Arnold, paraphrasing Joubert's description of Plato, has characterized him
as 'a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous
wings in vain.' This is largely true, but it overlooks the sound general
basis and the definite actual results which belong to his work, as to that
of every great idealist.

On the artistic side the most conspicuous thing in his poetry is the
ecstatic aspiration for Beauty and the magnificent embodiment of it.
Shelley is the poetic disciple, but a thoroughly original disciple, of
Coleridge. His esthetic passion is partly sensuous, and he often abandons
himself to it with romantic unrestraint. His 'lyrical cry,' of which
Matthew Arnold has spoken, is the demand, which will not be denied, for
beauty that will satisfy his whole being. Sensations, indeed, he must
always have, agreeable ones if possible, or in default of them, painful
ones; this explains his occasional touches of repulsive morbidness. But the
repulsive strain is exceptional. No other poetry is crowded in the same way
as his with pictures glorious and delicate in form, light, and color, or is
more musically palpitating with the delight which they create. To Shelley
as a follower of Plato, however, the beauty of the senses is only a
manifestation of ideal Beauty, the spiritual force which appears in other
forms as Intellect and Love; and Intellect and Love as well are equal
objects of his unbounded devotion. Hence his sensuousness is touched with a
real spiritual quality. In his poetic emotion, as in his social ambitions,
Shelley is constantly yearning for the unattainable. One of our best
critics [Footnote: Mr. R. H. Hutton.] has observed: 'He never shows his
full power in dealing separately with intellectual or moral or physical
beauty. His appropriate sphere is swift sensibility, the intersecting line
between the sensuous and the intellectual or moral. Mere sensation is too
literal for him, mere feeling too blind and dumb, mere thought too cold....
Wordsworth is always exulting in the fulness of Nature, Shelley is always