That Beauty in which all things work and move,
· · · · ·
that sustaining love
Which thro’ the web of Being blindly wove,
In man and beast and earth and air and sea,
Burns bright or dim as each are mirrors of
The fire for which all thirst.
That is his rendering, translated out of theological terms, of the sublime opening lines of the Paradiso:
The glory of Him who moves the whole, penetrates through the universe and is reflected in one part more and in another less.
But, even so, Shelley is feeling through these great words—Light, Love, Beauty—towards something which none of them can completely convey. And in this Shelleyan ‘love’ itself, the subtle distinctions carried out, as we saw, by Dante disappear even more completely than the dramatic play of thought in the Symposium disappears in the suffused splendour of Spenser’s Hymns. In logical power Shelley was as little to be compared with Dante as Spenser with Plato. Yet some distinctions seem to assert themselves even in that ecstatic love-interwoven universe of his. His poet’s intense consciousness of personality sounds clear through the pantheistic harmonies. When he is trying to utter as he sees it the sublime paradox of the dead but deathless poet, he falls successively, heedless of inconsistency, upon symbols drawn from the dogmas of antagonistic schools of thought. Pantheism, individual immortality, heaven, Elysium—he draws upon them all, but none suffices. The dead poet is made one with Nature, becomes a part of the loveliness which once he made more lovely; his voice is heard in the nightingale’s song. But he is also an individual soul, who has passed at death to the abode where the Immortals are, and is welcomed there by Chatterton and Sidney and Lucan and the rest. A cognate depth and reach of apprehension has perplexed the discoverers of contradiction in In Memoriam. ‘For the poets,’ aptly comments Mr. Bradley, though he is thinking chiefly of Shelley and Tennyson, ‘the soul of the dead in being mingled with nature does not lose its personality; in living in God it remains human and itself.’[60]