threads, and many others, were all taken up in his first
serious poem, 'Queen Mab' (1812-13), an over-long rhapsody,
partly in blank verse, partly in loose metres. The spirit of
Ianthe is rapt by the Fairy Mab in her pellucid car to the
confines of the universe, where the past, present, and future
of the earth are unfolded to the spirit's gaze. We see tyrants
writhing upon their thrones; Ahasuerus, "the wandering Jew," is
introduced; the consummation on earth of the age of reason is
described. In the end the fairy's car brings the spirit back
to its body, and Ianthe wakes to find

"Henry, who kneeled in silence by her couch,
Watching her sleep with looks of speechless love,
And the bright beaming stars
That through the casement shone."

Though many poets have begun their careers with something
better than this, 'Queen Mab' will always be read, because it
gives us, in embryo, the whole of Shelley at a stroke. The
melody of the verse is thin and loose, but it soars from the
ground and spins itself into a series of etherial visions. And
these visions, though they look utterly disconnected from
reality, are in fact only an aspect of his passionate interest
in science. In this respect the sole difference between 'Queen
Mab' and such poems as 'The West Wind' and 'The Cloud' is that,
in the prose of the notes appended to 'Queen Mab', with their
disquisitions on physiology and astronomy, determinism and
utilitarianism, the scientific skeleton is explicit. These
notes are a queer medley. We may laugh at their crudity--their
certainty that, once orthodoxy has been destroyed by argument,