Shelley was the poet of that time of life when men feel most strongly the sense of proud and lonely inviolability, which is legible in everything he wrote, and when their spirits, like his, are also "tameless and swift and proud." And this is a time of life and magic that, once gone, is gone forever, and that may never be recaptured save by memory.
But in the years that followed, just as Eugene's physical body grew coarser and more heavy, and his sensual appetites increased enormously, so also did the energy of his spirit, which in childhood had been wing-like, soaring, and direct in its aerial buoyancy, grew darker, slower, heavier, smoldering and slow in its beginning heat, and densely woven and involved in all its web-like convolutions.
And as all the strength and passion of his life turned more and more away from its childhood thoughts of aerial flight and escape into some magic and unvisited domain, it seemed to him that the magic and unvisited domain was the earth itself, and all the life around him - that me must escape not out of life but into it, looking through walls he never had seen before, exploring the palpable and golden substance of this earth as it had never been explored, finding, somehow, the word, the key, the door, to the glory of a life more fortunate and happy than any man has ever known, and which yet, incredibly, palpably, is his, even as the earth beneath his feet is his, if he could only take it.
