He may have seen some cave that was the bed of a rivulet by some river side, or have followed some mountain stream to its source in a cave, for from his return to England rivers and streams and wells, flowing through caves or rising in them, came into every poem of his that was of any length, and always with the precision of symbols. Alastor passed in his boat along a river in a cave; and when for the last time he felt the presence of the spirit he loved and followed, it was when he watched his image in a silent well; and when he died it was where a river fell into ‘an abysmal chasm’; and the Witch of Atlas in her gladness, as he in his sadness, passed in her boat along a river in a cave, and it was where it bubbled out of a cave that she was born; and when Rousseau, the typical poet of _The Triumph of Life_, awoke to the vision that was life, it was where a rivulet bubbled out of a cave; and the poet of _Epipsychidion_ met the evil beauty ‘by a well under blue nightshade bowers’; and Cythna bore her child imprisoned in a great cave beside ‘a fountain round and vast, in which the wave imprisoned leaped and boiled perpetually’; and her lover Laon was brought to his prison in a high column through a cave where there was ‘a putrid pool,’ and when he went to see the conquered city he dismounted beside a polluted fountain in the market-place, foreshadowing thereby that spirit who at the end of _Prometheus Unbound_ gazes at a regenerated city from ‘within a fountain in the public square’; and when Laon and Cythna are dead they awake beside a fountain and drift into Paradise along a river; and at the end of things Prometheus and Asia are to live amid a happy world in a cave where a fountain ‘leaps with an awakening sound’; and it was by a fountain, the meeting-place of certain unhappy lovers, that Rosalind and Helen told their unhappiness to one another; and it was under a willow by a fountain that the enchantress and her lover began their unhappy love; while his lesser poems and his prose fragments use caves and rivers and wells and fountains continually as metaphors. It may be that his subconscious life seized upon some passing scene, and moulded it into an ancient symbol without help from anything but that great memory; but so good a Platonist as Shelley could hardly have thought of any cave as a symbol, without thinking of Plato’s cave that was the world; and so good a scholar may well have had Porphyry on ‘the Cave of the Nymphs’ in his mind. When I compare Porphyry’s description of the cave where the Phæacian boat left Odysseus, with Shelley’s description of the cave of the Witch of Atlas, to name but one of many, I find it hard to think otherwise. I quote Taylor’s translation, only putting Mr. Lang’s prose for Taylor’s bad verse. ‘What does Homer obscurely signify by the cave in Ithaca which he describes in the following verses? “Now at the harbour’s head is a long-leaved olive tree, and hard by is a pleasant cave and shadowy,