To students of Shelley’s inner life “Epipsychidion” will always have high value, independently of its beauty of style, as containing his doctrine of love.  It is the full expression of the esoteric principle presented to us in “Alastor”, the “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” and “Prince Athanase.”  But the words just quoted, which may be compared with Mrs. Shelley’s note to “Prince Athanase,” authorize our pointing out what he himself recognized as the defect of his theory.  Instead of remaining true to the conception of Beauty expressed in the “Hymn,” Shelley “sought through the world the One whom he may love.”  Thus, while his doctrine in “Epipsychidion” seems Platonic, it will not square with the “Symposium.”  Plato treats the love of a beautiful person as a mere initiation into divine mysteries, the first step in the ladder that ascends to heaven.  When a man has formed a just conception of the universal beauty, he looks back with a smile upon those who find their soul’s sphere in the love of some mere mortal object.  Tested by this standard, Shelley’s identification of Intellectual Beauty with so many daughters of earth, and his worshipping love of Emilia, is a spurious Platonism.  Plato would have said that to seek the Idea of Beauty in Emilia Viviani was a retrogressive step.  All that she could do, would be to quicken the soul’s sense of beauty, to stir it from its lethargy, and to make it divine the eternal reality of beauty in the supersensual world of thought.  This Shelley had already acknowledged in the “Hymn;” and this he emphasizes in these words:—­“The error consists in seeking in a mortal image the likeness of what is, perhaps, eternal.”

The fragments and cancelled passages published in Forman’s edition do not throw much light upon “Epipsychidion.”  The longest, entitled “To his Genius” by its first editor, Mr. Garnett, reads like the induction to a poem conceived and written in a different key, and at a lower level of inspiration.  It has, however, this extraordinary interest, that it deals with a love which is both love and friendship, above sex, spiritual, unintelligible to the world at large.  Thus the fragment enables the student better to realize the kind of worship so passionately expressed in “Epipsychidion.”

The news of Keats’s death at Rome on the 27th of December, 1820, and the erroneous belief that it had been accelerated, if not caused, by a contemptible review of “Endymion” in the “Quarterly”, stirred Shelley to the composition of “Adonais”.  He had it printed at Pisa, and sent copies to Ollier for circulation in London.  This poem was a favourite with its author, who hoped not only that it might find acceptance with the public, but also that it would confer lustre upon the memory of a poet whom he sincerely admired.  No criticisms upon Shelley’s works are half so good as his own.  It is, therefore, interesting to collect the passages in which he speaks of an elegy only equalled in our language by “Lycidas”,