Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/302

286 ruling, all the evil—"madness, crime, remorse, hell, or the sharp fear of hell." Scene 3, Act ii., shows the nature-worship fading away. But the most prominent and pervading idea of the poem is Pantheistic. The Good spirit, which at last triumphs, is, indeed, typified in the Titan Prometheus, and not in a man; but no faith in or worship of this deliverer is required from men who would be saved. The Universal Mind is freed and purified; the earth and the moon grow more glorious, and fertile, and beautiful, inspired by the renewed health of the informing spirit. The poem is an apotheosis of the One Infinite Soul, self-subsisting, informing all things, one and the same in all masks of man, and beast, and worm, and plant, and slime. The conclusion of the "Sensitive Plant," written in 1820, puts forth somewhat hesitatingly a species of transcendental idealism, which there is no space here for considering.

We now come to the poems written in 1821, the year before his death.

"Hellas" (in the wonderful chorus commencing, "Worlds on worlds are rolling ever, from creation to decay") contains a noble recognition of the character of Jesus Christ, a recognition much more decided than that in the First Act of the Prometheus. It also contains, in the speeches of Ahasuerus to Mahmud, one of the two grandest assertions of Idealism with which I am acquainted; the other is developed in his "Ode to Heaven," written in 1819. It is pure Berkeleyan philosophy, with the Kantian extension—that space and time are merely necessary forms of human thought, and have no existence separate from the human mind. Having no room for these passages