unreal, he believed already; he had a craving to believe in something noble, beautiful, and difficult to understand; he was ready, therefore, to accept the rest of that theory, and to believe that these passing phenomena were imperfect types and resemblances—imperfect incarnations, so to speak—of certain immovable, eternal, archetypal realities. All his later writings are coloured by that theory, though in some passages the remains of the philosophy of the senses with which he commenced appear in odd proximity to the philosophy of abstractions with which he concluded. There is, perhaps, no allusion in Shelley to the _Phædrus_; but no one can doubt which of Plato’s ideas would be most attractive to the nature we have described. The most valuable part of Plato he did not comprehend. There is in Shelley none of that unceasing reference to ethical consciousness and ethical religion which has for centuries placed Plato first among the preparatory preceptors of Christianity. The general doctrine is that ‘The one remains, the many change and pass; Heaven’s light for ever shines, earth’s shadows fly; Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of eternity, Until death tramples it to fragments.’ The particular worship of the poet is paid to that one spirit whose ‘Plastic stress Sweeps through the dull dense world, compelling there All new successions to the forms they wear; Torturing th’ unwilling dross that checks its flight To its own likeness, as each mass may bear; And bursting in its beauty and its might From trees, and beasts, and men, into the heaven’s light.’ It is evident that not even in this, the highest form of creed to which he ever clearly attained, is there any such distinct conception of a character as is essential to a real religion. The conception of God is not to be framed out of a single attribute. Shelley has changed the ‘idea’ of beauty into a spirit, and this probably for the purposes of poetry; he has given it life and animal motion; but he has done no more; the ‘spirit’ has no will, and no virtue: it is animated, but unholy; alive, but unmoral: it is an object of intense admiration; it is not an object of worship.