But Conservatives, 't is rumoured, are still averse to your opinions, and are believed to prefer to yours the works of the Reverend Mr. Keble, and, indeed, of the clergy in general. But, in spite of all this, your poems, like the affections of the true lovers in Theocritus, are still 'in the mouths of all, and chiefly on the lips of the young.' It is in your lyrics that you live, and I do not mean that every one could pass an examination in the plot of "Prometheus Unbound" Talking of this piece, by the way, a Cambridge critic finds that it reveals in you a hankering after life in a cave--doubtless an unconsciously inherited memory from cave-man. Speaking of cave-man reminds me that you once spoke of deserting song for prose, and of producing a history of the moral, intellectual, and political elements in human society, which, we now agree, began, as Asia would fain have ended, in a cave. Fortunately you gave us 'Adonai, and 'Hellas' instead of this treatise, and we have now successfully written the natural history of Man for ourselves. Science tells us that before becoming cave-dweller he was a brute; Experience daily proclaims that he constantly reverts to his original condition. _L'homme est un méchant animal_, in spite of your boyish efforts to add pretty girls 'to the list of the good, the disinterested, and the free.' Ah, not in the wastes of Speculation, nor the sterile din of Politics, were 'the haunts meet for thee.' Watching the yellow bees in the ivy bloom, and the reflected pine forest in the water-pools, watching the sunset as it faded, and the dawn as it fired, and weaving all fair and fleeting things into a tissue where light and music were at one, that was the task of Shelley! 'To ask you for anything human,' you said, 'was like asking for a leg of mutton at a gin-shop.' Nay, rather, like asking Apollo and Hebe, in the Olympian abodes, to give us beef for ambrosia, and port for nectar. Each poet gives what he has, and what he can offer; you spread before us fairy bread, and enchanted wine, and shall we turn away, with a sneer, because, out of all the multitudes of singers, one is spiritual and strange, one has seen Artemis unveiled? One, like Anchises, has been beloved of the Goddess, and his eyes, when he looks on the common works of common men, are, like the eyes of Anchises, blind with excess of light. Let Shelley sing of what he saw, what none saw but Shelley!