Page:Ideas of Good and Evil, Yeats, 1903.djvu/139

The Philosophy of Shelley's Poetry. with an eagle—symbols In Blake too and in the Alchemists; and it is the Morning Star that appears as a winged youth to a woman, who typifies humanity amid its sorrows, in the first canto of Laon and Cythna; and it is evoked by the wailing women of Hellas, who call it 'lamp of the free' and 'beacon of love' and would go where it hides flying from the deepening night among those 'kingless continents sinless as Eden,' and 'mountains and islands' 'prankt on the sapphire sea' that are but the opposing hemispheres to the senses but, as I think, the ideal world, the world of the dead, to the imagination; and in the Ode to Liberty, Liberty is bid lead wisdom out of the inmost cave of man's mind as the Morning Star leads the sun out of the waves. We know too that had Prince Athanase been finished it would have described the finding of Pandemus, the stars' lower genius, and the growing weary of her, and the coming to its true genius Urania at the coming of 129