Nature, take from his verse perpetual incarnation and reincarnation, pass
in a thousand glorious transmigrations through the radiant forms of his
imagery.

Thus, but not in the Wordsworthian sense, he is a veritable poet of
Nature. For with Nature the Wordsworthians will admit no tampering: they
exact the direct interpretative reproduction of her; that the poet should
follow her as a mistress, not use her as a handmaid. To such following
of Nature, Shelley felt no call. He saw in her not a picture set for his
copying, but a palette set for his brush; not a habitation prepared for
his inhabiting, but a Coliseum whence he might quarry stones for his own
palaces. Even in his descriptive passages the dream-character of his
scenery is notorious; it is not the clear, recognisable scenery of
Wordsworth, but a landscape that hovers athwart the heat and haze arising
from his crackling fantasies. The materials for such visionary Edens
have evidently been accumulated from direct experience, but they are
recomposed by him into such scenes as never had mortal eye beheld. "Don't
you wish you had?" as Turner said. The one justification for classing
Shelley with the Lake poet is that he loved Nature with a love even more
passionate, though perhaps less profound. Wordsworth's _Nightingale and
Stockdove_ sums up the contrast between the two, as though it had been
written for such a purpose. Shelley is the "creature of ebullient
heart," who

Sings as if the god of wine
Had helped him to a valentine.

Wordsworth's is the

--Love with quiet blending,