Being a singer inwardly inspired, Shelley could picture the ideal goals of life, the ultimate joys of experience, better than a discursive critic or observer could have done.  The circumstances of life are only the bases or instruments of life:  the fruition of life is not in retrospect, not in description of the instruments, but in expression of the spirit itself, to which those instruments may prove useful; as music is not a criticism of violins, but a playing upon them.  This expression need not resemble its ground.  Experience is diversified by colours that are not produced by colours, sounds that are not conditioned by sounds, names that are not symbols for other names, fixed ideal objects that stand for ever-changing material processes.  The mind is fundamentally lyrical, inventive, redundant.  Its visions are its own offspring, hatched in the warmth of some favourable cosmic gale.  The ambient weather may vary, and these visions be scattered; but the ideal world they pictured may some day be revealed again to some other poet similarly inspired; the possibility of restoring it, or something like it, is perpetual.  It is precisely because Shelley’s sense for things is so fluid, so illusive, that it opens to us emotionally what is a serious scientific probability; namely, that human life is not all life, nor the landscape of earth the only admired landscape in the universe; that the ancients who believed in gods and spirits were nearer the virtual truth (however anthropomorphically they may have expressed themselves) than any philosophy or religion that makes human affairs the centre and aim of the world.  Such moral imagination is to be gained by sinking into oneself, rather than by observing remote happenings, because it is at its heart, not at its fingertips, that the human soul touches matter, and is akin to whatever other centres of life may people the infinite.

For this reason the masters of spontaneity, the prophets, the inspired poets, the saints, the mystics, the musicians are welcome and most appealing companions.  In their simplicity and abstraction from the world they come very near the heart.  They say little and help much.  They do not picture life, but have life, and give it.  So we may say, I think, of Shelley’s magic universe what he said of Greece; if it

                  “Must be
    A wreck, yet shall its fragments re-assemble,
    And build themselves again impregnably
          In a diviner clime,
    To Amphionic music, on some cape sublime
    Which frowns above the idle foam of time.”

“Frowns,” says Shelley rhetorically, as if he thought that something timeless, something merely ideal, could be formidable, or could threaten existing things with any but an ideal defeat.  Tremendous error!  Eternal possibilities may indeed beckon; they may attract those who instinctively pursue them as a star may guide those who wish to reach the place over which it happens to shine.  But an eternal