intenser comprehension of them, shoving them on to the rack of his imaginary conceptions, and vehemently essaying to stretch them out to ideal proportions. When they shouted and struggled, he was indignant, or, in the hour of subsequent dejection, confessed with a sorrowful ingenuousness that his 'passion for reforming the world' did not somehow seem to work well. In darker hours still he craved for the final peace of extinction. Wilder 'passions for reforming the world' than ever Shelley had have reformed the world more than once, but they have done so because they were allied to a profound sense of the nature of men and women, of the meaning of life and living. Zoroaster, Gautama, Jesus, Mohammed—the list can be enlarged at will.
Shelley died, we have noted, only seventy years ago, and already the symbolism which he used in his attempted 'criticism of life' is effete. It was, as it were, so largely journalism, so little literature; so largely mistaken and superficial subjects, so little a powerful utilisation of the permanent materials of life. To put it shortly, he was passably wanting in brains, and he did not make up for it by any great force of intuition. And then he did not in his heart really care much about what are optimistically termed his 'ideas.' His revolutionary enthusiasm never went very deep. Of course he thought it did. For his
