‘Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know,
But leech-like to their fainting country cling.’
It is perhaps to be lamented that the true poetic temperament should ever turn aside to share the fret and fever of political strife. It is waste of the spirit of Alastor to rage against Swellfoot. But the poet cannot wholly escape the influences of baser humanity, and, watching the struggles of ‘the blind and battling multitude’ from afar, he cannot avoid being moved either to a passion of pity or to a passion of disdain, or to both at once, in view of this combat, which seems to him so poor and small, so low and vile. Men of genius know the mere transitory character of those religions and those social laws which awe, as by a phantasm of terror, weaker minds, and they refuse to allow their lives to be dictated to or bound down; and in exact proportion to their power of revolt is their attainment of greatness.
The soul of Shelley was, besides, deeply imbued by that wide pantheism which makes all the received religions of men look so trite, so poor, so narrow and so mean.
‘Canst those imagine where those spirits live
Which make such delicate music in the woods?
. . . . . . . . . .
’Tis hard to tell:
I have heard those more skilled in spirits say,
The bubbles, which enchantment of the sun