"The poet who creates a new ideal, and fills men's hearts with the flame of a divine desire, is a practical force in the stream of human development—and this Shelley has done. So much of his poetry is full of the tender melancholy of the moonlight he loved, that the world is still half blind to his highest bardic character, as the poet of a spiritual dawn, the eager spirit who flies forward—
"Calling the lapsèd soul,
And weeping in the morning dew."
Even his moonlight seems to reflect the beams of some unrisen sun; and his sunlight has all the ethereal exhilaration of that of the first hours of a glorious day."—John Todhunter.
Other Poems to be Read: Adonais; The Sensitive Plant; The Cloud; Mount Blanc; To Wordsworth; The Euganean Hills; Liberty; Alastor; Prometheus Unbound.
References: De Quincey's Essays; Jeaffreson's The Real Shelley; Shelley (English Men of Letters), by J. A. Symonds; Leigh Hunt's Imagination and Fancy; Rossetti's Memoir of Shelley; Dowden's Life of P. B. Shelley; Moore's Life of Lord Byron; Middleton's Shelley and his Writings; Medwin's Life of Shelley; Trelawney's Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron; Todhunter's Shelley: A Study.
