Sometimes he trifles with it delicately:

Your guardian spirit, Ariel, who
From life to life, must still pursue
Your happiness.1

Both Plato and Shelley admit into their heaven-world, as one of its chief delights, intercourse with the souls of the great dead. In the Apology Socrates inquires What would not a man give if he might converse with Orpheus and Musaeus and Hesiod and Homer?'

So in Adonais Shelley represents his dead poet as meeting with the souls of those who also were gifted and unfortunate and perished young:

Sidney, as he fought

And as he fell and as he lived and loved
Sublimely mild, a Spirit without spot,

Arose; and Lucan by his death approved!

And in The Revolt of Islam the hero and heroine are welcomed by the noble dead:

Beneath, there sate on many a sapphire throne,
The Great, who had departed from mankind.2

Both Plato and Shelley, though their view of heaven is essentially a spiritual one, do at times express it by means of popular myths, such as the one given in the Gorgias or (in the Republic) the wonderful vision of Er the Armenian.3 Shelley gives an Elysium in the close of The Revolt of Islam. The consideration of Plato's heaven leads us to what is his chief characteristic as a thinker: the extraordinary tenacity with which he lays hold upon the world of mind; to him the world of sense, vividly as he apprehends it, is always less real, less emphatically existent than the supersensuous world; it always appears as if to him 'mind-stuff' were the essential material of the universe. The common man feels

as if the objects of sense were the realities and all mental

1 With a Guitar.

2 Revolt of Islam, i. 54.

9 Bk. X.

things 'abstractions'; to Plato the things of the mind are the only true realities, and matter is, in comparison, 'the dream and the shade'. No one has apprehended the splendour of the outer world more fully than he, but, nevertheless, he regarded it in all its magnificent variety, as being only a dull copy of certain divine ideas which, in their eternal beauty, could be seen and realized only with the eyes of the soul. He dwells, by preference, amid abstractions: they are for him a world in themselves-brighter, more vivid, more beautiful and, above all, more real than the world of so-called reality.

Now Shelley exactly resembles Plato in this: the supersensuous world is always more real to him than the one of which he can with bodily fingers lay hold; this is the cause, of that extreme' tenuity' which so many of his critics have blamed in his poetry. It is noticeable that he does not, like most poets, illustrate mental processes by physical parallels, but the reverse. As he says himself in the preface to Prometheus Unbound: The imagery which I have employed will be found, in many instances, to have been drawn from the operations of the human mind or from those external actions. by which they are expressed.'

In Hellas he describes thought' as the most enduring thing upon earth :

Greece and her foundations are
Built below the tide of war,
Based on the crystalline sea
Of thought and its eternity.

Earth and ocean,

Space, and the isles of life or light that gem

The sapphire floods of interstellar air

this Whole

Of suns and worlds and men and beasts and flowers,

And again :

Thought

Alone, and its quick elements, Will, Passion,
Reason, Imagination, cannot die;

They are

The stuff whence mutability can weave

All that it hath dominion o'er.

Before passing to Plato's theories concerning ethics and man in society it may be as well to pause for a moment over his cosmic speculations; these, to modern readers, seem mainly curiosities, but they are worthy of note as they had a considerable influence upon Shelley.

In the Timaeus Plato teaches that the entire universe is the self-evolution of an absolute intelligence; thinking in accordance with the laws of its own perfection, it creates and animates the universe. All parts of this universe are inspired by their own intelligences: the sun is the visible embodiment of the supreme spirit; the planets are all divine or are under the guidance of divine spirits; Plato speaks of the 'souls' of the seven planets; the Earth also is a divine being.

Shelley has embodied all these conceptions in his poetry. In the Hymn to Apollo he shows a truly Greek and Platonic feeling for the sun as the chief source to the universe, not of light and of force only but also of intelligence :

the Moon's globe

And the pure stars in their eternal bowers
Are cinctured with my power as with a robe.
I am the eye with which the Universe
Beholds itself and knows itself divine.1

Prometheus Unbound is full of Platonic imagery concerning the soul of the Earth and the souls of the planets. The Earth takes a real part in the action of the drama; as is the case with Plato, Shelley is not quite clear whether the Earth herself is living or whether she is inspired by a spirit.

1 Cp. The Laws, Bk. X.

Thus, in the first Act, it is the Earth herself who lives and

She speaks of joy as running through all her 'stony veins ' at the birth of Prometheus, and of her whole existence becoming poisoned by anger when Jupiter tortures him. As in the Timaeus, all those various existences which are contained in the Earth are only the transformations of the same soul of the world acting upon the same matter. In the fourth Act, however, the Earth is considered in its cosmic aspect, as not being in itself alive but inspired by a planetary spirit. Ione says:

On its head there burns

A light like a green star, whose emerald beams
Are twined with its fair hair! how, as it moves
The splendour drops in flakes upon the grass,
Knowest thou it?"1

and Panthea replies:

It is the delicate spirit

That guides the earth through heaven. From afar
The populous constellations call that light
The loveliest of the planets.

In the fourth act of Prometheus Unbound, Shelley, in the most magical way, blends his Platonism with the ideas of modern astronomy. In the Timaeus the law of gravitation is explained by Plato as being not only an attraction of lesser bodies to greater, but as having a magnetic power. Shelley avails himself of this idea: the Moon and the Earth he represents as living spirits, and the force of gravity which binds them together as the magnetic attraction of their love; the moon circles ever around the earth:

Gazing, an insatiate bride,

On thy form from every side.

1 Prometheus Unbound, Act III, Sc. 4.

1

In the same way as Plato in the Timaeus, Shelley represents the universe as being a congeries of intelligences of all grades

who have homes,
From man's high mind even to the central stone
Of sullen lead; from Heaven's star-fretted domes
To the dull weed some sea-worm battens on.1

With regard to man's nature and general position in society, Shelley again shows certain resemblances to Plato. Plato's most scientific division of man's nature is the triple one of the Republic: into the rational and appetitive souls and the body. More usually, however, Plato speaks as if man were a dualism; like most men of strong passions, he is keenly conscious of the war in his members'; the famous allegory in the Phaedrus of the dark horse and the white horse, the one struggling against the other, represents a mood which is predominant in him. He would have found it difficult to say with Browning's Rabbi:

Nor soul helps flesh now more than flesh helps soul.

Shelley, also, is conscious of a similar dualism. In his Prometheus Unbound it forms positively the leading idea: Prometheus is the soul of man, his mind, noble and suffering; in Jupiter is exemplified the baser side of man, his lusts and concupiscence, his errors of mind and his sins of body. Prometheus-the intellect-has originally given power to Jupiter the ancient religions, harsh superstitions and cruel faiths which, thus enthroned, have countenanced all lusts, persecutions and abominations, and tortured the nobler part of man; this nobler part endures in desolate protest unyielding and therefore finally triumphant. The action of Prometheus Unbound is essentially a mental action which explains why so many people fail to understand it as action at all, and why to Shelley it seems all-sufficient; Jupiter, it has

1 Prometheus Unbound, Act IV. See Note at close of this article.