Page:Ideas of Good and Evil, Yeats, 1903.djvu/116

Ideas of Good and Evil. and whose too constant presence, and perhaps Shelley's ignorance of their more traditional forms, give some of his poetry an air of rootless phantasy. They change continually in his poetry, as they do in the visions of the mystics everywhere and of the common people in Ireland, and the forms of these changes display, in an especial sense, the glowing forms of his mind when freed from all impulse not out of itself or out of supersensual power. These are 'gleams of a remoter world which visit us in sleep,' spiritual essences whose shadows are the delights of all the senses, sounds 'folded in cells of crystal silence,' 'visions swift and sweet and quaint,' which lie waiting their moment 'each in his thin sheath like a chrysalis,' 'odours' among 'ever-blooming eden trees,' 'liquors' that can give 'happy sleep,' or can make tears 'all wonder and delight'; 'The golden genii who spoke to the poets of Greece in dreams'; 'the phantoms' which become the forms of 106