[B] Those who desire to fully investigate Shelley's ideas on the immortality of the soul, and the existence, or nature, of Deity, will be amply repaid by reading W.M. Rossetti's admirable memoir of the poet, appended to the last two-volume London edition of his works.
When we take Shelley from a poetical standpoint, or with the divine truism implanted by the Ain-soph clamoring within to his intelligence for expression, how confident he appears of a hereafter, as in the "Adonais," or in the following extract from an unpublished letter to his father-in-law, William Godwin, the property of my friend C.W. Frederickson, of New York, one of the most enthusiastic admirers of Shelley, and who has been often known to pay more than the weight in gold for Shelleyana:
"With how many garlands we can beautify the tomb. If we begin betimes, we can learn to make the prospect of the grave the most seductive of human visions. By little and little we hive therein all the most pleasing of our dreams. Surely, if any spot in the world be sacred, it is that in which grief ceases, and for which, if the voice within our hearts mocks us not with an everlasting lie, we spring upon the untiring wings of a pangless and seraphic life—those whom we love around us—our nature, universal intelligence, our atmosphere, eternal love."
How exquisite these remarks and his description of a disembodied spirit:
"it stood
All beautiful in naked purity,
The perfect semblance of its bodily frame,
Instinct with inexpressible beauty and grace,
Each stain of earthliness
Had passed away, it re-assumed
Its native dignity, and stood
Immortal amid ruin."
It must appear impossible to any rational mind, that, with the full evidence before their eyes, materialists can attempt to claim Shelley as endorsing their doctrines, for even in the "Queen Mab," which has been considered by those not understanding it as a most atheistical poem, he speaks of—
"the remembrance
With which the happy spirit contemplates
Its well-spent pilgrimage on earth."
Positive dogmatists are tyrannically endeavoring to crush the belief in a soul, that All which makes the-present life happy on earth, the hope of our heritage in a future state. To them the fact that the race from the dawn of history, and through the ages has knelt down in abnegation before this inscrutable truth is nothing. This glorious belief evolved from the primæval Cabala, taught in ancient Egypt, found contemporaneously in India, enunciated by scholarly Rabbis, ever present before the Chaldæan and Assyrian Magi, and laid down as axioms in the philosophical schools of Greece and Rome, not only to be discovered a fundamental in the Egyptian, the Hebraistic, the Brahminical, the Buddhistic, the Vedic, but also in all the sacred books of every nation, and handed down and perpetuated to these days as a sacred legacy from the past, by both Mohammed and Christ. This, the great co-mystery of all the ancient mysteries, shall remain ever present through all futurity like "the existing order of the Universe, or rather, of the part of it known to us," to use the phraseology of John Stuart Mill. Nations may rise and fall, theologies may flourish and decay, but this glorious and divine inheritance shall never pass away. Let pseudo-scientists avail themselves of stale and exploded arguments, and urge that there is no invisible world, and therefore no immortality for man, but honest scientists, like Professors Tait and Stewart, in the "Unseen Universe," will agree with the Illuminati: "in the position assigned by Swedenborg, and by the Spiritualists, according to which they look upon the invisible world not as something absolutely distinct from the visible universe, and absolutely unconnected with it, as is frequently thought to be the case, but rather as a universe that has some bond of union with the present;" and like Tyndall, will be obliged in abject humility to acknowledge, unlike the initiated occultist, that: "When we endeavor to pass from the phenomena of physics to those of thought, we meet a problem which transcends any conceivable expansion of the powers we now possess. We may think over the subject again and again—it eludes all intellectual presentation—we stand at length face to face with the incomprehensible."
Shelley was ever calling attention to the fact that either from ignorance or the casuistical sophistries of mal-interested teachers who have distorted the divine pristine truths for their own base ends, emanated superstition, the taint of all it looked upon; and with no unsparing hand he flagellated the professors of the numerous false faiths, bastardized from their original purity, which have in their decay, darkened the earth, and with all the force of his powerful pen, mightier than any sword, he ridiculed these gross theologies existant among men, as in the following: