Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: NOTES. The title of this Poem—Epipsychidion—is translated by Shelley himself in the line, "Whither 'twas fled, this soul out of my soul;" and the word Epipsychidion is coined by him to express the idea of that line. It might mean something which is placed on a soul as if to complete or crown it. It was probably intended by Shelley to be also a diminutive of endearment from epipsycke. There is no such Greek word as eVt-w. But epipsyche would mean "a soul upon a soul," just as epicycle, in the Ptolemaic astronomy, meant " a circle upon a circle." Such " a soul on a soul" might be paraphrased as a soul which is the complement- of, and therefore responsive to, another soul like itself, but in higher place and of a higher order. The lower would then seek to be united with the higher, because in suchunion it would be made perfect, and the pre-established harmony between them be actually realised. This idea, many suggestions of which may be found in Plato, runs through a great part of Shelley's personal poetry, and the accomplishment of it is expressed near the end of Epipsychidion in the lines which begin " One passion in two hearts." But perhaps the best commentary on the whole of this conception is the passage which I here extract from Shelley's fragment On Love:— " Thou demandest what is love ? It is that powerful attraction towards all that we conceive, or fear, or hope beyond ourselves, when we find within our own thoughts the chasm of an insufficient void, and seek to awaken in all things that are, a community with what we experience within ourselves. If we reason, we would be understood ; if we imagine, we would that the airy children of our brain were born anew within another's; if we feel, we would that another's nerves should vibrate to our own, that the b...