and of the influence of the dead, but whether he understood that the great memory is also a dwelling-house of symbols, of images that are living souls, I cannot tell. He had certainly experience of all but the most profound of the mystical states, of that union with created things which assuredly must precede the soul’s union with the uncreated spirit. He says, in his fragment of an essay ‘On Life,’ mistaking a unique experience for the common experience of all: ‘Let us recollect our sensations as children ... we less habitually distinguished all that we saw and felt from ourselves. They seemed as it were to constitute one mass. There are some persons who in this respect are always children. Those who are subject to the state called reverie, feel as if their nature were resolved into the surrounding universe, or as if the surrounding universe were resolved into their being,’ and he must have expected to receive thoughts and images from beyond his own mind, just in so far as that mind transcended its preoccupation with particular time and place, for he believed inspiration a kind of death; and he could hardly have helped perceiving that an image that has transcended particular time and place becomes a symbol, passes beyond death, as it were, and becomes a living soul. When Shelley went to the Continent with Godwin’s daughter in 1812 they sailed down certain great rivers in an open boat, and when he summed up in his preface to _Laon and Cythna_ the things that helped to make him a poet, he spoke of these voyages: ‘I have sailed down mighty rivers and seen the sun rise and set and the stars come forth whilst I sailed night and day down a rapid stream among mountains.’