BIRDS 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 Keason, 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 
