“I am the daughter of earth and water,
        And the nursling of the sky: 
    I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores;
        I change, but I cannot die. 
    For after the rain, when with never a stain,
        The pavilion of heaven is bare,
    And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams,
        Build up the blue dome of air,
    I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,
        And out of the caverns of rain,
    Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,
        I arise and unbuild it again.”

That is one of Shelley’s happiest poems.  For most of his poems have at least a tone of sadness, even the joyous song of the skylark leaves us with a sigh on our lips, “our sincerest laughter with some pain is fraught.”  But The Cloud is full only of joy and movement, and of the laughter of innocent mischief.  It is as if we saw the boy Shelley again.

We find his sadness, too, in his Ode to the West Wind, but it ends on a note of hope.  Here are the last verses—­

    “Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is: 
    What if my leaves are falling like its own! 
    The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

    “Will take from both a deep autumnal tone,
    Sweet though in sadness.  Be thou, spirit fierce,
    My spirit!  Be thou me, impetuous one!

    “Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
    Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth;
    And by the incantation of this verse,

    “Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
    Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! 
    Be through my lips to unawakened earth

    “The trumpet of a prophecy!  O wind,
    If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”

Shelley sang of Love as well as of the beauty of all things. 
Here is a little poem, some lines of which are often quoted—­

    “One word is too often profaned
        For me to profane it,
    One feeling too falsely disdained
        For thee to disdain it,
    One hope is too like despair
        For prudence to smother,
    And Pity from thee more dear
        Than that from another.

    “I can give not what men call love,
        But wilt thou accept not
    The worship the heart lifts above
        And the Heavens reject not. 
    The desire of the moth for the star,
        Of the night for the morrow,
    The devotion of something afar
        From the sphere of our sorrow?”

And when his heart was crushed with the knowledge of the wrong and cruelty in the world, it was through love alone that he saw the way to better and lovelier things.  “To purify life of its misery and evil was the ruling passion of his soul,"* said one who loved him and knew him perhaps better than any living being.  And it was through love and the beauty of love that he hoped for the triumph of human weal.