If Keats is highly imaginative and poetic without on the whole rising to high seriousness or sinking to sophistry, Shelley, on the other hand, illustrates in his imaginative activity the confusion of values that was so fostered by romanticism. Here again I do not wish to be too absolute. Shelley has passages especially in his “Adonais” that are on a high level. Yet nothing is more certain than that the quality of his imagination is on the whole not ethical but Arcadian or pastoral. In the name of his Arcadia conceived as the “ideal” he refuses to face the facts of life. I have already spoken of the flimsiness of his “Prometheus Unbound” as a solution of the problem of evil. What is found in this play is the exact opposite of imaginative concentration on the human law. The imagination wanders irresponsibly in a region quite outside of normal human experience. We are hindered from enjoying the gorgeous iridescences of Shelley’s cloudland by Shelley’s own evident conviction that it is not a cloudland, an “intense inane,” but a true empyrean of the spirit. And our irritation at Shelley’s own confusion is further increased by the long train of his indiscreet admirers. Thus Professor C.H. Herford writes in the “Cambridge History of English Literature” that what Shelley has done in the “Prometheus Unbound,” is to give “magnificent expression to the faith of Plato and of Christ”![296] Such a statement in such a place is a veritable danger signal, an indication of some grave spiritual bewilderment in the present age. To show the inanity of these attempts to make a wise man of Shelley it is enough to compare him not with Plato and Christ, but with the poet whom he set out at once to continue and contradict--with Æschylus. The “Prometheus Bound” has the informing ethical imagination that the “Prometheus Unbound” lacks, and so in its total structure belongs to an entirely different order of art. Shelley, indeed, has admirable details. The romanticism of nympholeptic longing may almost be said to culminate, at least in England, in the passage I have already cited (“My soul is an enchanted boat”). There is no reason why in recreative moods one should not imagine one’s soul an enchanted boat and float away in a musical rapture with the ideal dream companion towards Arcady. But to suppose that revery of this kind has anything to do with the faith of Plato and of Christ, is to fall from illusion into dangerous delusion.