Page:Studies in Letters and Life (Woodberry, 1890).djvu/135

Rh Shelley's work is a secondary thing; its virtue is blended with and transfused into the nature of Shelley himself, who is the centre of their worship. To reveal the fineness and lustre of his character, his essential worth throughout that romantic and darkened career of thirty years, is their chief pleasure, and in this, too, they have now won some success, and have partially reversed the popular estimate of the poet as merely an immoral atheist; yet, although some amends have been made for harsh contemporary criticism, Shelley's name is still for orthodoxy a shibboleth of pious terror and of insult to God. It is still too early to decide whether the modification of the harsh criticism once almost universally bestowed upon Shelley will go on permanently, or whether it is not in some measure due to peculiar results of culture in our own time. Without attempting to prejudge this question, especially in regard to poetic fame, there seems to be, as the cause passes out of the hands of those who knew Shelley personally into the guardianship of the new generation, a tendency toward greater unity of judgment in regard to the larger phases of his character and conduct.