‘Yet through those dungeon-walls there came Thy thrilling light, O liberty! And as the meteor’s midnight flame Startles the dreamer, sunlight truth Flashed on his visionary youth, And filled him, not with love, but faith, And hope, and courage, mute in death; For love and life in him were twins, Born at one birth: in every other First life, then love its course begins, Though they be children of one mother: And so through this dark world they fleet Divided, till in death they meet. But he loved all things ever. Then He passed amid the strife of men, And stood at the throne of armed power Pleading for a world of woe: Secure as one on a rock-built tower O’er the wrecks which the surge trails to and fro. ’Mid the passions wild of human-kind He stood, like a spirit calming them; For, it was said, his words could bind Like music the lulled crowd, and stem That torrent of unquiet dream Which mortals truth and reason deem, But is revenge, and fear, and pride. Joyous he was, and hope and peace On all who heard him did abide, Raining like dew from his sweet talk, As, where the evening star may walk Along the brink of the gloomy seas, Liquid mists of splendour quiver.’ Such is the description of all his reformers in calm. In times of excitement, they all burst forth— ‘Fear not the tyrants shall rule for ever, Or the priests of the bloody faith; They stand on the brink of that mighty river Whose waves they have tainted with death; It is fed from the depths of a thousand dells, Around them it foams, and rages, and swells: And their swords and their sceptres I floating see, Like wrecks in the surge of eternity.’ In his more didactic poems it is the same. All the world is evil, and will be evil, until some unknown conqueror shall appear—a teacher by rhapsody and a conqueror by words—who shall at once reform all evil. Mathematicians place great reliance on the unknown symbol, great X. Shelley did more; he expected it would take life and reform our race. Such impersonations are, of course, not real men; they are mere incarnations of a desire. Another passion, which no man has ever felt more strongly than Shelley—the desire to penetrate the mysteries of existence (by Hazlitt profanely called curiosity)—is depicted in ‘Alastor’ as the sole passion of the only person in the poem:—