Page:Shelley, a poem, with other writings (Thomson, Debell).djvu/47

Rh 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," 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 in extenso, I refrain from injuring them by fragmentary citation.

From the "Adonais" I must quote a little, in order to show what Pantheism pervades it. He asserts of the dead Keats—

"He is a portion of the loveliness Which once be made more lovely: he doth bear His part, while the one Spirit's plastic stress Sweeps through the dull dense world, compelling there All new successions to the forms they wear; Torturing th' unwilling dross that checks its flight To its own likeness, as each mass may bear;