through the ravine, and compares the unknown sources of our thoughts in some ‘remoter world’ whose ‘gleams’ ‘visit the soul in sleep,’ to Arne’s sources among the glaciers on the mountain heights. Cythna in the passage where she speaks of making signs ‘a subtle language within language’ on the sand by the ‘fountain’ of sea water in the cave where she is imprisoned, speaks of the ‘cave’ of her mind which gave its secrets to her, and of ‘one mind the type of all’ which is a ‘moveless wave’ reflecting ‘all moveless things that are;’ and then passing more completely under the power of the symbol, she speaks of growing wise through contemplation of the images that rise out of the fountain at the call of her will. Again and again one finds some passing allusion to the cave of man’s mind, or to the caves of his youth, or to the cave of mysteries we enter at death, for to Shelley as to Porphyry it is more than an image of life in the world. It may mean any enclosed life, as when it is the dwelling-place of Asia and Prometheus, or when it is ‘the still cave of poetry,’ and it may have all meanings at once, or it may have as little meaning as some ancient religious symbol enwoven from the habit of centuries with the patterns of a carpet or a tapestry. As Shelley sailed along those great rivers and saw or imagined the cave that associated itself with rivers in his mind, he saw half-ruined towers upon the hilltops, and once at any rate a tower is used to symbolize a meaning that is the contrary to the meaning symbolized by caves. Cythna’s lover is brought through the cave where there is a polluted fountain to a high tower, for being man’s far-seeing mind, when the world has cast him out he must to the ‘towers of thought’s crowned powers’; nor is it possible for Shelley to have forgotten this first imprisonment when he made men imprison Lionel in a tower for a like offence; and because I know how hard it is to forget a symbolical meaning, once one has found it, I believe Shelley had more than a romantic scene in his mind when he made Prince Athanase follow his mysterious studies in a lighted tower above the sea, and when he made the old hermit watch over Laon in his sickness in a half-ruined tower, wherein the sea, here doubtless as to Cythna, ‘the one mind,’ threw ‘spangled sands’ and ‘rarest sea shells.’ The tower, important in Maeterlinck, as in Shelley, is, like the sea, and rivers, and caves with fountains, a very ancient symbol, and would perhaps, as years went by, have grown more important in his poetry. The contrast between it and the cave in _Laon and Cythna_ suggests a contrast between the mind looking outward upon men and things and the mind looking inward upon itself, which may or may not have been in Shelley’s mind, but certainly helps, with one knows not how many other dim meanings, to give the poem mystery and shadow. It is only by ancient symbols, by symbols that have numberless meanings beside the one or two the writer