"I love all that thou lovest, Spirit of Delight! The fresh earth in new leaves dressed, And the starry night, Autumn evening, and the morn When the golden mists are born. I love snow, and all the forms Of the radiant frost; I love waves and winds and storms,-- Everything almost Which is Nature's, and may be Untainted by man's misery. I love tranquil solitude. And such society As is quiet, wise, and good. Between thee and me What difference? But thou dost possess The things I seek, not love them less." But Shelley's spirit rises on the wings of his sublime enthusiasm for liberty high into the clear air above all these mournful moods. His ode _To a Skylark_, the poem which indicates the transition to the poetry of liberty, is written in a perfect intoxication of joy and freedom from care. It is almost safe to assert that there had been nothing in the older English literature finer in its way than the best of Wordsworth's songs to the lark, which are so typical of the spirit and art of the Lake School. "Leave to the nightingale her shady wood; A privacy of glorious light is thine," writes Wordsworth; and, as the true conservative poet, he goes on to apostrophise the lark as "Type of the wise, who soar, but never roam-- True to the kindred points of Heaven and Home." Turn from this to Shelley's lark:-- "Like a cloud of fire The blue deep thou wingest, And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest." We seem to hear all the winds ringing with its "shrill delight," and seem to glide into and be engulfed by a sea of eternally fresh melody. This is the youngest, freshest, gladdest pæan of the pure spirit of freedom. It forms the transition to the long series of poems of freedom, the great group of works in which Shelley's genius is the loud herald of the approaching revolutions. His poetry of freedom is one long war-cry, garbed in ever-changing melodies. Whether it takes the shape of odes to liberty and its champions (poems as beautiful and grand as the Marseillaise), of political satires levelled at customs or persons, of Aristophanic comedy ridiculing the abuses and follies of the day in England, or of mythical or historical tragedy, it is in its essence always the same mighty wail over injustice and hypocrisy, the same powerful appeal to all of his contemporaries who were still capable of feeling anything whatsoever a degradation.