But our sympathy with this little poet would not be nearly so intense were he twenty years older. When it is said of a mature poetess,
She almost shrank
To feel the secret and expanding might
Of her own mind,
[Footnote: The Last Hours of a Young Poetess, Lucy Hooper.]
the reader does not always remain in a sympathetically prayerful mind. Such reverence paid by the poet to his gift calls to mind the multiple Miss Beauchamp, of psychologic fame, and her comment on the vagaries of her various personalities, "But after all, they are all me!" Too often, when the poet is kneeling in adoration of his Muse, the irreverent reader is likely to suspect that he realizes, only too well, that it is "all me."
However, if the Philistine reader sets up as a critic, he must make good his charges. Have we any real grounds for declaring that the alleged divinity who inspires the poet is merely his own intelligence, or lack of it? Perhaps not. And yet the dabbler in psychology finds a good deal to indicate the poet's impression that the "subconscious" is shaping his verse. Shelley was especially fascinated by the mysterious regions of his mind lying below the threshold of his ordinary thought. In fact, some of his prose speculations are in remarkable sympathy with recent scientific papers on the subject. [Footnote: See Speculations on Metaphysics, Works, Vol. VI, p. 282, edited by Buxton Forman.] And in Mont Blanc he expresses his wonder at the phenomenon of thought:
The everlasting universe of things
Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,
Now dark—now glittering—now reflecting gloom—
Now lending splendor, where from secret springs
The source of human thought its tribute brings
Of waters.
Again, in The Defense of Poetry he says,
The mind in creation is a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the color of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our nature are unprophetic either of its approach or departure.
Wordsworth, too, thinks of his gift as arising from the depths of his mind, which are not subject to conscious control. He apprises us,
A plastic power
Abode with me, a forming hand, at times
Rebellious, acting in a devious mood,
A local spirit of its own, at war
With general tendency, but for the most
Subservient strictly to external things
With which it communed. An auxiliary light
Came from my mind which on the setting sun
Bestowed new splendor—
[Footnote: The Prelude.]
Occasionally the sudden lift of these submerged ideas to consciousness is expressed by the figure of an earthquake. Aurora Leigh says that upon her first impulse to write, her nature was shaken,