Last among the elements of Shelley's thought I may perhaps mention his atheism. Shelley called himself an atheist in his youth; his biographers and critics usually say that he was, or that he became, a pantheist. He was an atheist in the sense that he denied the orthodox conception of a deity who is a voluntary creator, a legislator, and a judge; but his aversion to Christianity was not founded on any sympathetic or imaginative knowledge of it; and a man who preferred the _Paradiso_ of Dante to almost any other poem, and preferred it to the popular _Inferno_ itself, could evidently be attracted by Christian ideas and sentiment the moment they were presented to him as expressions of moral truth rather than as gratuitous dogmas. A pantheist he was in the sense that he felt how fluid and vital this whole world is; but he seems to have had no tendency to conceive any conscious plan or logical necessity connecting the different parts of the whole; so that rather than a pantheist he might be called a panpsychist; especially as he did not subordinate morally the individual to the cosmos. He did not surrender the authority of moral ideals in the face of physical necessity, which is properly the essence of pantheism. He did the exact opposite; so much so that the chief characteristic of his philosophy is its Promethean spirit. He maintained that the basis of moral authority was internal, diffused among all individuals; that it was the natural love of the beautiful and the good wherever it might spring, and however fate might oppose it. "To suffer ... To forgive ... To defy Power ... To love and bear; to hope, till hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates; Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent; This ... is to be Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free." Shelley was also removed from any ordinary atheism by his truly speculative sense for eternity. He was a thorough Platonist All metaphysics perhaps is poetry, but Platonic metaphysics is good poetry, and to this class Shelley's belongs. For instance: "The pure spirit shall flow Back to the burning fountain whence it came, A portion of the eternal, which must glow Through time and change, unquenchably the same. Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep! He hath awakened from the dream of life. 'Tis we who, lost in stormy visions, keep With phantoms an unprofitable strife. "He is made one with Nature. There is heard His voice in all her music, from the moan Of thunder, to the song of night's sweet bird. "He is a portion of the loveliness Which once he made more lovely.