Beside the poems mentioned, Shelley wrote "The Cenci," "Alastor," "Prometheus Unbound," and many others, including a beautiful little ode to a "Skylark," and the well-known "Sensitive Plant." Shelley was a true and noble man--no poet was ever warmed by a more genuine and unforced aspiration.--De Quincey says, "Shelley would, from his earliest manhood, have sacrificed all that he possessed for any comprehensive purpose of good for the race of man. He dismissed all insults and injuries from his memory. He was the sincerest and most truthful of human creatures. "If he denounced marriage as a vicious institution, _that_ was but another phase of the partial lunacy which affected him: for to no man were purity and fidelity more essential elements in the idea of real love. Again, De Quincey speaks of Shelley's "fearlessness, his gracious nature, his truth, his purity from all flesh-liness of appetite, his freedom from vanity, his diffusive love and tenderness." This testimony is worth much, the more especially when we remember that it is from the pen of Thomas de Quincey, who, while truthfully acknowledging the man, hesitates not to use polished irony, rough wit, and covert sneering, when dealing with the man's uttered thinkings. "That Shelley understood the true mission of a poet, and the true nature of poetry, will appear from the following extract from one of his prose essays:--"Poetry," he says, "is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds. We are aware of evanescent visitations of thought and feeling, sometimes associated with place and person, sometimes regarding our own mind alone, and always arising unforeseen, and departing unbidden, but elevating and delightful beyond all expression. Poets are not only subject to these experiences, as spirits of the most refined organization, but they can color all they combine with the evanescent lines of this ethereal world; a word, a trait in the representation of a scene or passion will touch the enchanted cord, and reanimate in those who have ever experienced these emotions, the sleeping, the cold, the buried image of the past. Poetry thus makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the world; it arrests the vanishing apparitions which haunt the interlunations of life, and veiling them, or in language or in form, sends them forth among mankind, bearing sweet news of kindred joy to those with whom their sisters abide--abide, because there is no portal of expression from the caverns of the spirit which they inhabit into the universe of things." Shelley's beautiful imagery and idealistic drapery is sometimes so accumulated in his poems, that it is difficult to follow him in his thinkings. In his verse he wishes to stand high as a philosophical reasoner, and this, together with his devotion to the cause, which even men of De Quincey's stamp call "Insolent Infidelity," has prevented Shelley from becoming so popular as he might have been.