unacknowledged legislators of the world."

Other poets besides Shelley have seen

"Through all that earthly dress
Bright shoots of everlastingness,"

and others have felt that the freedom from self, which is
attained in the vision, is supremely good. What is peculiar to
him, and distinguishes him from the poets of religious
mysticism, is that he reflected rationally on his vision,
brought it more or less into harmony with a philosophical
system, and, in embracing it, always had in view the
improvement of mankind. Not for a moment, though, must it be
imagined that he was a didactic poet. It was the theory of the
eighteenth century, and for a brief period, when the first
impulse of the Romantic Movement was spent, it was again to
become the theory of the nineteenth century, that the obJect of
poetry is to inculcate correct principles of morals and
religion. Poetry, with its power of pleasing, was the jam
which should make us swallow the powder unawares. This
conception was abhorrent to Shelley, both because poetry ought
not to do what can be done better by prose, and also because,
for him, the pleasure and the lesson were indistinguishably
one. The poet is to improve us, not by insinuating a moral,
but by communicating to others something of that ecstasy with
which he himself burns in contemplating eternal truth and
beauty and goodness.

Hitherto all the writings mentioned have been, except 'The