purer development of what is best and noblest in ourselves.  We are taught in it to love all living and lifeless things, with which in the material and moral universe we are surrounded—­we are taught to love the wisdom and goodness and majesty of the Almighty, for we are taught to love the universe, his symbol and visible exponent.  God has given two books for the study and instruction of mankind; the book of revelation and the book of nature.  In one at least of these was Shelley deeply versed, and in this one he has given admirable lessons to his fellow-men.  Throughout his writings, every thought and every feeling is subdued and chastened by a spirit of unutterable and boundless love.  The poet meets us on the common ground of a disinterested humanity, and he teaches us to hold an earnest faith in the worth and the intrinsic Godliness of the soul.  He tells us—­he makes us feel that there is nothing higher than human hope, nothing deeper than the human heart; he exhorts us to labor devotedly in the great and good work of the advancement of human virtue and happiness, and stimulates us

    “To love and hear—­to hope till hope creates
    From its own wreck the thing it contemplates.”

It is observed by Shelley that

“The exertions of Locke, Hume, Gibbon, Voltaire, Rousseau, and their disciples in favor of oppressed and deluded humanity, are entitled to the gratitude of mankind.  Yet it is easy to calculate the degree of moral and intellectual improvement which the world would have exhibited, had they never lived.  A little more nonsense would have been talked for a century or two; and perhaps a few more men, women and children burnt as heretics.  We might not at this moment have been congratulating each other on the abolition of the Inquisition in Spain.”

The vast impetus, which these extraordinary geniuses gave to freedom in metaphysical strongholds, led to a corresponding degree of liberty in the political and social relations.

Shelley was not one who

                          “beheld the woe
    In which mankind was bound, and deem’d that fate
    Which made them abject, would preserve them so.”

but on the contrary was aware of the progressive character of the race, and threw himself with all his heart and soul into the cause of Republicanism, and never slackened in his efforts till death took him from his work.  His noblest endeavors were directed toward the cause of suffering humanity, crushed under the weight of despotism; and his tuneful lyre was ever struck in behalf of the Goddess of Freedom, to whom, in that soul inspiring “Ode to Liberty,” he offers chaplets of the most glorious verse to rouse the nations from their apathy.  He has given us his reflections on the English Revolution, when Cromwell crushed royalty under his feet in the person of the tyrant Charles Stuart, and which, notwithstanding, rose again to befoul, in the profligacy and debauchery of the second Carolian epoch; on the French Revolution, when an intelligent people drove out a brood of vampires, who had drained the blood of France too long, to be replaced by atrocious demagogues, hateful priest-ridden Bourbons and a Napoleon Bonaparte, the wholesale Jaffa poisoner, on whose death Shelley wrote lines pregnant with republican feelings: