lays an emphasis upon, or the half-score he knows of, that any highly subjective art can escape from the barrenness and shallowness of a too conscious arrangement, into the abundance and depth of nature. The poet of essences and pure ideas must seek in the half-lights that glimmer from symbol to symbol as if to the ends of the earth, all that the epic and dramatic poet finds of mystery and shadow in the accidental circumstance of life. The most important, the most precise of all Shelley’s symbols, the one he uses with the fullest knowledge of its meaning, is the Morning and Evening Star. It rises and sets for ever over the towers and rivers, and is the throne of his genius. Personified as a woman it leads Rousseau, the typical poet of _The Triumph of Life_, under the power of the destroying hunger of life, under the power of the sun that we shall find presently as a symbol of life, and it is the Morning Star that wars against the principle of evil in _Laon and Cythna_, at first as a star with a red comet, here a symbol of all evil as it is of disorder in _Epipsychidion_, and then as a serpent with an eagle—symbols in Blake too and in the Alchemists; and it is the Morning Star that appears as a winged youth to a woman, who typifies humanity amid its sorrows, in the first canto of _Laon and Cythna_; and it is invoked by the wailing women of _Hellas_, who call it ‘lamp of the free’ and ‘beacon of love’ and would go where it hides flying from the deepening night among those ‘kingless continents sinless as Eden,’ and ‘mountains and islands’ ‘prankt on the sapphire sea’ that are but the opposing hemispheres to the senses but, as I think, the ideal world, the world of the dead, to the imagination; and in the _Ode to Liberty_, Liberty is bid lead wisdom out of the inmost cave of man’s mind as the Morning Star leads the sun out of the waves. We know too that had _Prince Athanase_ been finished it would have described the finding of Pandemus, the stars’ lower genius, and the growing weary of her, and the coming to its true genius Urania at the coming of death, as the day finds the Star at evening. There is hardly indeed a poem of any length in which one does not find it as a symbol of love, or liberty, or wisdom, or beauty, or of some other expression of that Intellectual Beauty, which was to Shelley’s mind the central power of the world; and to its faint and fleeting light he offers up all desires, that are as ‘The desire of the moth for the star, Of the night for the morrow, The devotion to something afar From the sphere of our sorrow.’