"
The question for Shelley is not at all what will look nicest in his
song; that is the preoccupation of mincing rhymesters, whose well is
soon dry. Shelley's abundance has a more generous source; it springs
from his passion for picturing what would be best, not in the picture,
but in the world. Hence, when he feels he has pictured or divined it,
he can exclaim:
"The joy, the triumph, the delight, the madness,
The boundless, overflowing, bursting gladness,
The vaporous exultation, not to be confined!
Ha! Ha! the animation of delight,
Which wraps me like an atmosphere of light,
And bears me as a cloud is borne by its own wind!"
To match this gift of bodying forth the ideal Shelley had his vehement
sense of wrong; and as he seized upon and recast all images of beauty,
to make them more perfectly beautiful, so, to vent his infinite horror
of evil, he seized on all the worst images of crime or torture that he
could find, and recast them so as to reach the quintessence of
distilled badness. His pictures of war, famine, lust, and cruelty are,
or seem, forced, although perhaps, as in the _Cenci_, he might urge
that he had historical warrant for his descriptions, far better
historical warrant, no doubt, than the beauty and happiness actually
to be found in the world could give him for his _Skylark_, his
_Epipsychidion_, or his _Prometheus_.
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