and the late Mr. Clough.  But let the mention of Mr. Tennyson suggest such other names, and stand as a sufficient protest against our absurd habit of omitting such in a connection like the present.  As if, forsooth, when a writer passed into verse, he were to be abandoned as utterly out of calculable relationship to all on this side of the boundary, and no account were to be taken of his thoughts and doings, except in a kind of curious appendix at the end of the general register?  What if philosophy, at a certain extreme range, and of a certain kind, tends of necessity to pass into poesy, and can hardly help being passionate and metrical?  If so, might not the omission of poets, purely as being such, from a conspectus of the speculative writers of any time, lead to erroneous conclusions, by giving an undue prominence in the estimate of all such philosophizing as could most easily, by its nature, refrain from passionate or poetic expression?  Thus, would philosophy, or one kind of philosophy in comparison with another, have seemed to had been in such a diminished condition in Britain about the year 1830, if critics had been in the habit of counting Wordsworth in the philosophic list as well as Coleridge, Mackintosh, Bentham, and James Mill?  Was there not more of what you might call Spinozaism in Wordsworth than even in Coleridge, who spoke more of Spinoza?  But that hardly needs all this justification, so far as Mr. Tennyson is concerned, of our reckoning him in the present list.  He that would exclude In “Memoriam” (1850) and “Maud” (1855) from the conspectus of the philosophical literature of our time, has yet to learn what philosophy is.  Whatever else “In Memoriam” may be, it is a manual for many of the latest hints and questions in British Metaphysics.”

The soi-disant philosophers and classifiers of the sciences and arts who will not permit such poets as Shelley and Tennyson to be put in the category of philosophers, remind one very forcibly of the passage in Macbeth:  “The earth has bubbles, as the water has, and these are of them!”

As a poet and not as a poet, as an acknowledged legislator for the race, as a philosopher, (a searcher after, or lover of wisdom) and as a political and social reformer, it is my intention to treat Shelley this evening, and having finished my prefatory remarks, will now regard him in those attributes which peculiarly should enshrine him in your hearts and mine.

The philosophical theories of advanced thinkers are always tinged with the reflex of that which called them forth, or impeded them in their development, consequently social bondage and the “anarch custom” being always present to Shelley, the great idea ever uppermost to him was that true happiness is only attainable in perfect freedom:  the atrocious system of fagging, now almost extinct in the English Public Schools and the tyrannical venality of ushers, deeply impressed themselves on the mind of Shelley, and he tells us, in the beautiful lines to his wife, of the remembrance of his endeavors to overthrow these abominations having failed, of flying from “the harsh and grating strife of tyrants and of foes” and of the high and noble resolves which inspired him: