say to the author of _Queen Mali_, the _Revolt of Islam_, and
_Prometheus Unbound_ with such acknowledgments as might be
acceptable to a Christian minister and zealous upholder of the
Established Church. But Shelley soon placed me at my ease.
Standing where he now does, and reviewing all his successive
productions from a higher point, he assures me that there is a
harmony, an order, a regular procession, which enables him to lay
his hand upon any one of the earlier poems and say, "This is my
work," with precisely the same complacency of conscience wherewithal
he contemplates the volume of discourses above mentioned. They are
like the successive steps of a staircase, the lowest of which, in
the depth of chaos, is as essential to the support of the whole as
the highest and final one resting upon the threshold of the heavens.
I felt half inclined to ask him what would have been his fate had he
perished on the lower steps of his staircase, instead of building
his way aloft into the celestial brightness.

How all this may be I neither pretend to understand nor greatly
care, so long as Shelley has really climbed, as it seems he has,
from a lower region to a loftier one. Without touching upon their
religious merits, I consider the productions of his maturity
superior, as poems, to those of his youth. They are warmer with
human love, which has served as an interpreter between his mind and
the multitude. The author has learned to dip his pen oftener into
his heart, and has thereby avoided the faults into which a too
exclusive use of fancy and intellect are wont to betray him.
Formerly his page was often little other than a concrete arrangement
of crystallizations, or even of icicles, as cold as they were
brilliant. Now you take it to your heart, and are conscious of a
heart-warmth responsive to your own. In his private character