Mysticism of Shelley: Shelley (like Browning) is a love- and-beauty mystic. He looks upon love as the solution of the mystery of life, as the link between God and man. To Shelley this was a glorious intuition, which reached him through his imagination, whereas the life of man, as he saw it, roused in him little but mad indignation, wild revolt and passionate protest.

Shelley believes in a soul of the universe, in which all things live and move and have their being; which, as one feels in the Prometheus, is un-nameable, inconceivable even to man, for “the deep truth is imageless. His most passionate desire was not, as was Browning’s, for an increased and ennobled individuality but for the mystical fusion of his own personality with this Spirit, this object of his worship and adoration. To Shelley death was the rending of a veil, which would admit us to the full vision of the ideal, which alone is true life. The sense of unity in all things is most strongly felt in Adonais, where Shelley’s maturest thoughts and philosophy are to be found; and indeed, the mystical sphere in this poem, especially towards the end, is greater than anywhere else in his writings. The hymn to Intellectual Beauty is, in some ways, Shelley’s clearest and most obvious expression of his devotion to the spirit of Ideal Beauty, its reality to him and his vow of dedication to its service.

Shelley, like Blake, regarded the human imagination as a divine creative force. In his Prometheus Unbound, the most deeply mystical of his poems, Prometheus stands for the human imagination or the genius of the world; and it is his union with Asia, the divine idea, the spirit of beauty and life, from which a new universe is born. It is this union, which consummates the aspiration of humanity, that Shelley celebrates in the marvellous love song Prometheus. To Shelley the form assumed by the divine in man, is love, which to Shelley is synonymous with beauty.

‘l’he three great English poets, who are also fundamentally mystical in thought, are Wordsworth, Browning and Blake. Their philosophy or mystical belief, one in essence, though so differently expressed, lies at the root, as it is also the flower of their life-work. In others, as in Shelley, Keats and Rossetti, although it is the inspiring force of their poetry, it is not a flame burning steadily and evenly but rather a light flashing out intermittently into brilliant and dazzling radiance. The man himself is not so permeated by it and hence results the unsatisfied desire, the almost painful yearning, the recurring disappointment and disillusionment, which we do not find in Browning, Wordsworth and Blake.