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

“Let us recollect our sensations as children … we less habitually distinguished all that we saw and felt from ourselves. They seemed as it were to constitute one mass. There are some persons who in this respect are always children. Those who are subject to the state called reverie, feel as if their nature were resolved into the surrounding universe, or as if the surrounding universe were resolved into their being” [via]

Consider also:

  1. “as a cold and changeable fire set in the bare heavens, she governs alike chastity and the joyless idle drifting hither and thither of generated things”
  2. “His early romances and much throughout his poetry show how strong a fascination the traditions of magic and of the magical philosophy had cast over his mind, and one can hardly suppose that he had not brooded over their doctrine of symbols or signatures, though I do not find anything to show that he gave it any deep study.”
  3. “she passes along the Nile ‘by Moeris and the Mareotid lakes,’ and sees all human life shadowed upon its waters in shadows that ‘never are erased but tremble ever’; and in many a dark and subterranean street under the Nile–new caverns–and along the bank of the Nile; and as she bends over the unhappy, she compares unhappiness to ‘the strife that stirs the liquid surface of man’s life’; and because she can see the reality of things she is described as journeying ‘in the calm depths’ of ‘the wide lake’ we journey over unpiloted.”
  4. “Again and again one finds some passing allusion to the cave of man’s mind, or to the caves of his youth, or to the cave of mysteries we enter at death, for to Shelley as to Porphyry it is more than an image of life in the world.”
  5. “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.”