He is filled with the afflatus of prophecy, and there flow from his lips, as if in improvisation, surely the most limpid, the most spontaneous stanzas in our language:
A brighter Hellas rears its mountains
From waves serener far.
He sings happily and, as it were, incautiously of Tempe and Argo, of Orpheus and Ulysses, and then the jarring note of fear is heard:
O write no more the tale of Troy
If earth Death's scroll must be,
Nor mix with Laian rage the joy
Which dawns upon the free.
He has turned from the empty abstraction of the Godwinian vision of perfection. He dissolves empires and faiths, it is true. But his imagination calls for action and movement. The New Philosophy had driven history out of the picture. This lyrical vision restores it, whole, complete, and literal. The wealth of the concrete takes its revenge upon the victim of abstraction. The men of his golden age are no longer tribeless and nationless. They are Greeks. He has peopled his future; but, as the picture hardens into detail, he seems to shrink from it. That other earlier theme of his symphony recurs. His chorus had sung:
Revenge and wrong bring forth their kind.
The foul cubs like their parents are,
Their den is in their guilty mind,
And conscience feeds them with despair.
Some end there must be to the perpetuum mobile of wrong and revenge. And yet it seems to be in human affairs the very principle of motion. He ends with a cry and a prayer, and a clouded vision. The infinity of evil must be stayed, but what if its cessation means extinction?
O cease! must hate and death return?
Cease! must men kill and die?
Cease! Drain not to its dregs the urn
Of bitter prophecy.
The world is weary of the past
O might it die, or rest at last.
Never were there simpler verses in a great song. But he were a bold man who would pretend to know quite certainly what they mean. Shelley is not sure whether his vision of perfection will be embodied in the earth. For a moment he seems to hope that Greece will renew her glories. For one fleeting instant—how ironical the vision seems to us—he conceives that she may be re-incarnated in America. But there is a deeper doubt than this in the prophet's mind. He is not sure that he wants to see the Golden Age founded anew in the perilous world of fact. There is a pattern of the perfect society laid up in Heaven, or if that phrase by familiarity has lost its meaning, let us say rather that the Republic exists firmly founded in the human mind itself:
But Greece and her foundations are
Built below the tide of war,
Based on the crystalline sea
Of thought and its eternity.