"I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers, From the seas and the streams; I bear light shade for the leaves when laid In their noonday dreams. * * * * * I sift the snow on the mountains below And their great pines groan aghast." He thus begins the song, _To a Skylark_-- "Hail to thee, blithe spirit! Bird thou never wert," and he likens the lark to "an unbodied joy." He peoples the garden in his lyric, _The Sensitive Plant_, with flowers that are definite, individual manifestations of "the Spirit of Love felt everywhere," the same power on which Shelley enthusiastically relied for the speedy transformation of the world. "A Sensitive Plant in a garden grew, And the young winds fed it with silver dew." The "tulip tall," "the Naiad-like lily," "the jessamine faint," "the sweet tuberose," were all "ministering angels" to the "companionless Sensitive Plant," and each tried to be a source of joy to all the rest. No one who had not caught the new spirit of humanity could have imagined that garden. In the exquisite _Ode to the West Wind_, he calls to that "breath of Autumn's being" to express its own mighty harmonies through him:-- "O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being, * * * * * Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is: What if my leaves are falling like its own! The tumult of thy mighty harmonies Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone, Sweet though in sadness." We may fancy that the spirit forms of nature which appear in cloud and night, in song of bird and western wind, are content to have found in Shelley a lyre that responded to their touch in such entrancing notes. General Characteristics.--Shelley's is the purest, the most hopeful, and the noblest voice of the Revolution. Wordsworth and Coleridge lost their faith and became Tories, and Byron was a selfish, lawless creature; but Shelley had the martyr spirit of sacrifice, and he trusted to the end in the wild hopes of the revolutionary enthusiasts. His _Queen Mab, Revolt of Islam, Ode to Liberty, Ode to Naples_, and, above all, his _Prometheus Unbound_, are some of the works inspired by a trust in the ideal democracy which was to be based on universal love and the brotherhood of man. This faith gives a bounding elasticity and buoyancy to Shelley's thought, but also tinges it with that disgust for the old, that defiance of restraint, and that boyish disregard for experience which mark a time of revolt. The other subject that Shelley treats most frequently in his verse is ideal beauty. He yearned all his life for some form beautiful enough to satisfy the aspirations of his soul. _Alastor, Epipsychidion, The Witch of Atlas_, and _Prometheus Unbound_, all breathe this insatiate craving for that "Spirit of Beauty," that "awful Loveliness."