circle around its proper Paradise, which pain and sorrow and evil dare not overleap. To this we eagerly refer all sensations, thirsting that they should resemble or correspond with it. The discovery of its antitype; the meeting with an understanding capable of clearly estimating our own; an imagination which should enter into and seize upon the subtle and delicate peculiarities which we have delighted to cherish and unfold in secret; with a frame whose nerves, like the chords of two exquisite lyres, strung to the accompaniment of one delightful voice, vibrate with the vibrations of our own; and of a combination of all these in such proportion as the type within demands; this is the invisible and unattainable point to which Love tends; and to attain which, it urges forth the powers of man to arrest the faintest shadow of that, without the possession of which there is no rest nor respite to the heart over which it rules. Hence in solitude, or in that deserted state when we are surrounded by human beings, and yet they sympathize not with us, we love the flowers, the grass, the waters, and the sky. In the motion of the very leaves of spring, in the blue air, there is then found a secret correspondence with our heart. There is eloquence in the tongueless wind,3 and a melody in the flowing brooks and the rustling of the reeds beside them, which by their inconceivable relation to something within the soul, awaken the spirits to a dance of breathless rapture, and bring tears of mysterious tender In The Keepsake we read and instead of or. 2 The whole line of thought here and in the following sentence corresponds with the line of thought in Alastor, one would say, rather than with Shelley's studies and writings of 1818. 3 Cf. Epipsychidion: I questioned every tongueless wind that flew Over my tower of mourning, if it knew Whether 'twas fled, this soul out of my soul; there is much in Epipsychidion that is reminiscent of Alastor and of the phase of Shelley's existence which produced that earlier poem. Sterne ness to the eyes, like the enthusiasm of patriotic success, or the voice of one beloved singing to you alone. says that if he were in a desert he would love some cypress. So soon as this want or power is dead, man becomes the living sepulchre of himself, and what yet survives is the mere husk of what once he was. [The fragment on a Future State is from the Essays &c., but includes the Reflection on Death already mentioned (see page 256) as having been given in The Athenæum for the 29th of September, 1832, and in The Shelley Papers. Mrs. Shelley says of this Fragment (Preface, page xiii) that, “in this portion of his Essay he gives us only that view of a future state which is to be derived from reasoning and analogy"; and adds that it is "not to be supposed" Shelley's mind “should be content with a mere logical view of that which even in religion is a mystery and a wonder"; and that he "certainly regarded the country beyond the grave as one by no means foreign to our interests and hopes." Those who require this consolation in accepting Shelley may find plenty of confirmation in the series of his works; but the opposite position may be maintained with at least equal success by putting in evidence other passages from the same series of works.-H. B. F.] ON A FUTURE STATE. IT has been the persuasion of an immense majority of human beings in all ages and nations that we continue to live after death,-that apparent termination of all the functions of sensitive and intellectual existence. Nor has mankind been contented with supposing that species of existence which some philosophers have asserted; namely, the resolution of the component parts of the mechanism of a living being into its elements, and the impossibility of the minutest particle of these sustaining the smallest diminution. They have clung to the idea that sensibility and thought, which they have distinguished from the objects of it, under the several names of spirit and matter, is, in its own nature, less susceptible of division and decay, and that, when the body is resolved into its elements, the principle which animated it will remain perpetual and unchanged. Some philosophers—and those to whom we are indebted for the most stupendous discoveries in physical science, suppose, on the other hand, that intelligence is the mere result of certain combinations among the particles of its objects; and those among them who believe that we live after death, recur to the PROSE. VOL. II. T |