Treatment of Nature.—Shelley was not interested in things themselves, but in their elusive, animating spirit. In the lyric poem, To Night, he does not address himself to mere darkness, but to the active, dream-weaving "Spirit of Night." The very spirit of the autumnal wind seems to him to breathe on the leaves and turn them—
"Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes."[24]
In his spiritual conception of nature, he was profoundly affected by Wordsworth; but he goes farther than the older poet in giving expression to the strictly individual forms of nature. Wordsworth pictures nature as a reflection of his own thoughts and feelings. In The Prelude he says:—
"To unorganic natures were transferred
My own enjoyments."
Shelley, on the other hand, is most satisfying and original when his individual spirit forms in night, cloud, skylark, and wind are made to sing, not as a reflection of his own mood, but as these spirit forces might themselves be supposed to sing, if they could express their song in human language without the aid of a poet. In the lyric, The Cloud, it is the animating spirit of the Cloud itself that sings the song:—
"I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers,
From the seas and the streams;
I bear light shade for the leaves when laid
In their noonday dreams.
* * * * *
I sift the snow on the mountains below
And their great pines groan aghast."
He thus begins the song, To a Skylark—
"Hail to thee, blithe spirit!
Bird thou never wert,"
and he likens the lark to "an unbodied joy."
He peoples the garden in his lyric, The Sensitive Plant, with flowers that are definite, individual manifestations of "the Spirit of Love felt everywhere," the same power on which Shelley enthusiastically relied for the speedy transformation of the world.