This whole Of suns and worlds, and men and beasts, and flowers With all the violent and tempestuous workings By which they have been, are, or cease to be, Is but a vision: _all that it inherits_ Are motes of a sick eye, bubbles and dreams; Thought is its cradle and its grave, nor less The future and the past are idle shadows Of thought's eternal flight—they have no being. Nought is but that it feels itself to be. The italicised words point to the original in the 'Tempest;' but Shelley proceeds to expound his theory more dogmatically than Prospero, and we are not quite surprised when Mahmoud is puzzled and declares that the words 'stream like a tempest of dazzling mist through his brain.' The words represent the most characteristic effect of Shelley as accurately as the aspect of consistent idealism to a prosaic mind. It need not be said how frequently the thought occurs in Shelley. We might fix him to a metaphysical system if we interpreted him prosaically. When in 'Prometheus' Panthea describes to Asia a mysterious dream, suddenly Asia sees another shape pass between her and the 'golden dew' which gleams through its substance. 'What is it?' she asks. 'It is mine other dream,' replies Panthea. 'It disappears,' exclaims Asia. 'It passes now into my mind,' replies Panthea. We are, that is, in a region where dreams walk as visible as the dreamers, and pass into or out of a mind which is indeed only a collection of dreams. The archaic mind regarded dreams as substantial or objective realities. In Shelley the reality is reduced to the unsubstantiality of a dream. To the ordinary thinker, the spirit is (to speak in materialist language) the receptacle of ideas. With Shelley, a little further on, we find that the relation is inverted; spirits themselves inhabit ideas; they live in the mind as in an ocean. Thought is the ultimate reality which contains spirits and ideas and dreams, if, rather, it is not simpler to say that everything is a dream. The Faery-land of Spenser might be classified in our inadequate phraseology as equally 'ideal' with Shelley's impalpable scenery. But Spenser's allegorical figures are as visible as the actors in a masque; and, in fact, the 'Faery Queen' is a masque in words. His pages are a gallery of pictures, and may supply innumerable subjects for the artist. To illustrate Shelley would be as impossible as to paint a strain of music, unless, indeed, some of Turner's cloud scenery may be taken as representative of his incidental descriptions.