute of power, 

 vitality, continuous and all-pervasive energy. This is not 

 poetry borrowing the forms of pantheistic speculation, but 

 pantheism assuming to itself the faith and passion which 

 transmutes speculative thought into religion. To this under- 

 lying intuition of indwelling deity Shelley owes the magic 

 of his verse, whenever he deals directly with nature. Those 

 aerial conceptions of living creatures in the elements, the 

 ministry of the cloud, the wizardry of the west wind, the 

 sympathies of the sensitive plant, the incantations of the 

 Witch of Atlas, the raptures of the loves of earth and moon, 

 the daemon of the whirlwind, the chariot-races of the hours, 

 the primeval genii of Prometheus Unbound all these 

 creations of the poet's mythopoeic fancy are vitally connectec 

 with the poet's belief in the universe as a manifestation o: 

 spiritual force. For him it is not that subordinate divinities 

 fairies, angels, fiends, nymphs, fauns, and so forth exist 

 separately everywhere upon a slightly different plane from 

 that of human nature ; but everywhere, and in all things, in 

 plants and beasts and men and earth and sky, eternally 

 abides a genius and a spirit, whose particular epiphanies 

 constitute one moving whole, a stream of life, a poos as the 

 Greek sage called it. c All things pass, and nothing stays ; 

 the cosmos may be compared to the flow of a river, into 

 which it is impossible to plunge twice and find it the same 

 flood.' Yes : but the stream, though ever changing, is 

 perennially one ; and all things, including man, are drops 

 which go to make its continuity. 



