Preface

The “Essay on a Future State” is also unhappily a fragment. Shelley observes, on one occasion, “man is not a being of reason only, but of imaginations and affections.” In this portion of his Essay he gives us only that view of a future state which is to be derived from reasoning and analogy. It is not to be supposed that a mind so full of vast ideas concerning the universe, endowed with such subtle discrimination with regard to the various modes in which this does or may appear to our eyes, with a lively fancy and ardent and expansive feelings, should be content with a mere logical view of that which even in religion is a mystery and a wonder. I cannot pretend to supply the deficiency, nor say what Shelley’s views were—they were vague, certainly; 119 yet as certainly regarded the country beyond the grave as one by no means foreign to our interests and hopes. Considering his individual mind as a unit divided from a mighty whole, to which it was united by restless sympathies and an eager desire for knowledge, he assuredly believed that hereafter, as now, he would form a portion of that whole—and a portion less imperfect, less suffering, than the shackles inseparable from humanity impose on all who live beneath the moon. To me, death appears to be the gate of life; but my hopes of a hereafter would be pale and drooping, did I not expect to find that most perfect and beloved specimen of humanity on the other shore; and my belief is that spiritual improvement in this life prepares the way to a higher existence. Traces of such a faith are found in several passages of Shelley’s works. In one of the letters of the second volume he says, “The destiny of man can scarcely be so degraded, that he was born only to die.” And again, in a journal, I find these feelings recorded, with regard to a danger we incurred together at sea. “I had time in that moment to reflect and even to reason on death; it was rather a thing of discomfort and disappointment than terror to me. We should 120never be separated; but in death we might not know and feel our union as now. I hope—but my hopes are not unmixed with fear for what will befal this inestimable spirit when we appear to die.” A mystic ideality tinged these speculations in Shelley’s mind; certain stanzas in the poem of “The Sensitive Plant,” express, in some degree, the almost inexpressible idea, not that we die into another state, when this state is no longer, from some reason, unapparent as well as apparent, accordant with our being—but that those who rise above the ordinary nature of man, fade from before our imperfect organs; they remain in their “love, beauty, and delight,” in a world congenial to them—we, clogged by “error, ignorance, and strife,” see them not, till we are fitted by purification and improvement for their higher state. ^* For myself, no religious 121doctrine, nor philosophical precept, can shake the faith that a mind so original, so delicately and beautifully moulded, as Shelley’s, so endowed with wondrous powers and eagle-eyed genius—so good, so pure, would never be shattered and dispersed by the Creator; but that the qualities and consciousness that formed him, are not only indestructible in themselves, but in the form under which they were united here, and that to become worthy of him is to assure the bliss of a reunion.