"Most glorious night! Thou wert not sent for slumber! let me be A sharer in thy fierce and far delight,-- _A portion of the tempest and of thee!_"
There could not be a better example of the difference between the attitude towards nature of an all-embracing and an all-defying poetic intellect. Shelley does not, like Byron, desire to possess himself of her thunderbolts. He loves her, not as his weapon, but as his lyre; loves her, unappalled by her gigantic proportions, familiar with her prodigious forces, feeling that the universe is his home. His imagination delights in occupying itself with the heavenly bodies; he is fascinated by their beauty and life as others are by the beauty of the forget-me-not and the rose.
What powerful, all-compelling imagination in the poem which he writes on hearing of the death of Napoleon!
"What! alive and so bold, O Earth? Art thou not over-bold? What! leapest thou forth as of old In the light of thy morning mirth, The last of the flock of the starry fold? Ha! leapest thou forth as of old? Are not the limbs still when the ghost is fled, And canst thou move, Napoleon being dead?
How! is not thy quick heart cold? What spark is alive on thy hearth? How! is not _his_ death-knell knolled, And livest _thou_ still, Mother Earth? Thou wert warming thy fingers old O'er the embers covered and cold Of that most fiery spirit, when it fled-- What, Mother, dost thou laugh now he is dead? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 'Still alive and still bold,' shouted Earth, 'I grow bolder and still more bold. The dead fill me ten thousandfold Fuller of speed and splendour and mirth. I was cloudy and sullen and cold, Like a frozen chaos uprolled, Till by the spirit of the mighty dead My heart grew warm: I feed on whom I fed.'"
With the eyes of his soul Shelley beheld the soulèd spheres circling in space, glowing within, sparkling without, lighting up the night; his gaze sounded the unfathomable abysses where verdant worlds and comets with glittering hair, and pale, ice-cold moons, glide past each other. He compares them to the drops of dew which fill the flower chalices in the morning; he sees them whirl, world after world, from their genesis to their annihilation, like bubbles on a stream, glittering, bursting, and yet immortal, ever generating new beings, new laws, new gods, bright or sombre--garments wherewith to hide the nakedness of death. He sees them as Raphael painted them in Rome in the church of Santa Maria del Popolo, each governed and guided by its angel; and, wielding the absolute poetic power of his imagination, he assigns to the unfortunate Keats, lately dead, the throne of a yet kingless sphere.