The second poem, _Rosalind and Helen_, which gives a powerful general impression of the misery which prejudice and intolerance have brought upon the human race, has not hitherto been properly understood or valued according to its deserts. It attempts to give a comprehensive representation of all that truly good and liberal-minded human beings have to suffer from antiquated ideas and principles in combination with human malignity. We have the description of a father who was a coward to the strong, a tyrant to the weak; hard, selfish, false, rapacious; the torturer of his wife and terror of his children, who became pale and silent if they heard, or thought they heard, his footstep on the stair. He dies, and Rosalind, the mother, is distressed because her children involuntarily rejoice at their father's death, and because she herself cannot but feel it to be a relief. The dead man had been strictly orthodox. He has, as it appears when his will is read, decreed that the children shall inherit nothing if they continue to live with their mother, because she secretly holds the Christian creed to be false, and he must save his children from eternal fire. The mother feels that she must leave her children. "Thou know'st," she says-- "Thou know'st what a thing is poverty Among the fallen on evil days. 'Tis crime, and fear, and infamy, And houseless want in frozen ways Wandering ungarmented, and pain, And, worse than all, that inward stain, Foul self-contempt, which drowns in sneers Youth's starlight smile, and makes its tears First hot like gall, then dry for ever. And well thou know'st a mother never Could doom her children to this ill,-- And well he knew the same." Rosalind's fate serves, above all else, to show the misery of an unhappy marriage, more particularly the wife's condition of dependence on a bad and tyrannical husband. Shelley's own grief over the loss of his children is also distinctly perceptible in the poem; and Helen's fate recalls the persecution to which the author in his character of philosopher was subjected. The whole representation of Lionel's life and ideas is self-representation. Could there be a better description of Shelley's own love of his fellow-man than this:-- "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." Young, rich, well-born, Lionel at the time of the Revolution enthusiastically takes his place in the ranks of the reformers whose aim it is to emancipate humanity from the tyranny of creeds.