wild it may seem to those who are content with the humble offices of their inferior intellects, there need still be nothing absurd in the endeavour,-it may be, as indeed nearly all the movements of genius are, an impulse it cannot resist, coming with the strength and heat of inspiration; something ordained to enlarge the bounds of mind, and add, as has been done, by the discovery of new bodies in the farthest parts of the heavens, to the knowledge of man, to the light that now gleams but dimly over the wishes of his spirit, and the prospects of his being. All should judge of the eccentricities, the perversities, the apparent inconsistencies of a great soul, with benevolence, and decide on them with mercy. There is, undoubtedly, a feeling of humiliation, even of despair, in viewing those errors, and dangerous aberrations that often mark the course of the greatest intellects, and which overshadow the hopes that inferior minds are disposed to affix to their high powers, and cloud the destinies that sometimes break upon us, in following the track of the highest order of intellectual greatness. But it is, perhaps, only when the deviations are from the path of morals that they should be judged with severity. Then all can be their censors; but in things relating exclusively to the movements of mind, censure should be cast on them in the spirit of kindness and pardon. It is given to few to conceive, to still fewer to feel, the influences that act on such beings from within and from without; the keen susceptibility, the dark and even fierce aspirations, the wild wanderings of a tortured spirit, when in its moody moments it meditates on the inefficiency of all its efforts to discover, by thought, more than fancy has already suggested, or to shape from the records of its knowledge a more certain and less obscure evidence, as to all relating to its position and its prospects. It was in some of these moments of deep despondency, that Shelley expressed himself an atheist. His mind was ever directed, even at the earliest age, towards the most abstruse and the loftiest speculations. There was no love of trifling, nothing humorous in his character; but all his faculties were intensely bent on matters that concerned the welfare of his species,-on subjects that a humble reason can grasp, though they may be made to blend with the wildest metaphysical absurdity; and where that which belongs to the common affairs of life becomes irradiated by imagination, and the real, obscured by intermingling with the fanciful. At Oxford he involved himself in the doctrines of Plato; and, like most imaginative persons, was impelled, in the heat of enthusiasm, to yield an implicit faith and give an actual existence to the visions of his brain. He believed, with that philosopher, that all knowledge is reminiscence; that our immortal part has belonged to some predecessor; and that our minds, instead of gleaning for themselves, the VOL. XIX. No. 38. 35 little that they know here, are only renewing the memory of forgotten thought. To one who fully believes this doctrine, it is necessary to suppose infants in the possession of a mature intellect, and that they are the incarnate representatives of some former life. We will make another extract from the records we have before quoted, that delineates, very strongly, the singularly enthusiastic and imaginative character of the poet. "One Sunday we had been reading Plato together so diligently, that the usual hour of exercise passed away unperceived: we sallied forth hastily to take the air for half an hour before dinner. In the middle of Magdalen bridge we met a woman with a child in her arms. Shelley was more attentive, at that instant, to our conduct in a life that was past, or to come, than to a decorous regulation of the present, according to the established usages of society, in that fleeting moment of eternal duration, styled the nineteenth century. With abrupt dexterity he caught hold of the child. The mother, who might well fear that it was about to be thrown over the parapet of the bridge into the sedgy waters below, held it fast by its long train. 'Will your baby tell us any thing about pre-existence, madam?' he asked, in a piercing voice, and with a wistful look. The mother made no answer, but perceiving that Shelley's object was not murderous, but altogether harmless, she dismissed her apprehensions and relaxed her hold. 'Will your baby tell us any thing about pre-existence, madam?' he repeated, with unabated earnestness. 'He cannot speak, sir,' said the mother, seriously. Worse and worse,' cried Shelley, with an air of deep disappointment, shaking his long hair most pathetically about his young face: 'but surely the babe can speak if he will, for he is only a few weeks old. He may fancy, perhaps, that he cannot, but it is only a silly whim; he cannot have forgotten entirely the use of speech in so short a time; the thing is absolutely impossible.' 'It is not for me to dispute with you, gentlemen,' the woman meekly replied, ‘but I can safely declare that I never heard him speak, nor any child, indeed, of his age.' Shelley sighed deeply as he walked 'How provokingly close are those new born babes,' he ejaculated : 'but it is not the less certain, notwithstanding their cunning attempts to conceal the truth, that all knowledge is reminiscence: the doctrine is far more ancient than Plato, and as old as the venerable allegory, that the muses are the daughters of memory; not one of the nine was ever said to be the child of invention.'" on. With all his feelings and thoughts engaged in subjects such as these, and with the habit of severe study and deep thinking, it was not possible that the one topic, which transcends, in interest and importance, all others, should have been passed over idly, the existence of a Deity. With a large portion of the world it is a matter seldom dwelt upon. So much of life is mere habit, that the human view is not often attracted beyond the affairs of daily occurrence; but with minds of a higher order it is one of the things on which they meditate the most frequently, the earliest, and the most anxiously. Shelley very naturally became, at an extremely early age, an inquirer into the mysteries that surrounded him. He regarded nothing with indifference that seemed to bear on man or his interests; every sentiment seemed to float on a tide of the most cheerful and unbounded philanthropy. The whole moral beauty of his character was displayed in the nobleness of his purposes and the enthusiasm with which he pursued them. Religion, God, the present and everlasting condition of his fellow creatures, appeared, in the eagerness with which he studied them, to be blended with the very fruition of his existence. But his spirit of enquiry was directed by a pure and benevolent impulse; there was none of the coldness of Hume; none of the malignity of Voltaire, nor of the cowardly cunning of Gibbon. He professed his opinions openly, and though with the audacity of youth and inexperience, still with all its honesty. He had no reserve,-his heart lay bare, and though, without doubt, the opinions in themselves were dangerous, even uprooting the very basis of society, yet much of their venom was removed by their candour, the sincerity with which they were expressed, and the readiness that was equally displayed to be made their martyr. Queen Mab, the work in which these heresies were first given to the world, was published without his consent, and after he had retracted many of its worst sentiments. He should stand, therefore, excused from all design of doing harm, and even from blame that he ever held such notions, since they were no longer his at the time of their publication. We know how to comprehend the process by which a young man may become an atheist or an infidel. The ignorance and impetuosity of youth-his daring will and strong passions, are unfortunate and imperfect elements for the construction of a belief. The desire of knowledge does not point out at once the way to gain it, and a violent and hazardous struggle hence ensues in a mind that questions of its momentous interests, between its feeble powers of judging, and the rash rapidity with which it bounds to a conclusion. Every youth, whose intellectual aspirations rise to the questioning the awful and inscrutable things he is told that he must believe, takes upon himself a tremendous task. It is easy, as it is common, with all who reflect but superficially, to throw themselves on the negative energies of doubt. It requires no waste of time or mind to entrench one's self there. Every anxious misgiving, all noble desire of knowledge, is at once quenched in the deep tranquillity of that passive and supine condition. Yet nearly all young minds make it their strong hold for a time. Never having encountered the fearful difficulties of thought, they attach but little interest to subjects of whose importance they are not aware, and which exact from the most powerful intellects the strongest and most serious reflection. Even with those who give all the attention they can, and in the sincerest spirit of truth, there is a wide circle, a dark and dangerous tract to go through-first of enquiry, then of doubt, then of infidelity, before the reason is satisfied; and the agitated feelings, hope and despair, settle on the unruffled bosom of faith. Not unfrequently the miserably troubled state of dissatisfaction and uncertainty lasts through life. The soul plunges itself into the purgatory of a false and feeble judgment and a confused reason, leaving every difficulty still more obscure, every danger still farther increased, every doubt stronger, every hope diminished. The paths of reflection grow more tortuous and indirect, and the same spirit that began its course in the headlong speed of young desire, in conceit and with rash reliance upon its own energies, lies broken and subdued before the impediments that rise like battlements, staying its advance or its receding. But this state comes more often when doubting has become habitual, and irresolution almost instinctive, for the clearest and soundest and greatest minds, so far as is known, seem never to have doubted, or to have satisfied themselves early. "I had rather believe all the fables in the legend, in the Talmud and the Alcoran, than that this universal frame is without a mind." And the mind that dictated these words is sufficient in itself to establish the belief in a God. Its own marvellous greatness is overwhelming testimony. But an atheist is a moral and intellectual excrescence, he closes against himself all the inlets of knowledge; his senses and his affections are bound down by the cold rigour of his intellect, and its inordinate and absurd demands. In the fact of his being so, he shows himself of a weak judgment. He brings forward no evidence to prove his point. All the arguments against him are positive. All those he adduces merely negative. The thing has not been made evident to him; therefore he does not believe it. It has not been brought within the experience of his senses; it has not been, or cannot be inspired by his reason; there are things incompatible with the existence of Deity, such as man would make him, with the power, the perfection, the benevolence they declare to be his attributes, why not make the revelation of his will and his designs more thorough, why not unfold this vast universe of miracles to human view? If we are immortal creatures, though we seem but atoms amid the boundless space of the stupendous whole, why not declare our destiny? and with reasons such as these, and such audacious questioning, the atheist hopes to unsettle the faith and overturn the system of morals the civilized world has adopted. But how can he answer when he is asked, are there not mysteries throughout all creation your conceptions and your understanding cannot reach? is not the daily course of the world and life beyond your comprehension ?-is not the smallest, as well as the greatest incident, the earthquake or the tempest, the vast firmament, on whose abyss an infinite multitude of worlds seem to repose as gently as the bird upon the bosom of the air, the wide sea and the minute insect, are they not all equally beyond your capacity? Yet you can deny a creative Deity to these, a spirit presiding over their birth and upholding their existence, because you cannot understand it because neither your sense nor reason can seize their deep mystery. But turn from the contemplation of vast objects, that subdue our intelligence in their immensity, and pain us in the agony of comprehension, to yourself; study and try to account for the movements of your own mind, bend all your attention to the metaphysics of your own soul, struggle with the remote links of cause and effect in the sphere of your own nature, try to catch the obscure association of ideas, all the various wonders that envelope and mingle in our brief and counted being. Do we arrive at any other result than the assurance of our complete ignorance, and the existence of some power transcending all we know or can conceive? And what other revelation is required, than the proof of the humbleness of our intellect, and its complete incapacity for that knowledge; and therefore its absurd audacity in doubting and questioning? But Shelley's atheism was of an ideal nature he felt that there was a power pervading and governing all things, but he knew not how to distinguish it, for he discarded all the common ideas that men attach to such a being, but worshipped it with all the deep homage, with all the elevation of feeling his imagination could produce and endowed it with all the perfection, all the beauty that was imaged in his own soul. It was impossible for him not to acknowledge, in accordance with the sensibility that animated his mind, and the disposition to admire and even venerate, that was one of his strongest characteristics, the surpassing grandeur, the wide spread loveliness and majesty, that were inwrought with creation. He saw and he felt these, and thence came his impassioned sense of the great Author of all— and the conceptions that so far transcended those of other men. But he threw by all the attributes usually attached to him, except those of perfect benevolence and perfect excellence. It seems not to have been possible for him to conceive that all that was base in human nature, all crime, all vice, all misery, could be designed or flow from the same source whence sprung the loftiest virtue and the purest good. "Hath nature's soul That formed this world, so beautiful, that spread Strung to unchanging unison, that gave The happy birds their dwelling in the grove, |