NATURE AND HER HARMONIES. 45 



To overlook the ages, what is the Prometheus of Shelley 

 but an impersonation of the Soul of Imagination, warring 

 with the great powers of evil, who curse it with a body. The 

 Rock, Animal Life Reason, the Chain and fell Disease, the 

 Vulture ; and when the Demons drove the Vulture off that 

 they might be refreshed with taunting him, the fearfulest 

 image of fierce torture they could conjure was 



" Thou thinkest we will live through thee one by one 

 Like Animal Life ? And though we can obscure not 

 The Soul which burns within that we will dwell 

 Beside thee, like a vain loud multitude, 

 Vexing the self-content of wisest men : 

 That we will be dread thought beneath thy brain, 

 And foul desire round thine astonished heart, 

 And blood within thy labyrinthine veins, 

 Crawling like agony /" 



Poets have writ no cumbrous tomes, nor heaped dull 

 dogmatisms mountain high, to awe the world ; but they have 

 felt all truths, and written them just as they felt, and called 

 them too by universal names in scorn of pedant nomencla- 

 ture. They leave it to the drudging scholiast to classify ; but 

 under one name in every tongue they have synonymed Im- 

 agination and the Soul. "Without a thought of school-men's 

 terms, they have felt them to be one, and so inscribed them. 

 Aye ! and so they are ! And our theory is but a gleaning 

 from " the chronicles of wasted Time," of " what their antique 

 pen would have expressed!" 



" Spirit of Nature ! thou 

 Life of interminable multitudes ! 

 Soul of those mighty spheres 

 Whose changeless paths through Heaven's 



deep silence lie ! 

 Soul of that smallest being, 

 The dwelling of whose life 

 Is one faint April gleam !" 



