an egolator.  He had not even such an innocent egoism as Thoreau’s.  He was always longing to give himself to the world.  In the Italian days we find him planning an expedition with Byron to rescue, by main force, a man who was in danger of being burnt alive for sacrilege.  He has often been denounced for his heartless treatment of Harriet Westbrook, and, though we may not judge him, it is possible that a better man would have behaved differently.  But it was a mark of his unselfishness, at least, that he went through the marriage service with both his wives, in spite of his principles, that he so long endured Harriet’s sister as the tyrant of his house, and that he neglected none of his responsibilities to her, in so far as they were consistent with his deserting her for another woman.  This may seem a bizarre defence, but I merely wish to emphasize the fact that Shelley behaved far better than ninety-nine men out of a hundred would have done, given the same principles and the same circumstances.  He was a man who never followed the line of least resistance or of self-indulgence, as most men do in their love affairs.  He fought a difficult fight all his life in a world that ignored him, except when it was denouncing him as a polluter of Society.  Whatever mistakes we may consider him to have made, we can hardly fail to admit that he was one of the greatest of English Puritans.

(3) THE POET OF HOPE

Shelley is the poet for a revolutionary age.  He is the poet of hope, as Wordsworth is the poet of wisdom.  He has been charged with being intangible and unearthly, but he is so only in the sense in which the future is intangible and unearthly.  He is no more unearthly than the skylark or the rainbow or the dawn.  His world, indeed, is a universe of skylarks and rainbows and dawns—­a universe in which

  Like a thousand dawns on a single night
  The splendours rise and spread.

He at once dazzles and overwhelms us with light and music.  He is unearthly in the sense that as we read him we seem to move in a new element.  We lose to some extent the gravity of flesh and find ourselves wandering among stars and sunbeams, or diving under sea or stream to visit the buried day of some wonder-strewn cave.  There are other great poets besides Shelley who have had a vision of the heights and depths.  Compared with him, however, they have all about them something of Goliath’s disadvantageous bulk.  Shelley alone retains a boyish grace like David’s, and does not seem to groan under the burden of his task.  He does not round his shoulders in gloom in the presence of Heaven and Hell.  His cosmos is a constellation.  His thousand dawns are shaken out over the earth with a promise that turns even the long agony of Prometheus into joy.  There is no other joy in literature like Shelley’s.  It is the joy not of one who is blind or untroubled, but of one who, in a midnight of tyranny and suffering of the unselfish, has learned