The same thought runs through many of Shelley’s poems. In The Sensitive Plant the flowers live, love, and die.
none ever trembled and panted with bliss
In the garden, the field, or the wilderness,
Like a doe in the noontide, with love’s sweet want,
As the companionless sensitive plant.
The beauty and loveliness of nature will do us more good “than all the sages can.” They will inspire us as nothing else will.
Dr. Ackermann draws attention to the kindness of Wordsworth and Shelley for animals, and notes the similarity between the two following passages.[190] Thus Wordsworth in The Excursion, II, 41-47:
Birds and beasts
And the mute fish that glances in the stream
And harmless reptile coiling in the sun
... he loved them all:
Their rights acknowledging he felt for all.
And Shelley in Alastor, 13-15:
If no bright bird, insect, or gentle beast
I consciously have injured, but still loved
And cherished these my kindred.
Wordsworth concludes The Excursion and Shelley the Alastor with the desire for death.
With the name of Wordsworth, the name of that greater genius, Coleridge, will always be linked. Although they were life-long friends still no two could be more unlike in character and temperament. Wordsworth was moody and determined. He, like Shelley, worked out his plans unmindful of the opinion of others. Neglect and ridicule did not trouble him in the least. He was an excellent type of mens sana in corpore sano. Coleridge, on the other hand, was without ambition and steadiness of purpose. He drifted on through life in a listless manner, “sometimes committing a golden thought to the blank leaf of a book, or to a private letter, but generally content with oral communication.”[191] At an early age he had accomplished great things and it was felt that these were but “the morning giving promise of a glorious day.” He was scarcely thirty when he won distinction as a poet, journalist, lecturer, theologian, critic and philosopher. The “glorious day,” however, never matured. Sickness and opium were the clouds that obscured the brightness of his genius. His married life was not a happy one. As in the case of Shelley, jealousy and irritation on the part of the wife, and disenchantment on the part of the husband made home-life intolerable.
One of the earliest manifestations of Coleridge’s radicalism is his Ode on the Destruction of the Bastile, written in 1789. In it he rejoices at the overthrow of tyranny and the success of Freedom. Liberty with all her attendant virtues will now be the portion of all.