No More Learning

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. ' When he is dead he will
still influence the living, for though Adonais has fled 'to the burning
fountains whence he came,' and 'is a portion of the eternal which must
glow through time and change unquenchably the same,' and has 'awaked
from the dream of life,' he has not gone from 'the young dawn,' or the
'caverns in the forests,' or 'the faint flowers and the fountains. ' He
has been 'made one with nature,' and his voice is 'heard in all her
music,' and his presence is felt wherever 'that power may move which
has withdrawn his being to its own,' and he bears 'his part' when it is
compelling mortal things to their appointed forms, and he overshadows
men's minds at their supreme moments, for

'when lofty thought
Lifts a young heart above its mortal lair,
And love and life contend in it for what
Shall be its earthly doom, the dead live there,
And move like winds of light on dark and stormy air. '

'Of his speculations as to what will befall this inestimable spirit
when we appear to die,' Mrs. Shelley has written, 'a mystic ideality
tinged these speculations in Shelley's mind; certain stanzas in the
poem of _The Sensitive Plant_ express, in some degree, the almost
inexpressible idea, not that we die into another state, when this
state is no longer, from some reason, unapparent as well as apparent,
accordant with our being--but that those who rise above the ordinary
nature of man, fade from before our imperfect organs; they remain in
their "love, beauty, and delight," in a world congenial to them, and
we, clogged by "error, ignorance, and strife," see them not till we
are fitted by purification and improvement to their higher state. ' Not
merely happy souls, but all beautiful places and movements and gestures
and events, when we think they have ceased to be, have become portions
of the eternal.

'In this life
Of error, ignorance, and strife,
Where nothing is, but all things seem,
And we the shadow of the dream,

It is a modest creed, and yet
Pleasant, if one considers it,
To own that death itself must be,
Like all the rest, a mockery.

That garden sweet, that lady fair,
And all sweet shapes and odours there,
In truth have never passed away;
'Tis we, 'tis ours are changed, not they.

For love and beauty and delight
There is no death, nor change; their might
Exceeds our organs, which endure
No light, being themselves obscure. '

He seems in his speculations to have lit on that memory of nature the
visionaries claim for the foundation of their knowledge; but I do not
know whether he thought, as they do, that all things good and evil
remain for ever, 'thinking the thought and doing the deed,' though
not, it may be, self-conscious; or only thought that 'love and beauty
and delight' remain for ever. The passage where Queen Mab awakes 'all
knowledge of the past,' and the good and evil 'events of old and
wondrous times,' was no more doubtless than a part of the machinery
of the poem, but all the machineries of poetry are parts of the
convictions of antiquity, and readily become again convictions in minds
that dwell upon them in a spirit of intense idealism.