BIKDS AND POETS. 171 



cated air " of universal love whose very errors have a sub- 

 limity in them approaching to the awful, from the consistent 

 earnestness of this love for the Brotherhood of Humanity 

 which made them blind ! 



He to be stigmatized from such a quarter as whitely cold, 

 in the frozen isolation of his ideality " all statue blind," is 

 too unpardonable. None but fools and fanatics pretend to 

 pin their faith upon any particular poem of Shelley's as the 

 embodiment of a philosophy or creed. 



To all thinkers, Queen Mab is, to the last intent, false as 

 he, himself, regretfully acknowledged in later life. But then 

 it is recognized as, artistically, the most intense and finest 

 expression of a peculiar period or phase of development 

 common to that dawn of eager energies which as well makes a 



" Morning like the spirit of a youth, 



Who means to be of note, begin betimes." 



There is a sublimer thing than Reason, which is Faith 

 the highest faculty of the human soul' and Shelley has dif- 

 fered from other lofty, earnest minds in the particular, that 

 he has not only thought out and felt out with singular dis- 

 tinctiveness, but left on record every step, feature and con- 

 dition, of that weary travel from Doubt to assured Truth, 

 each one has to make for himself over the highway of de- 

 velopment. 



All along the way of his pilgrimage, he has left land- 

 marks which may lead the weak, who stop short, to error ; 

 but to the strong- visioned and the hardy must prove import- 

 ant guides to that high-placed "house of life," upon the very 

 threshold of which he suddenly fell into the abyss of death. 

 As a metaphysician and philosopher, he is not to be classi- 

 fied so much by what he was, as by what the evident tenden- 

 cies of his later modes of thought showed he would have 

 been. 



His life was an unfinished act upon which the curtain has 



