Page:Shelley, a poem, with other writings (Thomson, Debell).djvu/90

72 to allot him a station in her starry firmament of the illustrious dead, though scarcely yet among the greater lights—

and perchance, ere the century be fulfilled, she will open her soul to the truth that this star-created leader of the infernal spirits is in very deed Lucifer, Son of the Morning; Lucifer regnant, unfallen from heaven, the supreme celestial glory of her second great day-spring following the glooms and gloaming of a night of two hundred years. O, Alma Mater, clear-eyed and large-hearted! who hast so soon forgiven and forgotten in him thine own stupidity, cowardice, and cruel injustice toward him: the hardest of all things to forgive and forget in their victim!

It is no longer needful to excuse or vindicate this poet of poets. It is now fashionable and facile to laud him, with or without understanding. Even church-going belles are now free to admire "that poor dear Shelley;" even pious pastors may now sleek him with praise soft and pitiful, as an erring lamb which, had it lived to mature sheephood, would certainly have found its way back to the one secure fold. For genuine students the time to simply praise is past, the time to fitly appraise not yet come; for the morning he so fulgently heralded is still far from its noon, and the most prescient are still all-unsure what shall be the character of the evolution and completion of its day. In the meantime, those who from their youth up, when he was despised and rejected of men, have loved and revered him with a rapture of enthusiasm such as no other singer of these latter days has excited, to whom he, far beyond any other, has been