the images, often so tenuous and metaphysical, that crowd upon him, are all sparks thrown off at white heat, embodiments of a fervent, definite, unswerving inspiration.  If we think that the Cloud or the West Wind or the Witch of the Atlas are mere fireworks, poetic dust, a sort of bataille des fleurs in which we are pelted by a shower of images—­we have not understood the passion that overflows in them, as any long-nursed passion may, in any of us, suddenly overflow in an unwonted profusion of words.  This is a point at which Francis Thompson’s understanding of Shelley, generally so perfect, seems to me to go astray.  The universe, Thompson tells us, was Shelley’s box of toys.  “He gets between the feet of the horses of the sun.  He stands in the lap of patient Nature, and twines her loosened tresses after a hundred wilful fashions, to see how she will look nicest in his song.”  This last is not, I think, Shelley’s motive; it is not the truth about the spring of his genius.  He undoubtedly shatters the world to bits, but only to build it nearer to the heart’s desire, only to make out of its coloured fragments some more Elysian home for love, or some more dazzling symbol for that infinite beauty which is the need—­the profound, aching, imperative need—­of the human soul.  This recreative impulse of the poet’s is not wilful, as Thompson calls it:  it is moral.  Like the Sensitive Plant

    “It loves even like Love,—­its deep heart is full;
     It desires what it has not, the beautiful.”

The question for Shelley is not at all what will look nicest in his song; that is the preoccupation of mincing rhymesters, whose well is soon dry.  Shelley’s abundance has a more generous source; it springs from his passion for picturing what would be best, not in the picture, but in the world.  Hence, when he feels he has pictured or divined it, he can exclaim: 

    “The joy, the triumph, the delight, the madness,
     The boundless, overflowing, bursting gladness,
     The vaporous exultation, not to be confined! 
     Ha!  Ha! the animation of delight,
     Which wraps me like an atmosphere of light,
     And bears me as a cloud is borne by its own wind!”

To match this gift of bodying forth the ideal Shelley had his vehement sense of wrong; and as he seized upon and recast all images of beauty, to make them more perfectly beautiful, so, to vent his infinite horror of evil, he seized on all the worst images of crime or torture that he could find, and recast them so as to reach the quintessence of distilled badness.  His pictures of war, famine, lust, and cruelty are, or seem, forced, although perhaps, as in the Cenci, he might urge that he had historical warrant for his descriptions, far better historical warrant, no doubt, than the beauty and happiness actually to be found in the world could give him for his Skylark, his Epipsychidion, or his Prometheus.