1. 8. Who wields the world with never wearied love, &c.  These two lines are about the nearest approach to definite Theism to be found in any writing of Shelley.  The conception, which may amount to Theism, is equally consistent with Pantheism.  Even in his most anti-theistic poem, Queen Mab, Shelley said in a note—­’The hypothesis of a pervading Spirit, co-eternal with the universe, remains unshaken.’

+Stanza 43,+ 11. 1-3. He is a portion of the loveliness Which ones he made more lovely.  He doth bear his part, &c.  The conception embodied in this passage may become more clear to the reader if its terms are pondered in connexion with the passage of Shelley’s prose extracted on p. 56—­’The existence of distinct individual minds,’ &c.  Keats, while a living man, had made the loveliness of the universe more lovely by expressing in poetry his acute and subtle sense of its beauties—­by lavishing on it (as we say) ‘the colours of his imagination,’ He was then an ’individual mind’—­according to the current, but (as Shelley held) inexact terminology.  He has now, by death, wholly passed out of the class of individual minds; and he forms a portion of the Universal Mind (the ‘One Spirit’) which is the animation of the universe.

11. 3, 4. While the One Spirit’s plastic stress Sweeps through the dull dense world, &c.  The function ascribed in these lines to the One Spirit is a formative or animating function:  the Spirit constitutes the life of ‘trees and beasts and men.’  This view is strictly within the limits of Pantheism.

+Stanza 44,+ 1. 1. The splendours of the firmament of time, &c.  As there are stars in the firmament of heaven, so are there splendours—­luminous intellects—­in the firmament of time.  The stars, though at times eclipsed, are not extinguished; nor yet the mental luminaries.  This asseveration may be considered in connexion with the passage in st. 5:  ’Others more sublime, Struck by the envious wrath of man or God, Have sunk, extinct in their refulgent prime.’

11. 5, 6. When lofty thought Lifts a young heart, &c.  The sense of this passage may be paraphrased thus:—­When lofty thought lifts a young heart above its mundane environments, and when its earthly doom has to be determined by the conflicting influences of love, which would elevate it, and the meaner cares and interests of life, which would drag it downwards, then the illustrious dead live again in that heart—­for its higher emotions are nurtured by their noble thoughts and aspirations,—­and they move, like exhalations of light along dark and stormy air.  This illustrates the previous proposition, that the splendours of the firmament of time are not extinguished; and, in the most immediate application of the proposition, Keats is not extinguished—­he will continue an ennobling influence upon minds struggling towards the light.