Shelley here looks forward, not back, to the Golden Age, and is the prophet of science and evolution.  If we compare his Titan with similar characters in Faust and Cain, we shall find this interesting difference,—­that while Goethe’s Titan is cultured and self-reliant, and Byron’s stoic and hopeless, Shelley’s hero is patient under torture, seeing help and hope beyond his suffering.  And he marries Love that the earth may be peopled with superior beings who shall substitute brotherly love for the present laws and conventions of society.  Such is his philosophy; but the beginner will read this poem, not chiefly for its thought, but for its youthful enthusiasm, for its marvelous imagery, and especially for its ethereal music.  Perhaps we should add here that Prometheus is, and probably always will be, a poem for the chosen few who can appreciate its peculiar spiritlike beauty.  In its purely pagan conception of the world, it suggests, by contrast, Milton’s Christian philosophy in Paradise Regained.

Shelley’s revolutionary works, Queen Mab (1813), The Revolt of Islam (1818), Hellas (1821), and The Witch of Atlas (1820), are to be judged in much the same way as is Prometheus Unbound.  They are largely invectives against religion, marriage, kingcraft, and priestcraft, most impractical when considered as schemes for reform, but abounding in passages of exquisite beauty, for which alone they are worth reading.  In the drama called The Cenci (1819), which is founded upon a morbid Italian story, Shelley for the first and only time descends to reality.  The heroine, Beatrice, driven to desperation by the monstrous wickedness of her father, kills him and suffers the death penalty in consequence.  She is the only one of Shelley’s characters who seems to us entirely human.

Far different in character is Epipsychidion (1821), a rhapsody celebrating Platonic love, the most impalpable, and so one of the most characteristic, of all Shelley’s works.  It was inspired by a beautiful Italian girl, Emilia Viviani, who was put into a cloister against her will, and in whom Shelley imagined he found his long-sought ideal of womanhood.  With this should be read Adonais (1821), the best known of all Shelley’s longer poems. Adonais is a wonderful threnody, or a song of grief, over the death of the poet Keats.  Even in his grief Shelley still preserves a sense of unreality, and calls in many shadowy allegorical figures,—­Sad Spring, Weeping Hours, Glooms, Splendors, Destinies,—­all uniting in bewailing the loss of a loved one.  The whole poem is a succession of dream pictures, exquisitely beautiful, such as only Shelley could imagine; and it holds its place with Milton’s Lycidas and Tennyson’s In Memoriam as one of the three greatest elegies in our language.