With Shelley, we move in a different atmosphere. Like Byron, he rebelled against society, and some comfortable admirers of the poetry which time has made respectable are apt to ignore those poems which, for passionate protest against social conditions, remained unique till William Morris transformed Socialism into song. Shelley was more sincere in his revolt than Byron. He did not always keep an eye on the gallery while declaiming his rebellion, and his mountains have no politics; they sing their own spontaneous melodies. Shelley combined the mystic’s vision with the accuracy of a trained observer. His descriptions of an Alpine dawn, or a storm among the mountains, might have been written by a man who had studied these phenomena with a note-book in his hand. Nobody has ever observed with such sympathy “the dim enchanted shapes of wandering mist,” or brought more beauty to their praise. Shelley’s cloud poems have the same fugitive magic that haunts the fickle countries of the sky when June is stirring in those windy hills where-- “Dense fleecy clouds Are wandering in thick flocks among the mountains Shepherded by the slow unwilling wind.” Shelley did not start with the poem, but with the mountain. His mountains are something more than a convenient instrument for the manufacture of rhyme. He did not write a poem about mountains as a pleasant variation on more conventional themes. With Shelley, you know that poetry was the handmaid of the hills, the one medium in which he could fitly express his own passionate worship of every accent in the mountain melody. And for these reasons Shelley seems to us a truer mountain poet than Byron, truer than Coleridge, truer even than Wordsworth, for Wordsworth, though some of his Alpine poetry is very good indeed, seems more at home in the Cumberland fells, whose quiet music no other poet has ever rendered so surely.