shaken through reading Shelley, unless his faith were shaken before he
read Shelley. Is any safely havened bark likely to slip its cable, and
make for a flag planted on the very reef where the planter himself was
wrecked?

* * * * *

Why indeed (one is tempted to ask in concluding) should it be that the
poets who have written for us the poetry richest in skiey grain, most
free from admixture with the duller things of earth--the Shelleys, the
Coleridges, the Keats--are the very poets whose lives are among the
saddest records in literature? Is it that (by some subtile mystery of
analogy) sorrow, passion, and fantasy are indissolubly connected, like
water, fire, and cloud; that as from sun and dew are born the vapours, so
from fire and tears ascend the "visions of aerial joy"; that the harvest
waves richest over the battlefields of the soul; that the heart, like the
earth, smells sweetest after rain; that the spell on which depend such
necromantic castles is some spirit of pain charm-poisoned at their base?
{10} Such a poet, it may be, mists with sighs the window of his life
until the tears run down it; then some air of searching poetry, like an
air of searching frost, turns it to a crystal wonder. The god of golden
song is the god, too, of the golden sun; so peradventure song-light is
like sunlight, and darkens the countenance of the soul. Perhaps the rays
are to the stars what thorns are to the flowers; and so the poet, after
wandering over heaven, returns with bleeding feet. Less tragic in its
merely temporal aspect than the life of Keats or Coleridge, the life of
Shelley in its moral aspect is, perhaps, more tragical than that of
either; his dying seems a myth, a figure of his living; the material
shipwreck a figure of the immaterial.