to the magnet. There was always an Eve in his Eden, and each
was the "wonder of her kind"; but whoever she was--Harriet
Grove, Harriet Westbrook, Elizabeth Hitchener, Cornelia Turner,
Mary Godwin, Emilia Viviani, or Jane Williams--she was never a
Don Juan's mistress; she was an incarnation of the soul of the
world, a momentary mirror of the eternal. Such an attitude
towards the least controllable of passions has several
drawbacks: it involves a certain inhumanity, and it is only
possible for long to one who remains ignorant of himself and
cannot see that part of the force impelling him is blind
attraction towards a pretty face. It also has the result that,
if the lover is a poet, his love-songs will be sad. Obsessed
by the idea of communion with some divine perfection, he must
needs be often cast down, not only by finding that, Ixion-like,
he has embraced a cloud (as Shelley said of himself and
Emilia), but because, even when the object of his affection is
worthy, complete communion is easier to desire than to attain.
Thus Shelley's love-songs are just what might be expected. If
he does strain to the moment of ingress into the divine being,
it is to swoon with excess of bliss, as at the end of
'Epipsychidion', or as in the 'Indian Serenade':

"Oh lift me from the grass!
I die! I faint! I fail!"

More often he exhales pure melancholy:

"See the mountains kiss high heaven
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister-flower would be forgiven