excursive flights;—and if the world of realities be not disturbed by the fictions of our dreamers, we may pardon them for building their castles in the air; and either giving, or denying,
"to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name!"
Of the fairies of his own creation, Mr. Shelley may dispose as he pleases:—either by gift, by lottery, or by sale:—but while he cannot make the present race of human beings better, it is not to be endured that he should make them worse, by recommending the extension of an acknowledged evil, as a means of securing the general good! This he has done by recommending the abolition of the marriage ceremony; but when he recommends atheism, he offers a chalice to the lips of which the wise and the good will refuse to drink, while the vicious and the ignorant will fear to taste.
An ordinary reader of the first cantos would believe him a profound theist. His first allusion to this subject, is an appeal to the Spirit of Nature, in p. 12, at the close of the first canto, in which he has borrowed the same idea of divinity which Pope adopts:—as of a spirit that—
"Lives through all life, extends through all extent."
After describing the scene to which the
