NATURE AND HER HARMONIES. 
45 
To overlook tlie 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 
Eock, Animal Life — Reason, the Chain — and fell Disease, the 
Yulture ; and when the Demons drove the Yulture 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 
LiTce 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 hrain^ 
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 I 
Soul of tliose 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 !" 
