The Poets of the Dawn – 3 143the secret, — for of all English poets he has perhaps the most
natural, spontaneous, sweet and unfailing gift of melody, and
his emotion and lyrical cry are at once of the most delicate and
the most intense, — is he frequently and constantly equal alike
in his thought, feeling, imagery, music. But it is not often that
he uses the pure lyrical form for his greatest sight, for what
would now be called his “message”. When he turns to that, he
attempts always a larger and more expansive form. The great-
ness ofPrometheus Unboundwhich remains, when all is said,
his supreme effort and one of the masterpieces of poetry, arises
from the combination of this larger endeavour and profounder
substance with the constant use of the lyrical mould in which he
most excelled, because it agreed with the most intimate turn of
his temperament and subtly exalted spirit.
The spiritual truth which had possession of Shelley’s mind
was higher than anything opened to the vision of any of his con-
temporaries, and its power and reality which was the essence of
his inspiration can only be grasped, when it is known and lived,
by a changed and future humanity. Light, Love, Liberty are the
three godheads in whose presence his pure and radiant spirit
lived; but a celestial light, a celestial love, a celestial liberty.
To bring them down to earth without their losing their celes-
tial lustre and hue is his passionate endeavour, but his wings
constantly buoy him upward and cannot beat strongly in an
earthlier atmosphere. The effort and the unconquered difficulty
are the cause of the ethereality, the want of firm earthly reality
that some complain of in his poetry. There is an air of luminous
mist surrounding his intellectual presentation of his meaning
which shows the truths he sees as things to which the mortal eye
cannot easily pierce or the life and temperament of earth rise
to realise and live; yet to bring about the union of the mortal
and the immortal, the terrestrial and the celestial is always his
passion. He is himself too much at war with his age to ignore its
contradictions and pass onward to the reconciliation. He has to
deny God in order to affirm the Divine, and his denial brings in
a note too high, discordant and shrill. He has not the symbols
or the thought-forms through which he can make the spirit of