figments, for the light which blazed around him to break through and flood the world with beauty.  Shelley can only be called an Atheist, in so far as he maintained the inadequacy of hitherto received conceptions of the Deity, and indignantly rejected that Moloch of cruelty who is worshipped in the debased forms of Christianity.  He was an Agnostic only in so far as he proclaimed the impossibility of solving the insoluble, and knowing the unknowable.  His clear and fearless utterances upon these points place him in the rank of intellectual heroes.  But his own soul, compact of human faith and love, was far too religious and too sanguine to merit either epithet as vulgarly applied.

The negative side of Shelley’s creed had the moral value which attaches to all earnest conviction, plain speech, defiance of convention, and enthusiasm for intellectual liberty at any cost.  It was marred, however, by extravagance, crudity, and presumption.  Much that he would fain have destroyed because he found it customary, was solid, true, and beneficial.  Much that he thought it desirable to substitute, was visionary, hollow, and pernicious.  He lacked the touchstone of mature philosophy, whereby to separate the pinchbeck from the gold of social usage; and in his intense enthusiasm he lost his hold on common sense, which might have saved him from the puerility of arrogant iconoclasm.  The positive side of his creed remains precious, not because it was logical, or scientific, or coherent, but because it was an ideal, fervently felt, and penetrated with the whole life-force of an incomparable nature.  Such ideals are needed for sustaining man upon his path amid the glooms and shadows of impenetrable ignorance.  The form the seal and pledge of his spiritual dignity, reminding him that he was not born to live like brutes, or like the brutes to perish without effort.

    Fatti non foste a viver come bruti,
    Ma per seguir virtude e conoscenza.

These criticisms apply to the speculations of Shelley’s earlier life, when his crusade against accepted usage was extravagant, and his confidence in the efficacy of mere eloquence to change the world was overweening.  The experience of years, however, taught him wisdom without damping his enthusiasm, refined the crudity of his first fervent speculations, and mellowed his philosophy.  Had he lived to a ripe age, there is no saying with what clear and beneficent lustre might have shone that light of aspiration which during his turbid youth burned somewhat luridly, and veiled its radiance in the smoke of mere rebelliousness and contradiction.