Page:Queen Mab (Shelley).djvu/239

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TO QUEEN MAB.
47

when they are reduced to ashes, they remain atoms still, and the loves and hatreds may be only purified by the ordeal. The process by which the sentient principle was infused into them, after they were clipped, or filed off, would be a curious matter for Queen Mab to explain, when she next visits the earth:—or perhaps they are quite independent atoms; and while growing on the toe or finger nails, have each their separate "loves and hatreds" to themselves!

After this adoption and extension of the doctrine of Pythagoras, we are distinctly told that "man is of soul and body;" which conveys some little contradiction to the doctrine that every atom is sentient, and that the block basis of a mountain is a living and entire spirit;—but poets must not be measured by too strict rules. In either case, we have arrived at nothing like atheism yet.

At the commencement of the sixth Canto, we find it questioned, whether "the universal spirit" will not "re-vivify" this "wild and miserable world," which is most emphatically called in the peculiar style of Calvinistic energy a "withered limb of heaven!" And answering the question in the affirmative, he