and tells how he "never was attached to that great sect," which requires that everyone should bind himself for life to one mistress or friend; for the secret of true love is that it is increased, not diminished, by division; like imagination, it fills the universe; the parts exceed the whole, and this is the great characteristic distinguishing all things good from all things evil. We then have a shadowy record of love's dealings with him. In childhood he clasped the vision in every natural sight and sound, in verse, and in philosophy. Then it fled, this "soul out of my soul." He goes into the wintry forest of life, where "one whose voice was venomed melody" entraps and poisons his youth. The ideal is sought in vain in many mortal shapes, until the moon rises on him, "the cold chaste Moon," smiling on his soul, which lies in a death-like trance, a frozen ocean. At last the long-sought vision comes into the wintry forest; it is Emily, like the sun, bringing light and odour and new life. Henceforth he is a world ruled by and rejoicing in these twin spheres. "As to real flesh and blood," he said in a letter to Leigh Hunt, "you know that I do not deal in those articles; you might as well go to a gin-shop for a leg of mutton as expect anything human or earthly from me." Yet it is certain that the figures behind the shifting web of metaphors are partly real--that the poisonous enchantress is his first wife, and the moon that saved him from despair his second wife. The last part of the poem hymns the bliss of union with the ideal. Emily must fly with him; "a ship is floating in the harbour now," and there is "an isle under Ionian skies," the fairest of all Shelley's imaginary landscapes, where their two souls may become one. Then, at the supreme moment, the song trembles and stops: "Woe is me! The winged words on which my soul would pierce Into the heights of love's rare universe, Are chains of lead around its flight of fire-- I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire." We have now taken some view of the chief of Shelley's longer poems. Most of these were published during his life. They brought him little applause and much execration, but if he had written nothing else his fame would still be secure. They are, however, less than half of the verse that he actually wrote. Besides many completed poems, it remained for his wife to decipher, from scraps of paper, scribbled over, interlined, and erased, a host of fragments, all valuable, and many of them gems of purest ray. We must now attempt a general estimate of this whole output. Chapter III The Poet of Rebellion, of Nature, and of Love