Page:Poet Lore, volume 4, 1892.djvu/310



HE consideration of Shelley’s Faith naturally involves a review of the whole of Shelley’s poetical and prose writing, as well as the chief events of his life. Such a review is no light matter, delightful as it may be, and necessarily one cannot do more than refer in the briefest way to passages which point to the conclusions which will be deduced in the course of the paper. It would have been useful to have quoted largely from many of the poems, but the earlier portion of this paper—the development—must be referred to in outline alone, for it admits of but little speculation, and consequently I have endeavored merely to give a straightforward account of what we actually find in Shelley’s work, reserving the latter portion of the paper, that dealing with the relativity of Shelley’s Faith to other Faiths, for the few thoughts I wish to contribute to the subject.

Religion is a wide subject, and to some minds covers a multitude of things, from manners, through morals, to immortality. We most of us differ considerably as to the construction to be put upon