Shelley's Pantheism.
The pages of Shelley were very clean; they stuck together lightly at the edges, like the pages of the Encyclopaedia at "Pantheism" and "Spinoza." Whatever their secret was, you would have to find it for yourself.
Table of Contents—Poems written in 1816—"Hymn to Intellectual Beauty." She read that first.
"Sudden thy shadow fell on me:—
I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy!"
It had happened to Shelley, too. He knew how you felt when it happened. (Only you didn't shriek.) It was a real thing, then, that did happen to people.
She read the "Ode to a Skylark," the "Ode to the West Wind" and
"Adonais."
All her secret happiness was there. Shelley knew about the queerness of the sharp white light, and the sudden stillness, when the grey of the fields turns to violet: the clear, hard stillness that covers the excited throb-throbbing of the light.
"Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of eternity"—
Colours were more beautiful than white radiance. But that was because of the light. The more light there was in them the more beautiful they were; it was their real life.
One afternoon Mr. Propart called. He came into the library to borrow a book.