James Thomson

“ He is a portion of the loveliness Which once he made more lovely: he doth bear His part, while the one Spirit's plastic stress Sweeps through the dull dense world, compelling there All new successions to the forms they wear ”

“ The Universal Mind is freed and purified; the earth and the moon grow more glorious, and fertile, and beautiful, inspired by the renewed health of the informing spirit. The poem is an apotheosis of the One Infinite Soul, self-subsisting, informing all things, one and the same in all masks of man, and beast, and worm, and plant, and slime. ”

“ Poor man, on the contrary, with soul, and reason, and virtue, and all sorts of fine pretences, is very weak and much given to roguery; with all the cardinal virtues to help him, he is quite overruled in the conclave by the more numerous and strong-willed and cardinal vices. ”

“ The fact is that Shelley, like every other brave Recusant, is credited with much more infidelity than he really had. Finding a vast State Church, based upon politico-theology, everywhere in the ascendant, he was naturally more occupied in negativing dominant assumptions than in affirming his own positive convictions. If a man asserts his right to crush me under his feet, it is not probable that my reply will contain an exact recognition of whatever wisdom and goodness he may really have. ”

“ Two spirits, the good and the evil, are struggling for the supreme sway. The evil spirit is still predominant; but each successive combat finds him weaker and the good stronger than heretofore. The final issue shall be the perfect triumph of the good and destruction of the evil. This philosophy is yet further expounded in the "Prometheus Unbound," written in 1819. ”

“ Herein also Shelley (like Plato, among others, before him) declares that "Almighty God," "Merciful God," made the living world and all that it contains of good; and the Evil spirit, now ruling, all the evil—"madness, crime, remorse, hell, or the sharp fear of hell." Scene 3, Act ii., shows the nature-worship fading away. But the most prominent and pervading idea of the poem is Pantheistic. The Good spirit, which at last triumphs, is, indeed, typified in the Titan Prometheus, and not in a man; but no faith in or worship of this deliverer is required from men who would be saved. ”

“ For though nature is no saint, but systematically sets most of her children to live by devouring one another—massacres good and bad, wise and foolish indiscriminately with storms and earthquakes, plagues and murrains ”

“ Certainly, if ignorance and perverseness will needs be national and universal, then they who adhere to wisdom and to truth are not therefore to be blamed for being so few as to seem a sect or faction. ”

“ He declares that he does not speak against the Supreme Being itself, but against the erroneous and degrading idea which men have conceived of a Supreme Being. In the first half of the first canto he distinctly and magnificently develops a sort of Manicheism. ”