Strangely enough, the next noblest dirge for the unrealmed divinities which I can call to remembrance, and at the same time the most eloquent celebration of the new power and prophecy of its triumph, has been uttered by Shelley, who cannot in any sense be termed a Christian poet.  It is one of the choruses in “Hellas,” and perhaps had he lived longer amongst us, it would have been the prelude to higher strains.  Of this I am certain, that before his death the mind of that brilliant genius was rapidly changing,—­that for him the cross was gathering attractions round it,—­that the wall which he complained had been built up between his heart and his intellect was being broken down, and that rays of a strange splendour were already streaming upon him through the interstices.  What a contrast between the darkened glory of “Queen Mab”—­of which in afterlife he was ashamed, both as a literary work and as an expression of opinion—­and the intense, clear, lyrical light of this triumphant poem!—­

  “A power from the unknown God,
  A Promethean conqueror came: 
  Like a triumphal path he trod
  The thorns of death and shame. 
    A mortal shape to him
    Was like the vapour dim
  Which the orient planet animates with light. 
    Hell, sin, and slavery came
    Like bloodhounds mild and tame,
  Nor prey’d until their lord had taken flight. 
    The moon of Mahomet
    Arose, and it shall set;
  While blazon’d, as on heaven’s immortal noon,
  The Cross leads generations on.

  “Swift as the radiant shapes of sleep,
  From one whose dreams are paradise,
  Fly, when the fond wretch wakes to weep,
  And day peers forth with her blank eyes: 
    So fleet, so faint, so fair,
    The powers of earth and air
  Fled from the folding star of Bethlehem. 
    Apollo, Pan, and Love,
    And even Olympian Jove,
  Grew weak, for killing Truth had glared on them. 
    Our hills, and seas, and streams,
    Dispeopled of their dreams,
  Their water turned to blood, their dew to tears,
  Wailed for the golden years.”

For my own part, I cannot read these lines without emotion—­not so much for their beauty as for the change in the writer’s mind which they suggest.  The self-sacrifice which lies at the centre of Christianity should have touched this man more deeply than almost any other.  That it was beginning to touch and mould him, I verily believe.  He died and made that sign.  Of what music did that storm in Spezia Bay rob the world!

“The Cross leads generations on.”  Believing as I do that my own personal decease is not more certain than that our religion will subdue the world, I own that it is with a somewhat saddened heart that I pass my thoughts around the globe, and consider how distant is yet that triumph.  There are the realms on which the crescent beams, the monstrous many-headed gods of India, the Chinaman’s heathenism,