can only come to life by the invocation of Venus Urania. All the weaknesses, faults, and follies of his life and his writings, as well as that "power in weakness veiled" which he felt himself to be, come from this. He is driven to reform society by attacking the conventional morality of marriage, because he is first a transcendental lover; just as Mr. William Morris is driven into socialism, because he is first a very practical decorative artist. To speak irreverently, both men want elbow-room for their fads. But Shelley's fad is of even more importance to us than Morris's. It is better to have a beautiful love, than to have a beautiful house to put him in. Shelley is, above all things, the poet of modern love. Dante's love, fantastic and supersensuous, was not modern love. We do not want angels, either in heaven or in the house, to condescend to our depravity and lead us upward. We do not want the divine school-mistress to bring us to something not ourselves which may or may not make for righteousness, but the divine mistress, passionate as well as pure, to bring us to our best selves, and live with us in perfect union. Shakespeare showed us glimpses of this love defeated by circumstances in _Romeo and Juliet_, triumphant over circumstances in Posthumus and Imogen; but Shelley has had a fuller vision of it. Since Shakespeare's time both manhood and womanhood, and especially womanhood, have by pressure of circumstances become more self-conscious, and the conditions of their union through love more complex. And what is this modern ideal of love, of which Shelley is the exponent? What is this strange affection, love, whether ancient or modern? It is that most paradoxical of passions, that compound of selfishness and self-renunciation, that forlorn desire which strives to reconcile all things, and found an eternal home on the shifting sands of time, of which we all know something. Blake has expressed this paradoxical character of love once for all in his little poem "The Clod and the Pebble." "Love seeketh not itself to please, Nor for itself hath any care, But for another gives its ease, And builds a heaven in hell's despair. Love seeketh only self to please, To bind another to its delight, Joys in another's loss of ease, And builds a hell in heaven's despite."