Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/297

Rh capabilities of the novel, and Ruskin for the true philosophy of art, and Emerson for quintessential philosophy, so must we study, and so will future men more and more study Shelley for quintessential poetry. It was a good nomenclator who first called him the poet of poets.

He was not thirty when he died. Had he but lived for another thirty years?—In the purity of our fervent youth, I think we all consecrate ourselves to an early death; but the gods cannot love us all with a partial love, and most of us must dwindle down through age and decrepitude into the grave. But Shelley, while singing of the millennial future, and chanting beatitudes of our free and pure and love-united posterity, knew with undeceiving prescience that he could not live to see even the first straight steps taken towards the glorious goal. The tomb which he selected and described with almost passionate tenderness in 1821, received his ashes in 1822. And so may we trust that the prophecy of 1821 was fulfilled in 1822:—

The breath whose might I have invoked in song Descends on me; my spirit's bark is driven Far from the shore; far from the trembling throng Whose sails were never to the tempest given; The massy earth and sphered skies are riven! I am borne darkly, fearfully afar: Whilst burning through the inmost veil of Heaven, The soul of Adonais, like a star, Beacons from the abodes where the eternal are."

If this meagre essay attracts any worthy student to Shelley, it will fulfil the purpose of its publication,