Indeed, an earth
really made perfect is hardly distinguishable from a posthumous
heaven: so profoundly must everything in it be changed, and so
angel-like must every one in it become. Shelley's earthly paradise, as
described in _Prometheus_ and in _Epipsychidion_, is too
festival-like> too much of a mere culmination, not to be fugitive: it
cries aloud to be translated into a changeless and metaphysical
heaven, which to Shelley's mind could be nothing but the realm of
Platonic ideas, where "life, like a dome of many-coloured glass," no
longer "stains the white radiance of eternity." But the age had been
an age of revolution and, in spite of disappointments, retained its
faith in revolution; and the young Shelley was not satisfied with a
paradise removed to the intangible realms of poetry or of religion; he
hoped, like the old Hebrews, for a paradise on earth. His notion was
that eloquence could change the heart of man, and that love, kindled
there by the force of reason and of example, would transform society.
He believed, Mrs. Shelley tells us, "that mankind had only to will
that there should be no evil, and there would be none." And she adds:
"That man could be so perfectionised as to be able to expel evil from
his own nature, and from the greater part of creation, was the
cardinal point of his system.
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