I. His Ruling Ideas from The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry in Ideas of Good and Evil by William Butler Yeats.

“I think this mysterious song utters a faith as simple and as ancient as the faith of those country people, in a form suited to a new age, that will understand, with Blake, that the holy spirit is ‘an intellectual fountain,’ and that the kinds and degrees of beauty are the images of its authority.” [via]

Consider also:

  1. “I was with a number of Hermetists, and one of them said to another, ‘Do you see something in the curtain?’ The other gazed at the curtain for a while and saw presently a man led through a wood by a black hound, and then the hound lay dead at a place the seer knew was called, without knowing why, ‘the Meeting of the Suns,’ and the man followed a red hound, and then the red hound was pierced by a spear. A white fawn watched the man out of the wood, but he did not look at it, for a white hound came and he followed it trembling, but the seer knew that he would follow the fawn at last, and that it would lead him among the gods. The most learned of the Hermetists said, ‘I cannot tell the meaning of the hounds or where the Meeting of the Suns is, but I think the fawn is the Morning and Evening Star.’ I have little doubt that when the man saw the white fawn he was coming out of the darkness and passion of the world into some day of partial regeneration, and that it was the Morning Star and would be the Evening Star at its second coming.”
  2. “He seems in his speculations to have lit on that memory of nature the visionaries claim for the foundation of their knowledge”
  3. “in the Ode to Liberty, Liberty is bid lead wisdom out of the inmost cave of man’s mind as the Morning Star leads the sun out of the waves.”
  4. “The rich have become richer, the poor have become poorer,… such are the effects which must ever flow from an unmitigated exercise of the calculating faculty.”
  5. “I have re-read Prometheus Unbound, which I had hoped my fellow-students would have studied as a sacred book, and it seems to me to have an even more certain place than I had thought, among the sacred books of the world.”