the millennium will begin; what is more to the purpose is to
recognise that here is something more than the ordinary
dogmatism of youthful ignorance. There is a flow of vigorous
language, vividness of imagination, and, above all, much
conscientious reasoning and a passion for hard facts. His wife
was not far wrong when she praised him for a 'logical exactness
of reason." The arguments he uses are, indeed, all
second-hand, and mostly fallacious; but he knew instinctively
something which is for ever hidden from the mass of
mankind--the difference between an argument and a confused
stirring of prejudices. Then, again, he was not content with
abstract generalities: he was always trying to enforce his
views by facts industriously collected from such books of
medicine, anatomy, geology, astronomy, chemistry, and history
as he could get hold of. For instance, he does not preach
abstinence from flesh on pure a priori grounds, but because
"the orang-outang perfectly resembles man both in the order and
number of his teeth." We catch here what is perhaps the
fundamental paradox of his character--the combination of a
curious rational hardness with the wildest and most romantic
idealism. For all its airiness, his verse was thrown off by a
mind no stranger to thought and research.

We are now on the threshold of Shelley's poetic achievement,
and it will be well before going further to underline the
connection, which persists all through his work and is already
so striking in 'Queen Mab', between his poetry and his
philosophical and religious ideas.

Like Coleridge, he was a philosophical poet. But his