The Philosophy of Shelley's Poetry.
the arts when 'the mind, arising bright from the embrace of beauty,' 'casts on them the gathered rays which are reality'; the 'guardians' who move in 'the atmosphere of human thought,' as 'the birds within the wind, or the fish within the wave,' or man's thought itself through all things; and who join the throng of the happy hours when Time is passing away—
'As the flying fish leap
From the Indian deep,
And mix with the seabirds half asleep.'
It is these powers which lead Asia and Panthea, as they would lead all the affections of humanity, by words written upon leaves, by faint songs, by eddies of echoes that draw 'all spirits on that secret way,' by the 'dying odours' of flowers and by 'the sunlight of the sphered dew,' beyond the gates of birth and death to awake Demogorgon, eternity, that 'the painted veil' 'called life' may be 'torn aside.'
There are also ministers of ugliness and
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