“All killing insects and gnawing worms,
     And things of obscene and unlovely forms,
     She bore in a basket of Indian woof,
     Into the rough woods far aloof—­
     In a basket of grasses and wild flowers full,
     The freshest her gentle hands could pull
     For the poor banished insects, whose intent,
     Although they did ill, was innocent.”

Now it is all very well to ask cancer-microbes to be reasonable, and go feed on oak-leaves, if the oak-leaves do not object; oak-leaves might be poison for them, and in any case cancer-microbes cannot listen to reason; they must go on propagating where they are, unless they are quickly and utterly exterminated.  And fundamentally men are subject to the same fatality exactly; they cannot listen to reason unless they are reasonable; and it is unreasonable to expect that, being animals, they should be reasonable exclusively.  Imagination is indeed at work in them, and makes them capable of sacrificing themselves for any idea that appeals to them, for their children, perhaps, or for their religion.  But they are not more capable of sacrificing themselves to what does not interest them than the cancer-microbes are of sacrificing themselves to men.

When Shelley marvels at the perversity of the world, he shows his ignorance of the world.  The illusion he suffers from is constitutional, and such as larks and sensitive plants are possibly subject to in their way:  what he is marvelling at is really that anything should exist at all not a creature of his own moral disposition.  Consequently the more he misunderstands the world and bids it change its nature, the more he expresses his own nature:  so that all is not vanity in his illusion, nor night in his blindness.  The poet sees most clearly what his ideal is; he suffers no illusion in the expression of his own soul.  His political utopias, his belief in the power of love, and his cryingly subjective and inconstant way of judging people are one side of the picture; the other is his lyrical power, wealth, and ecstasy.  If he had understood universal nature, he would not have so glorified in his own.  And his own nature was worth glorifying; it was, I think, the purest, tenderest, richest, most rational nature ever poured forth in verse.  I have not read in any language such a full expression of the unadulterated instincts of the mind.  The world of Shelley is that which the vital monad within many of us—­I will not say within all, for who shall set bounds to the variations of human nature?—­the world which the vital monad within many of us, I say, would gladly live in if it could have its way.