great characteristic distinguishing all things good from all
things evil. We then have a shadowy record of love's dealings
with him. In childhood he clasped the vision in every natural
sight and sound, in verse, and in philosophy. Then it fled,
this "soul out of my soul." He goes into the wintry forest of
life, where "one whose voice was venomed melody" entraps and
poisons his youth. The ideal is sought in vain in many mortal
shapes, until the moon rises on him, "the cold chaste Moon,"
smiling on his soul, which lies in a death-like trance, a
frozen ocean. At last the long-sought vision comes into the
wintry forest; it is Emily, like the sun, bringing light and
odour and new life. Henceforth he is a world ruled by and
rejoicing in these twin spheres. "As to real flesh and blood,"
he said in a letter to Leigh Hunt, "you know that I do not deal
in those articles; you might as well go to a gin-shop for a leg
of mutton as expect anything human or earthly from me." Yet it
is certain that the figures behind the shifting web of
metaphors are partly real--that the poisonous enchantress is
his first wife, and the moon that saved him from despair his
second wife. The last part of the poem hymns the bliss of
union with the ideal. Emily must fly with him; "a ship is
floating in the harbour now," and there is "an isle under
Ionian skies," the fairest of all Shelley's imaginary
landscapes, where their two souls may become one. Then, at the
supreme moment, the song trembles and stops:

"Woe is me!
The winged words on which my soul would pierce
Into the heights of love's rare universe,
Are chains of lead around its flight of fire--