He was always, indeed in chief, a witness for that ‘power unappealable.’ Maddalo, in _Julian and Maddalo_, says that the soul is powerless, and can only, like a ‘dreary bell hung in a heaven-illumined tower, toll our thoughts and our desires to meet round the rent heart and pray;’ but Julian, who is Shelley himself, replies, as the makers of all religions have replied— ‘Where is the love, beauty and truth we seek But in our mind? And if we were not weak, Should we be less in deed than in desire?’ while _Mont Blanc_ is an intricate analogy to affirm that the soul has its sources in ‘the secret strength of things,’ ‘which governs thought and to the infinite heavens is a law.’ He even thought that men might be immortal were they sinless, and his Cythna bids the sailors be without remorse, for all that live are stained as they are. It is thus, she says, that time marks men and their thoughts for the tomb. And the ‘Red Comet,’ the image of evil in _Laon and Cythna_, when it began its war with the star of beauty, brought not only ‘Fear, Hatred, Fraud and Tyranny,’ but ‘Death, Decay, Earthquake, and Blight and Madness pale.’ When the Red Comet is conquered, when Jupiter is overthrown by Demogorgon, when the prophecy of Queen Mab is fulfilled, visible nature will put on perfection again. He declares, in one of the notes to _Queen Mab_, that ‘there is no great extravagance in presuming ... that there should be a perfect identity between the moral and physical improvement of the human species,’ and thinks it ‘certain that wisdom is not compatible with disease, and that, in the present state of the climates of the earth, health in the true and comprehensive sense of the word is out of the reach of civilized man.’ In _Prometheus Unbound_ he sees, as in the ecstasy of a saint, the ships moving among the seas of the world without fear of danger ‘by the light Of wave-reflected flowers, and floating odours, And music soft,’ and poison dying out of the green things, and cruelty out of all living things, and even the toads and efts becoming beautiful, and at last Time being borne ‘to his tomb in eternity.’ This beauty, this divine order, whereof all things shall become a part in a kind of resurrection of the body, is already visible to the dead and to souls in ecstasy, for ecstasy is a kind of death. The dying Lionel hears the song of the nightingale, and cries— ‘Heardst thou not sweet words among That heaven-resounding minstrelsy? Heardst thou not, that those who die Awake in a world of ecstasy? That love, when limbs are interwoven, And sleep, when the night of life is cloven, And thought, to the world’s dim boundaries clinging, And music, when one beloved is singing, Is death? Let us drain right joyously The cup which the sweet bird fills for me.’