I SAID that Shelley and Leopardi, with their aston-
ishingly different ideas of life, both achieved, by
means of them, a similar result: and that was a certain
unity of experience, which enabled their poetry to
present, as a single rich harmony of complete signifi-
cance or manifest interrelation, something typical of
the whole range of life, its evil as well as its good.
This does not mean that such a unity is always of the
same kind. Its similarity lies simply in the fact that
it always makes on us some impression of greatness.
But there may be as many different kinds of harmony
as of individual minds; the kind will depend not only
on the particular experiences it includes, but also on
the kind of idea which enables it to be inclusive at all.
Great poetry will always be individual in one aspect,
and universal in another.

But the idea itself may vary infinitely. It may be
a definite moral, theological or philosophical explana-
tion of life; or we may be unable to define it as any-
thing more than a dominant sense of life, an habitual
mode of experience. It may also be something less

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