Matthew Arnold said that Shelley was not quite sane; and certainly he was not quite sane, if we place sanity in justness of external perception, adaptation to matter, and docility to the facts; but his lack of sanity was not due to any internal corruption; it was not even an internal eccentricity.  He was like a child, like a Platonic soul just fallen from the Empyrean; and the child may be dazed, credulous, and fanciful; but he is not mad.  On the contrary, his earnest playfulness, the constant distraction of his attention from observation to daydreams, is the sign of an inward order and fecundity appropriate to his age.  If children did not see visions, good men would have nothing to work for.  It is the soul of observant persons, like Matthew Arnold, that is apt not to be quite sane and whole inwardly, but somewhat warped by familiarity with the perversities of real things, and forced to misrepresent its true ideal, like a tree bent by too prevalent a wind.  Half the fertility of such a soul is lost, and the other half is denaturalised.  No doubt, in its sturdy deformity, the practical mind is an instructive and not unpleasing object, an excellent, if somewhat pathetic, expression of the climate in which it is condemned to grow, and of its dogged clinging to an ingrate soil; but it is a wretched expression of its innate possibilities.  Shelley, on the contrary, is like a palm-tree in the desert or a star in the sky; he is perfect in the midst of the void.  His obtuseness to things dynamic—­to the material order—­leaves his whole mind free to develop things aesthetic after their own kind; his abstraction permits purity, his playfulness makes room for creative freedom, his ethereal quality is only humanity having its way.

We perhaps do ourselves an injustice when we think that the heart of us is sordid; what is sordid is rather the situation that cramps or stifles the heart.  In itself our generative principle is surely no less fertile and generous than the generative principle of crystals or flowers.  As it can produce a more complex body, it is capable of producing a more complex mind; and the beauty and life of this mind, like that of the body, is all predetermined in the seed.  Circumstances may suffer the organism to develop, or prevent it from doing so; they cannot change its plan without making it ugly and deformed.  What Shelley’s mind draws from the outside, its fund of images, is like what the germ of the body draws from the outside, its food—­a mass of mere materials to transform and reorganise.  With these images Shelley constructs a world determined by his native genius, as the seed organises out of its food a predetermined system of nerves and muscles.  Shelley’s poetry shows us the perfect but naked body of human happiness.  What clothes circumstances may compel most of us to add may be a necessary concession to climate, to custom, or to shame; they can hardly add a new vitality or any beauty comparable to that which they hide.