No More Learning

And at the end of _The Ode to Naples_, he cries out to 'the spirit of
beauty' to overturn the tyrannies of the world, or to fill them with
its 'harmonizing ardours. ' He calls the spirit of beauty liberty,
because despotism, and perhaps, as 'the man of virtuous soul commands
not nor obeys,' all authority, pluck virtue from her path towards
beauty, and because it leads us by that love whose service is perfect
freedom. It leads all things by love, for he cries again and again
that love is the perception of beauty in thought and things, and it
orders all things by love, for it is love that impels the soul to its
expressions in thought and in action, by making us 'seek to awaken
in all things that are, a community with what we experience within
ourselves. ' 'We are born into the world, and there is something within
us which, from the instant that we live, more and more thirsts after
its likeness. ' We have 'a soul within our soul that describes a circle
around its proper paradise which pain and sorrow and evil dare not
overleap,' and we labour to see this soul in many mirrors, that we may
possess it the more abundantly. He would hardly seek the progress of
the world by any less gentle labour, and would hardly have us resist
evil itself. He bids the reformers in _The Philosophical Review of
Reform_ receive 'the onset of the cavalry,' if it be sent to disperse
their meetings, 'with folded arms,' and 'not because active resistance
is not justifiable, but because temperance and courage would produce
greater advantages than the most decisive victory;' and he gives them
like advice in _The Masque of Anarchy_, for liberty, the poem cries,
'is love,' and can make the rich man kiss its feet, and, like those who
followed Christ, give away his goods and follow it throughout the world.

He does not believe that the reformation of society can bring this
beauty, this divine order, among men without the regeneration of the
hearts of men. Even in _Queen Mab_, which was written before he had
found his deepest thought, or rather perhaps before he had found words
to utter it, for I do not think men change much in their deepest
thought, he is less anxious to change men's beliefs, as I think, than
to cry out against that serpent more subtle than any beast of the
field, 'the cause and the effect of tyranny. ' He affirms again and
again that the virtuous, those who have 'pure desire and universal
love,' are happy in the midst of tyranny, and he foresees a day when
'the spirit of nature,' the spirit of beauty of his later poems, who
has her 'throne of power unappealable in every human heart,' shall
have made men so virtuous that 'kingly glare will lose its power to
dazzle and silently pass by,' and as it seems commerce, 'the venal
interchange of all that human art or nature yields, which wealth should
purchase not,' come as silently to an end.

He was always, indeed in chief, a witness for that 'power
unappealable. ' Maddalo, in _Julian and Maddalo_, says that the soul is
powerless, and can only, like a 'dreary bell hung in a heaven-illumined
tower, toll our thoughts and our desires to meet round the rent heart
and pray;' but Julian, who is Shelley himself, replies, as the makers
of all religions have replied--

'Where is the love, beauty and truth we seek
But in our mind? And if we were not weak,
Should we be less in deed than in desire? '

while _Mont Blanc_ is an intricate analogy to affirm that the soul has
its sources in 'the secret strength of things,' 'which governs thought
and to the infinite heavens is a law. ' He even thought that men might
be immortal were they sinless, and his Cythna bids the sailors be
without remorse, for all that live are stained as they are.
It is thus,
she says, that time marks men and their thoughts for the tomb. And the
'Red Comet,' the image of evil in _Laon and Cythna_, when it began its
war with the star of beauty, brought not only 'Fear, Hatred, Fraud and
Tyranny,' but 'Death, Decay, Earthquake, and Blight and Madness pale. '

When the Red Comet is conquered, when Jupiter is overthrown by
Demogorgon, when the prophecy of Queen Mab is fulfilled, visible
nature will put on perfection again. He declares, in one of the notes
to _Queen Mab_, that 'there is no great extravagance in presuming . . .
that there should be a perfect identity between the moral and physical
improvement of the human species,' and thinks it 'certain that wisdom
is not compatible with disease, and that, in the present state of the
climates of the earth, health in the true and comprehensive sense of
the word is out of the reach of civilized man. ' In _Prometheus Unbound_
he sees, as in the ecstasy of a saint, the ships moving among the seas
of the world without fear of danger

'by the light
Of wave-reflected flowers, and floating odours,
And music soft,'

and poison dying out of the green things, and cruelty out of all living
things, and even the toads and efts becoming beautiful, and at last
Time being borne 'to his tomb in eternity. '

This beauty, this divine order, whereof all things shall become a part
in a kind of resurrection of the body, is already visible to the dead
and to souls in ecstasy, for ecstasy is a kind of death. The dying
Lionel hears the song of the nightingale, and cries--

'Heardst thou not sweet words among
That heaven-resounding minstrelsy?
Heardst thou not, that those who die
Awake in a world of ecstasy?
That love, when limbs are interwoven,
And sleep, when the night of life is cloven,
And thought, to the world's dim boundaries clinging,
And music, when one beloved is singing,
Is death? Let us drain right joyously
The cup which the sweet bird fills for me. '

And in the most famous passage in all his poetry he sings of Death as
of a mistress. 'Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, stains the
white radiance of eternity. ' 'Die, if thou wouldst be with that which
thou wouldst seek;' and he sees his own soon-coming death in a rapture
of prophecy, for 'the fire for which all thirst' beams upon him,
'consuming the last clouds of cold mortality.