Washed by the soft blue oceans of young air. 
    It is a favoured place.  Famine or Blight,
    Pestilence, War, and Earthquake, never light
    Upon its mountain-peaks; blind vultures, they
    Sail onward far upon their fatal way. 
    The winged storms, chanting their thunder-psalm
    To other lands, leave azure chasms of calm
    Over this isle, or weep themselves in dew,
    From which its fields and woods ever renew
    Their green and golden immortality. 
    And from the sea there rise, and from the sky
    There fall, clear exhalations, soft and bright,
    Veil after veil, each hiding some delight,
    Which sun or moon or zephyr draws aside,
    Till the isle’s beauty, like a naked bride
    Glowing at once with love and loveliness,
    Blushes and trembles at its own excess: 
    Yet, like a buried lamp, a soul no less
    Burns in the heart of this delicious isle,
    An atom of the Eternal, whose own smile
    Unfolds itself, and may be felt not seen
    O’er the grey rocks, blue waves, and forests green,
    Filling their bare and void interstices.

Shelley did not publish “Epipsychidion” with his own name.  He gave it to the world as a composition of a man who had “died at Florence, as he was preparing for a voyage to one of the Sporades,” and he requested Ollier not to circulate it, except among a few intelligent readers.  It may almost be said to have been never published, in such profound silence did it issue from the press.  Very shortly after its appearance he described it to Leigh Hunt as “a portion of me already dead,” and added this significant allusion to its subject matter:—­“Some of us have in a prior existence been in love with Antigone, and that makes us find no full content in any mortal tie.”  In the letter of June 18, 1822, again he says:—­“The ‘Epipsychidion’ I cannot look at; the person whom it celebrates was a cloud instead of a Juno; and poor Ixion starts from the Centaur that was the offspring of his own embrace.  If you are curious, however, to hear what I am and have been, it will tell you something thereof.  It is an idealized history of my life and feelings.  I think one is always in love with something or other; the error, and I confess it is not easy for spirits cased in flesh and blood to avoid it, consists in seeking in a mortal image the likeness of what is, perhaps, eternal.”  This paragraph contains the essence of a just criticism.  Brilliant as the poem is, we cannot read it with unwavering belief either in the author’s sincerity at the time he wrote it, or in the permanence of the emotion it describes.  The exordium has a fatal note of rhetorical exaggeration, not because the kind of passion is impossible, but because Shelley does not convince us that in this instance he had really been its subject.  His own critique, following so close upon the publication of “Epipsychidion,” confirms the impression made by it, and justifies the conclusion that he had utilized his feeling for Emilia to express a favourite doctrine in impassioned verse.