told his own story in the tale that Rousseau tells. Rousseau thinks that if Shelley would become actor or victim instead of spectator in this wretchedness, and follow the Conqueror

What thou wouldst be taught I then may learn

From thee.

That is, he would learn from Shelley's fate to understand his own.

A new phase of the allegory now begins; the story of a single life and its overthrow by Life. Rousseau describes himself asleep at the portals of this and of the antenatal world, a place here imaged as a cavern, through which flows a stream in which all things are forgotten. All those who are in the pageant of life have also been, as we understand at the end, asleep in this oblivious valley. When he arose into being, in infancy, he says that all things around kept the trace of some diviner light than that of earth, and melodies that confused the sense of earthly things were heard.

This is the half Platonic
Boyhood comes, imaged

conception of reminiscence. by the brightness of morning that floods the cavern, and then, a Shape all light stood before him, flinging freshness, and in her hand a cup of nepenthe. It is the Spirit of the aspirations and dreams of youth, the vision of Beauty Shelley saw, the Vision which, in different forms, all the creators see. She leads the youth forth out of the cave, and as he follows her all his thoughts were strewn under her feet like embers, and,

thought by thought, she quenched them, and all that was, seemed, as he gazed, as if it had been not. That is the swift succession of aspiration, thought, and feeling, each dying as its successor is born, which we know when we are young, and the sense, then also ours, of all the outward world becoming, in the pursuit of the ideal, as if it had no real being. At last the mystery of life which cannot be repressed, begins to stir within the youth. He can no longer resist the fatal question all must ask, and-" Show whence I came, he cries, and where I am, and why." "Arise and quench thy thirst," the Shape replies; and as he drank the cup, this Dream of youth grew dim, and her light—a light of heaven that hereafter glimmered only, forever sought again, forever lost-waned in the glare of the Masque of Life that now rushed through the forest. It is the entrance into manhood, life as it is in the world of action. He sees and it seems the answer to his question-the car in which Life itself is borne, its captives, and those who played, or gazed; or followed, or out-speeded the car—all as yet young. He himself plunges into "the thickest billows of that living storm,” but before the chariot had begun to climb the steep of middle age a new wonder grew.

The weariness, the cruel working of life's secret, begins to exhaust and destroy all the pleasure, all the eagerness, with which men at the first follow the chariot of Life. The way in which Shelley images this change, and the cause he assigns for it are as imaginative

as they are original. Shadows began to people the grove, dense flocks of phantoms, of various quality and shape, who hid in the capes of kings, and rode across the tiara of popes; and some were old anatomies that hatched broods, and whose dead eyes took power and gave it to those who ruined earth; and some fell like flashes of discoloured snow on the bosoms of the young and were melted by the glow which they extinguished; and others, like small gnats, thronged about the brows of lawyer, statesman, priest, and theorist. Shelley invents all kinds

of them, and each has its meaning. These are the
thoughts, written or spoken, the work and the pas-
sions of men; all that men have poured forth from
their hearts or impressed upon the world; the old
theologies, the old doctrines of kingcraft whose dead
eyes have power; the political theories, poetry, philo-
sophies, which have been sent forth from the begin-
ning of humanity, but which poured forth so fast and
furious before the Revolution. Rousseau knows
whence they came.
"Each one

"Of that great crowd sent forth incessantly
These shadows."

Shadows as they were, form was given them by the creative rays of the car, for all the thoughts and feelings of men are moulded by the mystery of life. And so moulded, and darkening all the ways of the pageant with the sense of the deep mystery that gave them

shape, they did their work, and hour by hour the unconquerable secret, embodied in the forms given to it by the infinite questioning of men, destroyed its victims.

From every form the beauty slowly waned;
From every firmest limb and fairest face
The strength and freshness fell like dust-

And long before the day of life

Was old, the joy which waked like heaven's glance

The sleepers in the oblivious valley died;

And some grew weary of the ghastly dance,
And fell as I have fallen, by the wayside ;-

And those fell soonest who had done most creative work; who had thought and felt and expressed the most-the more passionate, whether for good or evil, the worse off.

Those soonest from whose forms most shadows passed,
And least of strength and beauty did abide.

"Then what is Life?" I cried.

And with that cry all that Shelley wrote is ended.