Ossian Collection > Aspects of poetry

238 SHELLEY AS A LYRIC POET. [VIII.
facts, it was quick and subtle to seize the evanescent
hues of things, the delicate aromas which are too fine
for ordinary perceptions. His intellect waited on his
temperament, and, so to speak, did its will — caught up,
one by one, the warm emotions as they were thrown
off, and worked them up into the most exquisite ab-
stractions. The rush of throbbing pulsations supplied
the materials for his keen-edged thought to work on,
and these it did mould into the rarest, most beautiful
shapes. This his mind was busy doing all his life long.
The real world, existence as it is to other minds, he
recoiled from — shrank from the dull gross earth which
we see around us — nor less from the unseen world of
Righteous Law and Will which we apprehend above us.
The solid earth he did not care for. Heaven — a moral
heaven — there was that in him which would not tolerate.
So, as Mr. Hutton has said, his mind made for itself
a dwelling-place, midway between heaven and earth,
equally remote from both, some interstellar region, some
cold, clear place
' Pinnacled dim in the intense inane,'
which he peopled with ideal shapes and abstractions,
wonderful or weird, beautiful or fantastic, all woven out
of his own dreaming phantasy.
This was the world in which he was at home ; he was
not at home with any reality known to other men. Few
real human characters appear in his poetry ; his own
pulsations, desires, aspirations, supplied the place of