miscellaneous lessons of fortune.  The cannonade of hard, inexplicable facts that knocks into most of us what little wisdom we have left Shelley dazed and sore, perhaps, but uninstructed.  When the storm was over, he began chirping again his own natural note.  If the world continued to confine and obsess him, he hated the world, and gasped for freedom.  Being incapable of understanding reality, he revelled in creating world after world in idea.  For his nature was not merely predetermined and obdurate, it was also sensitive, vehement, and fertile.  With the soul of a bird, he had the senses of a man-child; the instinct of the butterfly was united in him with the instinct of the brooding fowl and of the pelican.  This winged spirit had a heart.  It darted swiftly on its appointed course, neither expecting nor understanding opposition; but when it met opposition it did not merely flutter and collapse; it was inwardly outraged, it protested proudly against fate, it cried aloud for liberty and justice.

The consequence was that Shelley, having a nature preformed but at the same time tender, passionate, and moral, was exposed to early and continual suffering.  When the world violated the ideal which lay so clear before his eyes, that violation filled him with horror.  If to the irrepressible gushing of life from within we add the suffering and horror that continually checked it, we shall have in hand, I think, the chief elements of his genius.

Love of the ideal, passionate apprehension of what ought to be, has for its necessary counterpart condemnation of the actual, wherever the actual does not conform to that ideal.  The spontaneous soul, the soul of the child, is naturally revolutionary; and when the revolution fails, the soul of the youth becomes naturally pessimistic.  All moral life and moral judgment have this deeply romantic character; they venture to assert a private ideal in the face of an intractable and omnipotent world.  Some moralists begin by feeling the attraction of untasted and ideal perfection.  These, like Plato, excel in elevation, and they are apt to despise rather than to reform the world.  Other moralists begin by a revolt against the actual, at some point where they find the actual particularly galling.  These excel in sincerity; their purblind conscience is urgent, and they are reformers in intent and sometimes even in action.  But the ideals they frame are fragmentary and shallow, often mere provisional vague watchwords, like liberty, equality, and fraternity; they possess no positive visions or plans for moral life as a whole, like Plato’s Republic.  The Utopian or visionary moralists are often rather dazed by this wicked world; being well-intentioned but impotent, they often take comfort in fancying that the ideal they pine for is already actually embodied on earth, or is about to be embodied on earth in a decade or two, or at least is embodied eternally in a sphere immediately above the earth, to which we shall presently climb, and be happy for ever.