Ideas of Good and Evil

‘For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
Is God Our Father dear;
And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
Is man, His child and care.

For Mercy has a human heart;
Pity a human face;
And Love the human form divine;
And Peace, the human dress.

Then every man of every clime,
That prays in his distress,
Prays to the human form divine—
Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace.’
Whenever he gave this symbol a habitation in space he set it in the sun, the father of light and life; and set in the darkness beyond the stars, where light and life die away

‘The joy of woman is the death of her beloved,
Who dies for love of her,
In torments of fierce jealousy and pangs of adoration.
The lover’s night bears on my song,
And the nine spheres rejoice beneath my powerful control.

They sing unwearied to the notes of my immortal hand.
The solemn, silent moon
Reverberates the long harmony sounding upon my limbs.
The birds and beasts rejoice and play,
And every one seeks for his mate to prove his inmost joy.

Furious and terrible they rend the nether deep,
The deep lifts up his rugged head,
And lost in infinite hovering wings vanishes with a cry.
The fading cry is ever dying,
The living voice is ever living in its inmost

‘Tired with all these, for restful death I cry;—
As, to behold desert a beggar born,
And needy nothing trimm’d in jollity,
And purest faith unhappily forsworn,
And gilded honour shamefully misplaced,
And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,
And right perfection wrongfully disgrac’d,
And strength by limping sway disabled,
And Art made tongue-tied by authority,
And folly, doctor-like, controlling skill,
And simple truth miscalled simplicity,
And captive good attending captain ill:
Tired with all these, from these would I begone
Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.’

For love and beauty and delight
There is no death, nor change; their might
Exceeds our organs, which endure
No light, being themselves obscure.’

In this life
Of error, ignorance, and strife,
Where nothing is, but all things seem,
And we the shadows of the dream,

It is a modest creed, and yet
Pleasant, if one considers it,
To own that death itself must be,
Like all the rest, a mockery.

This garden sweet, that lady fair,
And all sweet shapes and odours there,
In truth have never passed away;
’Tis we, ’tis ours are changed, not they.

In ancient times, it seems to me that Blake, who for all his protest was glad to be alive, and ever spoke of his gladness, would have worshipped in some chapel of the Sun, and that Keats, who accepted life gladly though ‘with a delicious diligent indolence,’ would have worshipped in some chapel of the Moon, but that Shelley, who hated life because he sought ‘more in life than any understood,’ would have wandered, lost in a ceaseless reverie, in some chapel of the Star of infinite desire

There is hardly indeed a poem of any length in which one does not find it as a symbol of love, or liberty, or wisdom, or beauty, or of some other expression of that Intellectual Beauty, which was to Shelley’s mind the central power of the world; and to its faint and fleeting light he offers up all desires, that are as

It is only by ancient symbols, by symbols that have numberless meanings beside the one or two the writer lays an emphasis upon, or the half-score he knows of, that any highly subjective art can escape from the barrenness and shallowness of a too conscious arrangement, into the abundance and depth of nature. The poet of essences and pure ideas must seek in the half-lights that glimmer from symbol to symbol as if to the ends of the earth, all that the epic and dramatic poet finds of mystery and shadow in the accidental circumstance of life.

‘thought can with difficulty visit the intricate and winding chambers which it inhabits. It is like a river, whose rapid and perpetual stream flows outward.... The caverns of the mind are obscure and shadowy; or pervaded with a lustre, beautiful and bright indeed, but shining not beyond their portals.’

Mind, as far as we have any experience of its properties, and beyond that experience how vain is argument, cannot create, it can only perceive;’