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 What indeed, compared to this, are the gross and brutish threats of theological materialism? what is the ice or fire of Dante, the burning marl of Milton? But by the application of this supreme curse to the supreme oppressor Shelley has transfigured the noble moral thought of the Stoic poet into the splendour of an idea too sublime for the conception of one so much lesser than himself. It is utterly inexplicable to me how an editor of Mr. Rossetti's high and rare intelligence in matters of art and imagination can here for once have failed to follow the track of Shelley's thought, to see with Shelley's eyes this vision of the two infinities of good and evil; of the evil deeds wrought by omnipotence and the good deeds wrought by suffering—both of these infinite as God himself, as the world he torments, as the solitude which is at once the condition and the chastisement of his omnipotence. The sequence of ideas is so natural and logical, so coherent with the whole scheme and subject of the poem, that I cannot understand by what strange aberration the editor should have lost his way through so plain and open a tract of country, and thought it necessary to shatter at once the harmony, the sense, and the grammar of so simple and superb a passage in order to patch up an explanation as forced, unnatural, and improbable as the more obvious interpretation was clear, consistent, and sufficient. I should add that as Mr. Rossetti, with his habitual candour and generous good sense, has since published a note which may be taken as equivalent to a recantation of the error which led him to cast aside the previous text for the dissonant and incongruous version produced by a change of pointing,