is unrecognised by men, and indeed confounded with evil:--

And the Great Spirit of Good did creep among
The nations of mankind, and every tongue
Cursed and blasphemed him as he passed, for none
Knew good from evil.

There is no doubt that to Shelley the form assumed by the divine in man
was love. Mrs Shelley, in her note to _Rosalind and Helen_, says that,
"in his eyes it was the essence of our being, and all woe and pain arose
from the war made against it by selfishness or insensibility, or
mistake"; and Shelley himself says, "the great secret of morals is love;
or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves
with the beautiful which exists in thought, action or person, not our
own."

Shelley was always searching for love; and, although he knew well,
through his study of Plato, the difference between earthly and spiritual
love, that the one is but the lowest step on the ladder which leads to
the other, yet in actual practice he confounded the two. He knew that he
did so; and only a month before his death, he summed up in a sentence
the tragedy of his life. He writes to Mr Gisborne about the
_Epipsychidion_, saying that he cannot look at it now, for--

"the person whom it celebrates was a cloud instead of a Juno," and
continues, "If you are curious, however, to hear what I am and have
been, it will tell you something thereof. It is an idealized
history of my life and feelings. I think one is always in love with
something or other; the error--and I confess it is not easy for
spirits cased in flesh and blood to avoid it--consists in seeking