Born, at Field Place, near Horsham, Sussex, 4 Aug. 1792. Educated privately, 1798–1802; at a school at Brentford, 1802–04; at Eton, July 1804 to 1809. Wrote poetry while at Eton. Matric., University Coll., Oxford, 10 April 1810. Expelled (with Hogg) from Oxford for publication of “The Necessity of Atheism,” 25 March 1811. Married (i.) Harriet Westbrook, 28 Aug. 1811. Lived for a few weeks with Hogg in Edinburgh; thence to Keswick, Nov. 1811. Friendship formed there with Southey. Friendship with Godwin begun, Jan. 1812. In Dublin, spring of 1812; at Lynmouth, June to Sept. 1812; in Carnarvonshire, Sept. 1812 to Feb. 1813; in Ireland, Feb. to April 1813; to London, April 1813. Removed to Bracknell, July 1813; in Edinburgh, winter 1813–14; returned to Bracknell, spring of 1814. On account of his having been married in Scotland as a minor, he remarried his wife in London, 24 March 1814. Estrangement from his wife, and meeting with Mary Godwin, 1814. To Continent with Mary Godwin, 28 July 1814; returned with her to England, Sept. 1814. Friendship with Byron begun, 1816. At Geneva with him, summer of 1816. Mrs. Shelley committed suicide, Dec. 1816. He married (ii.) Mary Godwin, 30 Dec. 1816; settled with her at Marlow, spring of 1817. Friendship with Keats begun, 1817. Removed to Italy, March 1818. Drowned, 8 July 1822. His body cremated on the shore near Via Reggio, 16 Aug. 1822. His ashes buried in old Protestant Cemetery, Rome, Dec. 1822. Works: “Zastrozzi” (under initials: P. B. S.), 1810; “Original Poetry: by Victor and Cazire” (no copy known [?]), 1810; “Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson,” 1810 (priv. ptd., ed. by H. B. Forman, 1877); “St. Irvyne” (anon.), 1811; “Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things,” 1811; “The Necessity of Atheism,” 1811; “An Address to the Irish People,” 1812; “Proposals for an Association,” 1812; “Declaration of Rights,” 1812; “Letters to Lord Ellenborough” [1812]; “The Devil’s Walk,” 1812; “Queen Mab,” 1813; “A Vindication of Natural Diet” (anon.), 1813; “A Refutation of Deism” (anon.), 1814; “Alastor,” 1816; “Proposal for putting reform to the Vote” (anon.), 1817; “History of a Six Weeks’ Tour through a Part of France” (with his wife; anon.), 1817; “Laon and Cythna,” 1818 [1817] (recalled; and reissued as “The Revolt of Islam,” 1817); “Address to the People on the Death of Princess Charlotte” [1818]; “Rosalind and Helen.” 1819; “The Cenci,” 1819; “Prometheus Unbound,” 1820; “Œdipus Tyrannus” (anon.), 1820; “Epipsychidion” (anon.), 1821; “Adonais,” 1821; “Hellas,” 1822. Posthumous: “Posthumous Poems,” ed. by Mrs. Shelley [1824]; “The Masque of Anarchy,” ed. by Leigh Hunt, 1832; “The Shelley Papers” (from “Athenæum”) 1833; “Essays, etc.,” ed. by Mrs. Shelley, 1840; “The Dæmon of the World,” ed. by H. B. Forman (priv. ptd.), 1876; “Notes on Sculptures in Rome and Florence” (ed. by H. B. Forman; priv. ptd.), 1879. Collected Works: ed. by H. Buxton Forman (8 vols.), 1880 [1876–80]. Life: by Prof. Dowden, 1886.

Personal

  I went to Godwin’s. Mr. Shelley was there. I had never seen him before. His youth and a resemblance to Southey, particularly in his voice, raised a pleasing impression, which was not altogether destroyed by his conversation, though it is vehement, and arrogant, and intolerant. He was very abusive towards Southey, whom he spoke of as having sold himself to the Court. And this he maintained with the usual party slang…. Shelley spoke of Wordsworth with less bitterness, but with an insinuation of his insincerity, etc.

	Midst others of less note, came one frail Form,
	A phantom among men; companionless
	As the last cloud of an expiring storm
	Whose thunder is its knell; he, as I guess,
	Had gazed on Nature’s naked loveliness,
	Actæon-like, and now he fled astray
	With feeble steps o’er the world’s wilderness,
	And his own thoughts, along that rugged way
	Pursued, like raging hounds, their father and their prey.
	*        *        *        *        *
	He came at last, neglected and apart;
	A herd-abandoned deer struck by the hunter’s dart.
	All stood aloof.

  The author of the “Prometheus Unbound,” has a fire in his eye, a fever in his blood, a maggot in his brain, a hectic flutter in his speech, which mark out the philosophic fanatic. He is sanguine-complexioned, and shrill-voiced. As is often observable in the case of religious enthusiasts, there is a slenderness of constitutional stamina, which renders the flesh no match for the spirit. His bending, flexible form appears to take no strong hold of things, does not grapple with the world about him, but slides from it like a river,—

	“And in its liquid texture mortal wound
	Receives no more than can the fluid air.”

  I cannot grieve for you, beloved Shelley! I grieve for thy friends—for the world—for thy child—most for myself, enthroned in thy love, growing wiser and better beneath thy gentle influence, taught by you the highest philosophy—your pupil, friend, lover, wife, mother of your children! The glory of the dream is gone. I am a cloud from which the light of sunset has passed. Give me patience in the present struggle. Meum codium cor! Good-night!

	“I would give
	All that I am to be as thou now art;
	But I am chain’d to time, and cannot thence depart.”

  Ten years ago the indiscretions of Shelley had rendered his name an unmentionable one to ears polite.

  Jackson talks much of Shelley. He knew him well; says that he was a perfect child in his habits. He remembers Shelley telling him how fine a death he thought it would be to be shipwrecked in the bay of Spezzia. Poor lad! He learned to know too well.

  “You should have known Shelley,” said Byron, “to feel how much I must regret him. He was the most gentle, most amiable, and least worldly-minded person I ever met; full of delicacy, disinterested beyond all other men, and possessing a degree of genius, joined to a simplicity as rare as it is admirable. He had formed to himself a beau-idéal of all that is fine, high-minded, and noble, and he acted up to this ideal even to the very letter. He had a most brilliant imagination, but a total want of worldly wisdom. I have seen nothing like him, and never shall again, I am certain. I never can forget the night that his poor wife rushed into my room at Pisa, with a face as pale as marble, and terror impressed on her brow, demanding, with all the tragic impetuosity of grief and alarm, where was her husband? Vain were all our efforts to calm her; a desperate sort of courage seemed to give her energy to confront the horrible truth that awaited her; it was the courage of despair. I have seen nothing in tragedy or on the stage so powerful, or so affecting, as her appearance; and it often presents itself to my memory. I knew nothing then of the catastrophe, but the vividness of her terror communicated itself to me, and I feared the worst,—which fears were, alas! too soon fearfully realized.”

  The qualities that struck any one newly introduced to Shelley, were,—First, a gentle and cordial goodness that animated his intercourse with warm affection and helpful sympathy. The other, the eagerness and ardour with which he was attached to the cause of human happiness and improvement; and the fervent eloquence with which he discussed subjects. His conversation was marked by its happy abundance, and the beautiful language with which he clothed his poetic ideas and philosophical notions. To defecate life of its misery and its evil was the ruling passion of his soul: he dedicated to it every power of his mind, every pulsation of his heart. He looked on political freedom as the direct agent to affect the happiness of mankind; and thus any new-sprung hope of liberty inspired a joy and an exultation more intense than he could have felt for any personal advantage.

  Possessing one of the most richly gifted minds ever framed by Providence to adorn and bless the world, and a heart whose sympathies comprehended all nature and mankind in the broad sphere of its love, he was still the most unpopular poet of his time—although he indicated, perhaps, more than any other, the tendencies of its imaginative literature, and expressed with more fulness, precision, and beauty, the subtle spirituality of its tone of thought. His character and his writings were elaborately misrepresented. Persons infinitely inferior to him, we will not say in genius, but in honesty, in benevolence, in virtue, in the practice of those duties of love and self-sacrifice which religion enjoins, still contrived to experience for him a mingled feeling of pity and aversion, unexampled even in the annals of the Pharisees. The same sympathizing apologists for the infirmities of genius, who shed tears and manufactured palliatives for Burns and Byron, fell back on the rigor and ice of their morality when they mentioned the name of Shelley. His adversaries were often in ludicrous moral contrast to himself. Venal politicians, fattening on public plunder, represented themselves as shocked by his theories of government. Roués were apprehensive that his refined notions of marriage would encourage libertinism. Smooth, practical atheists preached morality and religion to him from quarterly reviews, and defamed him with an arrogant stupidity, and a sneaking injustice, unparalleled in the effronteries and fooleries of criticism. That pure and pious poet, Thomas Moore, conceived it incumbent on himself to warn his immaculate friend Lord Byron, from being led astray by Shelley’s principles…. Men who could not write a single sentence unstained with malignity, selfishness or some other deadly sin, gravely rebuked him for infidelity, and volunteered their advice as to the manner by which he might become a bad christian and a good hypocrite. But Shelley happened to be an honest man as well as a poet, and was better contented with proscription, however severe, than with infamy, however splendid. This was a peculiarity of his disposition which made his conduct so enigmatical to the majority of his enemies.

  Can we imagine the case of an angel touched by lunacy? Have we ever seen the spectacle of a human intellect, exquisite by its functions of creation, yet in one chamber of its shadowy house already ruined before the light of manhood had cleansed its darkness? Such as angel, such a man—if ever such there were—such a lunatic angel, such a ruined man, was Shelley whilst yet standing on the earliest threshold of life…. Something of a similar effect arises to myself when reviewing the general abstract of Shelley’s life—so brief, so full of agitation, so full of strife. When one thinks of the early misery which he suffered, and of the insolent infidelity which, being yet so young, he wooed with a lover’s passion, then the darkness of midnight begins to form a deep, impenetrable background, upon which the phantasmagoria of all that is to come may arrange itself in troubled phosphoric streams, and in sweeping processions of woe. Yet, again, when one recurs to his gracious nature, his fearlessness, his truth, his purity from all fleshliness of appetite, his freedom from vanity, his diffusive love and tenderness, suddenly out of the darkness reveals itself a morning of May, forests and thickets of roses advance to the foreground, and from the midst of them looks out “the eternal child,” cleansed from his sorrow, radiant with joy, having power given him to forget the misery which he suffered, power given him to forget the misery which he caused, and leaning with his heart upon that dove-like faith against which his erring intellect had rebelled.

  Innocent and careless as a boy, he possessed all the delicate feelings of a gentleman, all the discrimination of a scholar, and united, in just degrees, the ardor of the poet with the patience and forbearance of the philosopher. His generosity and charity went far beyond those of any man (I believe) at present in existence. He was never known to speak evil of any enemy, unless that enemy had done some grievous injustice to another; and he divided his income of only one thousand pounds with the fallen and the afflicted. This is the man against whom such clamors have been raised by the religious and the loyal, and by those who live and lap under their tables.

  Shelley, indeed, was a good and noble creature. He had, spite of his skepticism, clearly and luminously stamped on his front the highest marks of a Christian; for the grand distinction appointed by Christ was—love. Shelley was a Christian in spite of himself. We learn from all who knew him that the Bible was his most favorite book. He venerated the character of Christ, and no man more fully carried out his precepts. His delight was to do good, to comfort and assist the poor. It was his zeal for truth and for the good of mankind which led him, in his indignation against those who oppressed them and imposed upon them, to leap too far in his attack on those enemies, and pass the borders which divide truth from error. For his conscientious opinion he sacrificed ease, honor, the world’s esteem, fortune, and friendship. Never was there so generous a friend, so truly and purely poetical a nature. Others are poets in their books and closets; the poet’s soul in him was the spirit of all hours and all occasions.

  His features were small—the upper part of his face not strictly regular—the eyes unusually prominent, too much so for beauty. His mouth was moulded after the finest modelling of Greek art, and wore an habitual expression of benevolence, and when he smiled, his smile irradiated his whole countenance. His hands were thin, and expressed feeling to the fingers’ ends;… his hair, profuse, silken, and naturally curling, was at a very early period interspersed with gray…. He did not look so tall as he was, being nearly five feet eleven, for his shoulders were a little bent by study… owing to his being near-sighted, and leaning over his books, and which increased the narrowness of his chest.

  Shelley, when he died, was in his thirtieth year. His figure was tall and slight, and his constitution consumptive. He was subject to violent spasmodic pains, which would sometimes force him to lie on the ground till they were over; but he had always a kind word to give to those about him, when his pangs allowed him to speak…. Though well-turned, his shoulders were bent a little, owing to premature thought and trouble. The same causes had touched his hair with gray; and though his habits of temperance and exercise gave him a remarkable degree of strength, it is not supposed that he could have lived many years…. His eyes were large and animated, with a dash of wildness in them; his face small, but well-shaped, particularly his mouth and chin, the turn of which was very sensitive and graceful. His complexion was naturally fair and delicate, with a color in the cheeks. He had brown hair which, though tinged with gray, surmounted his face well, being inconsiderable in quantity, and tending to a curl. His side-face upon the whole was deficient in strength, and his features would not have told well in a bust; but when fronting and looking at you attentively, his aspect had a certain seraphical character that would have suited John the Baptist, or the angel whom Milton describes as holding a reed “tipt with fire.”

  Shelley’s figure was tall and almost unnaturally attenuated, so as to bend to the earth like a plant that had been deprived of its vital air; his features had an unnatural sharpness, and an unhealthy paleness, like a flower that has been kept from the light of day; his eyes had an almost superhuman brightness, and his voice a preternatural elevation of pitch and shrillness of tone;—all which peculiarities probably arose from some accidental circumstances connected with his early nurture and bringing up.

  Both in appearance and in manners Shelley was the perfect gentleman.

  Brown’s four novels, Schiller’s “Robbers,” and Goethe’s “Faust,” were, of all the works with which he was familiar, those which took the deepest root in his mind, and had the strongest influence in the formation of his character. He was an assiduous student of the great classical poets, and among these his favourite heroines were Nausicaa and Antigone. I do not remember that he greatly admired any of our old English poets, excepting Shakspeare and Milton. He devotedly admired Wordsworth and Coleridge, and in a minor degree Southey: these had great influence on his style, and Coleridge especially on his imagination; but admiration is one thing and assimilation is another; and nothing so blended itself with the structure of his interior mind as the creations of Brown. Nothing stood so clearly before his thoughts as a perfect combination of the purely ideal and possibly real, as Constantia Dudley…. He had a prejudice against theatres which I took some pains to overcome. I induced him one evening to accompany me to a representation of the “School for Scandal.” When, after the scenes which exhibited Charles Surface in his jollity, the scene returned, in the fourth act, to Joseph’s library, Shelley said to me,—“I see the purpose of this comedy. It is to associate virtue with bottles and glasses, and villainy with books.” I had great difficulty to make him stay to the end. He often talked of “the withering and perverting spirit of comedy.” I do not think he ever went to another.

  After the fire was well kindled we repeated the ceremony of the previous day; and more wine was poured over Shelley’s dead body than he had consumed during his life. This with the oil and salt made the yellow flames glisten and quiver. The heat from the sun and fire was so intense that the atmosphere was tremulous and wavy. The corpse fell open and the heart was laid bare. The frontal bone of the skull, where it had been struck with the mattock, fell off; and, as the back of the head rested on the redhot bottom bars of the furnace, the brains literally seethed, bubbled, and boiled, as in a cauldron, for a very long time. Byron could not face this scene, he withdrew to the beach and swam off to the Bolivar. Leigh Hunt remained in the carriage. The fire was so fierce as to produce a white heat on the iron, and to reduce its contents to grey ashes. The only portions that were not consumed were some fragments of bones, the jaw, and the skull; but what surprised us all was that the heart remained entire. In snatching this relic from the fiery furnace, my hand was severely burnt; and had any one seen me do the act I should have been put into quarantine.

  At the commencement of Michaelmas term, that is, at the end of October, in the year 1810, I happened one day to sit next to a freshman at dinner; it was his first appearance in hall. His figure was slight, and his aspect remarkably youthful, even at our table, where all were very young. He seemed thoughtful and absent. He ate little, and had no acquaintance with any one…. His figure was slight and fragile, and yet his bones and joints were large and strong. He was tall, but he stooped so much, that he seemed of a low stature. His clothes were expensive, and made according to the most approved mode of the day; but they were tumbled, rumpled, unbrushed. His gestures were abrupt, and sometimes violent, occasionally even awkward, yet more frequently gentle and graceful. His complexion was delicate and almost feminine, of the purest red and white; yet he was tanned and freckled by exposure to the sun, having passed the autumn, as he said, in shooting. His features, his whole face, and particularly his head, were, in fact, unusually small; yet the last appeared of a remarkable bulk, for his hair was long and bushy, and in fits of absence, and in the agonies (if I may use the word) of anxious thought, he often rubbed it fiercely with his hands, or passed his fingers quickly through his locks unconsciously, so that it was singularly wild and rough…. His features were not symmetrical (the mouth, perhaps, excepted), yet was the effect of the whole extremely powerful. They breathed an animation, a fire, an enthusiasm, a vivid and preternatural intelligence, that I never met with in any other countenance. Nor was the moral expression less beautiful than the intellectual; for there was a softness, a delicacy, a gentleness, and especially (though this will surprise many) that air of profound religious veneration, that characterises the best works, and chiefly the frescoes (and into these they infused their whole souls), of the great masters of Florence and of Rome.

  The ashes of Shelley were deposited in the Protestant burial ground at Rome, by the side of his son William, and of his brother-poet Keats. An inscription in Latin, simply setting forth the facts, was written by Leigh Hunt, and Mr. Trelawny added a few lines from Shakspeare’s “Tempest” (one of Shelley’s favorite plays):—

	“Nothing of him that doth fade,
	But doth suffer a sea-change
	Into something rich and strange.”

The same gentleman also planted eight cypresses round the spot, of which seven were flourishing in 1844, and probably are still. And so the sea and the earth closed over one who was great as a poet, and still greater as a philanthropist; and of whom it may be said, that his wild, spiritual character, seems to have fitted him for being thus snatched from life under circumstances of mingled terror and beauty, while his powers were yet in their spring freshness, and age had not come to render the ethereal body decrepit, or to wither the heart which could not be consumed by fire.

  Shelley was a tall man,—nearly, if not quite, five feet ten in height. He was peculiarly slender, and … his chest had palpably enlarged after the usual growing period. He retained the same kind of straitness in the perpendicular outline on each side of him; his shoulders were the reverse of broad, but yet they were not sloping, and a certain squareness in them was naturally incompatible with anything feminine in his appearance. To his last days he still suffered his chest to collapse; but it was less a stoop than a peculiar mode of holding the head and shoulders,—the face thrown a little forward, and the shoulders slightly elevated; though the whole attitude below the shoulders, when standing, was unusually upright, and had the appearance of litheness and activity…. He had an oval face and delicate features, not unlike those given to him in the well-known miniature. His forehead was high. His fine, dark brown hair, when not cut close, disposed itself in playful and very beautiful curls over his brows and round the back of his neck. He had brown eyes, with a color in his cheek “like a girl’s;” but as he grew older, his complexion bronzed. So far the reality agrees with the current descriptions; nevertheless they omit material facts. The outline of the features and face possessed a firmness and hardness entirely inconsistent with a feminine character. The outline was sharp and firm; the markings distinct, and indicating an energetic physique. The outline of the bone was distinctly perceptible at the temples, on the bridge of the nose, at the back portion of the cheeks, and in the jaw, and the artist could trace the principal muscles of the face. The beard, also, although the reverse of strong, was clearly marked, especially about the chin.

  The lovers of Shelley as a man and a poet have done what they could to palliate his conduct in this matter. But a question of morals, as between man and society, cannot be reduced to any individual standard however exalted. Our partiality for the man only heightens our detestation of the error. The greater Shelley’s genius, the nobler his character and impulses, so much the more startling is the warning. If we make our own inclinations the measure of what is right, we must be the sterner in curbing them. A woman’s heart is too delicate a thing to serve as a fulcrum for the lever with which a man would overturn any system, however conventional. The misery of the elective-affinity scheme is that men are not chemical substances, and that in nine cases in ten the force of the attraction works more constantly and lasting upon the woman than the man.

  Poor Shelley—gentle, tender, ethereal, and aspiring, sober and abstemious, a pale student, an abstract and highly metaphysical thinker, delicate as a woman in his organization, sensitive as a woman in his sympathies, loathing all that was coarse and low with a woman’s shrinking, detesting all field-sports as barbarous and brutal.

  A more crystalline heart than Shelley’s has rarely throbbed in human bosom. He was incapable of an untruth, or of deceit in any form…. Shelley’s figure was a little above the middle height, slender, and of delicate construction, which appeared the rather from a lounging or waving manner in his gait, as though his frame was compounded barely of muscle and tendon; and that the power of walking was an achievement with him and not a natural habit. Yet I should suppose that he was not a valetudinarian, although that has been said of him on account of his spare and vegetable diet: for I have the remembrance of his scampering and bounding over the gorse-bushes on Hampstead Heath late one night,—now close upon us, and now shouting from the height like a wild school-boy. He was both an active and an enduring walker—feats which do not accompany an ailing and feeble constitution. His face was round, flat, pale, with small features; mouth beautifully shaped; hair bright brown and wavy; and such a pair of eyes as are rarely in the human or any other head,—intensely blue, with a gentle and lambent expression, yet wonderfully alert and engrossing; nothing appeared to escape his knowledge. Whatever peculiarity there might have been in Shelley’s religions faith, I have the best authority for believing that it was confined to the early period of his life. The practical result of its course of action, I am sure, had its source from the “Sermon on the Mount.” There is not one clause in that Divine code which his conduct towards his fellow mortals did not confirm and substantiate him to be—in action a follower of Christ.

  Of all the poets who have illustrated the Literature of England, there is no one whose life presents so many difficulties to the biographer as Percy Bysshe Shelley…. He was one of the most extraordinary men that ever walked the earth, so extraordinary, I think, that Shakespeare alone could have plucked out the heart of his mystery. He led at all times a dual life, and at most times a life of contradictions. To say that he was eccentric is to say nothing. He was as much out of place in this world as a being of another world would be, and he moved among its men and women like some strange creature of the elements. He neither understood himself, nor was understood by others, or at most by very few. The saintly Byron was warned against him by the clique in Murray’s back parlor; but Byron defended him—after he was dead. He had a passion for reforming the world, and the world never wants to be reformed. Of course, it was too strong for him—the many are always too strong for the one. He learned the lesson which he states so tersely:

	“Most wretched men
	Are cradled into poetry by wrong:
	They learn in suffering what they teach in song.”

  We must learn to think of Shelley not merely as gentle, dreamy, unworldly, imprudently disinterested, and ideally optimistic—though he was all this—but likewise as swift, prompt, resolute, irascible, strong-limbed and hardy, often very practical in his views of politics, and endowed with preternatural keenness of observation. There is but one formula for combining and harmonizing these apparent discrepancies: he was an elemental force whose essence is simplicity itself, but whose modes of operation are many and various. If we study the divers ways in which those who shared his society have striven to express that which they have felt to be inexpressible, we shall find that in the last analysis all amount to this.

	Hush! From the grave where I so oft
	Have stood, ’mid ruined Rome,
	I seem to hear a whisper soft
	Wafted across the foam;
	Bidding justest wrath be still,
	Good feel lovingly for ill,
	As exiles for rough paths that help them to their home.

  To prove that Shelley as a man was deficient in passion we need mention one incident only in his life. Some time after his separation from Harriett, he proposed that she should return to him and take up a place as a member of his household, not as his wife, but side by side with the friend for whom she had been abandoned, and who still shared his bed. This extraordinary proposal arose out of the most self-oblivious generosity, but what a commentary it affords on Shelley’s masculinity! The man who had no more acute sense than this implies of the beautiful relation of the sexes that is determined by healthy nature may have had the noblest heart, but he was deficient in one attribute. And the fractious men contemporary with him felt this in some uncertain way, though they could not realize it, and their slanderous accusations of licentiousness were the inapt and shameful speech in which their vague feeling expressed itself.

  Shelley, however free his theories, was a person on whose imagination a licentious image had never left a stain.

  Whilst Field Place and the Enthusiasts have committed indiscretions, that provoke remonstrance and demand correction, the extreme Shelleyan Socialists have placed his strongest title to social homage, on his courageous avowal of sentiments, that are unutterably distasteful to the great majority of conscientious and right-minded people. When a man is taken from the long roll of our mighty poets, and offered to the world’s admiration as a rare example of all the human virtues, it is well for people to examine the grounds of such extraordinary commendation. Now that “Queen Mab,” with its anti-matrimonial note, is put into the hands of our boys; now that “Laon and Cythna,” with its monstrous doctrine, is seen on our drawing-room tables; now that the author of so reprehensible a book is proclaimed a being of unqualified goodness, who, under auspicious circumstances, “Might have been the Saviour of the World,” it is time for the world to be told, that the recent efforts to win for Shelley a kind of regard, to which he is in no degree whatever entitled, are only part of a social movement, that, so far as the extreme Shelleyan Socialists are concerned, is a movement for the Abolition of Marriage,—in accordance with the spirit and purpose of his Social Philosophy.

  Mary Shelley returned to England in the autumn of 1823. On February 21, 1851, she died. Shelley’s son, Percy Florence, succeeded to the baronetcy on the death of his grandfather in April, 1844. In the monument, by Weekes, which Sir Percy and Lady Shelley have erected in the noble parish church of Christchurch, Hants, the feeling of Mary’s heart, confided to the pages of her journal after her husband’s death, is translated into monumental marble. In Boscombe Manor, Bournemouth, in an alcove devoted to that purpose, the portraits, relics, journals, note-books, and letters of Shelley and Mary, duly ordered by Lady Shelley’s hands, are preserved with love and reverence. The murmur of pine woods, and the resonance and silvery flash of the waves of our English sea, are near to solemnize and to gladden the heart.

  “Ariel;” “The Atheist;” “Glowry Scythrop;” “The Poet of Poets;” “The Snake.”

  What a set! what a world! is the exclamation that breaks from us as we come to an end of this history of “the occurrences of Shelley’s private life.” I used the French word bête for a letter of Shelley’s; for the world in which we find him I can only use another French word, sale. Godwin’s house of sordid horror, and Godwin preaching and holding the hat, and the green-spectacled Mrs. Godwin, and Hogg the faithful friend, and Hunt the Horace of this precious world, and, to go up higher, Sir Timothy Shelley, a great country gentleman, feeling himself safe while “the exalted mind of the Duke of Norfolk [the drinking Duke] protects me with the world,” and Lord Byron with his deep grain of coarseness and commonness, his affectation, his brutal selfishness—what a set!… Mrs. Shelley, after her marriage and during Shelley’s closing years, becomes attractive; up to her marriage her letters and journal do not please. Her ability is manifest, but she is not attractive. In the world discovered to us by Professor Dowden as surrounding Shelley up to 1817, the most pleasing figure is poor Fanny Godwin; after Fanny Godwin, the most pleasing figure is Harriet Shelley herself.

  Shelley’s moral character was really no better than Byron’s; but one was a cynic, and the other a sentimentalist who perhaps did not always carry his feelings into action. Without going back to Shelley’s former life, it is sufficient to study his relations to Emilia Viviani, to Jane Williams, and, indeed, to all the women whom he met frequently, or to read his poem, “Epipsychidion,” which inculcates the necessity of loving more than one woman in the interest of art and of the higher spiritual culture.

  What Shelley was at first he remained to the last: a beautiful, effeminate, arrogant boy—constitutionally indifferent to money, generous by impulse, self-indulgent by habit, ignorant to the end of all that it most behooves a responsible being to know, and so conceited that his ignorance was incurable; showing at every turn the most infallible sign of a feeble intellect, a belief in human perfectibility; and rushing at once to the conclusion, when he or others met with suffering, that some one, not the sufferer, was doing grievous wrong.

  He never could clearly realise the aspect which his relations with Mary bore to the world, who merely saw in him a married man who had deserted his wife and eloped with a girl of sixteen. He thought people should understand all he knew, and credit him with all he did not tell them; that they should sympathise and fraternise with him, and honour Mary the more, not the less, for what she had done and dared. Instead of this, the world accepted his family’s estimate of its unfortunate eldest son, and cut him.

  Few, perhaps, if any, think of Shelley as often as I do; and to me his whole personality seems the most spiritual and the most sympathetic of the age. The personality of Byron startles, captivates, entrances; he flashes by us like a meteor—lover, noble, man of pleasure and of the world, solitary and soldier by turns, and a great poet always, let the poetasters and sciolists of the moment say what they will in their efforts to decry and to deny him. Shelley’s has nothing of this dazzling and gorgeous romance, as he has nothing in his portraits of that haughty and fiery challenge which speaks in the pose of the head, and the glance of the eyes in every picture of Byron. Shelley’s eyes gaze outward with wistful, dreamy tenderness; they are the eyes of contemplative genius, the eyes which behold that which is not seen by the children of men. That sweetness and spirituality which are in his physiognomy characterize the fascination which his memory, like his verse, must exercise over any who can understand his soul. Nothing is more unfitting to him than those wranglings over his remains which are called studies of his life and letters. The solemnity and beauty of his death and burial should surely have secured him repose in his grave.

  He cursed his father, deceived his friend, and deserted his wife; yet every literary critic for sixty years has hesitated to call him a bad man. His poetry is full of a more subtle and perilous poison even than Byron’s; yet its latest editor has declared Shelley one who possessed the qualifications necessary for a saviour of the world.

  Proper critical appreciation of Shelley’s poetry, for example, does not involve any such reckless eulogy of Shelley’s character as has been the recent vogue in America and England. Charity covers faults, but it never lies about them or excuses them. Ethics draws no distinction between the wife-murderer who cleans stables or keeps a dive, and the wife-murderer who writes a “Prometheus Unbound,” or an “Ode to a Skylark.” The right of the aristocrat is not available as a shield against the operation of moral responsibility. The glamour of genius cannot blind the eyes of God.

	At Shelley’s birth,
	The Lark, dawn-spirit, with an anthem loud
	Rose from the dusky earth
	To tell it to the Cloud,
	That, like a flower night-folded in the gloom,
	Burst into morning bloom.
	At Shelley’s death,
	The Sea, that deemed him an immortal, saw
	A god’s extinguished breath,
	And landward, as in awe,
	Upbore him to the altar whence he came,
	And the rekindling flame.

  Shelley was nineteen. He was not a youth, but a man. He had never had any youth. He was an erratic and fantastic child during eighteen years, then he stepped into manhood, as one steps over a door-sill. He was curiously mature at nineteen in his ability to do independent thinking on the deep questions of life and to arrive at sharply definite decisions regarding them, and stick to them—stick to them and stand by them at cost of bread, friendships, esteem, respect, and approbation. For the sake of his opinions he was willing to sacrifice all these valuable things, and did sacrifice them; and went on doing it, too, when he could at any moment have made himself rich and supplied himself with friends and esteem by compromising with his father, at the moderate expense of throwing overboard one or two indifferent details of his cargo of principles.

  There is a clique which had made what Mr. Rudyard Kipling would term “a little tin god” of Shelley; and the members of this absurd coterie, in affecting to raise their idol above ordinary human nature, really do his fame nothing but great disservice in depicting him as what that very caustic and sarcastic lady Miss Clairmont termed “an insipid idiot.”

  He was, in the obvious sense of the word, a visionary, and his violent antagonisms were far more caused by his disgust with the contact of reality than by any genuine appreciation of the relative values of good and evil. He made no sane and conscious effort to understand things. He did not know how to strike injustice in its weakest part, or how best to help on the down-trodden. He wasted three-fourths of his energy on side-issues. He was always taking seriously the wrong people and the wrong ideas. He held Harriet Westbrook for a victim of social oppression, whereas she was merely the average pretty girl in search of “bread-and-cheese and kisses.” He accepted Mary Godwin as a sort of female seraph, and this essentially vulgar-souled, small-minded, sentimental poseuse exploited him fifty times more ruthlessly than the poor little Methodist. This did not in the least prevent him from a still wider, if only momentary, aberration over the lovely nullity of Emilia Viviani, the attitudinising Italian girl from whom he was inveigled by the envious Mary, resolute to retain the monopoly of exploitation which she had won by the ruin of a better woman than herself. Intellectually or sexually—it makes little difference which—Shelley was the born child of illusion. To the very last he looked upon Godwin—Godwin, the most sordid of mediocrities—as a great thinker, and his conception of Byron as a supreme artist is one of the gems of criticism. Shelley’s true brother is Blake, the inspired Cockney.

Necessity of Atheism, 1811

  At a meeting of the Master and Fellows held this day, it was determined that Thomas Jefferson Hogg, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, commoners, be publicly expelled for contumaciously refusing to answer questions proposed to them, and for also repeatedly declining to disavow a publication entitled “The Necessity of Atheism.”

  The importance of “The Necessity of Atheism” is rather biographical and illustrative than literary. It is true the little tract is put together cleverly, and apparently with perfect good faith; but from a strictly literary standpoint it could not be said that an irreparable loss would be sustained by its destruction. None the less its recovery seems to me a matter for great congratulation. So much hung upon this tract,—Shelley’s expulsion and all its momentous issues,—so much has been said and written about it,—that to have it before us exactly as it issued from the Press at Worthing and was offered to the Oxford worthies and undergraduates was highly desirable.

  His “Essay on Christianity” is full of noble views, some of which are held at the present day by some of the most earnest believers. At what time of his life it was written we are not informed; but it seems such as would insure his acceptance with any company of intelligent and devout Unitarians.

Queen Mab, 1813

  An extravagant expression of his zeal for the improvement of the world, full of vague fantastic notions, but also, like all his poems, replete with delicate, lofty, and brilliant ideas. The book, published by a treacherous bookseller against the poet’s wish, was condemned. Shelley had excited persecution specially by the notes he had added to the text. These notes, which contain an argument against Christianity, revealed great youthful incompetence; he forgot that it would be simple folly to deny the effects of Christianity in the history of the world…. It does not belong to a particular class; it is a series of sketches, lyrical, descriptive, polemic, didactic, in changing metres.

  We cannot include “Queen Mab,” in spite of its sonorous rhetoric and fervid declamation, in the canon of his masterpieces. It had a succès de scandale on its first appearance, and fatally injured Shelley’s reputation. As a work of art it lacks maturity and permanent vitality.

  The poem is such a marvel as the production of youth of eighteen, it illustrates so fully the starting point and direction of Shelley’s thought, it contains so many ideas which were his controlling mental qualities, it is on the whole so intensely Shelleyan, that I do not see why it cannot be regarded as one of his characteristic poems.

  Ridiculed in so far as it was not ignored at the time of its appearance, it has in later times and in some quarters been absurdly overpraised; but, with all its defects and excesses of youth, an impartial criticism can hardly hesitate to pronounce it the most striking and powerful work of imagination, and by far the richest in promise, that has ever sprung from the brain of a poet who had not yet passed his twentieth year.

  Despite the metaphysical speculations which disfigure “Queen Mab,” passages of extraordinary beauty give no uncertain promise of the coming glories.

  By it Shelley was long most widely known, and it remains one of the most striking of his works in popular apprehension…. The radical character of “Queen Mab,” which was made a part of the evidence against his character, on the occasion of the trial which resulted in his being deprived of the custody of his children by Lord Eldon, was a main element in the contemporary obloquy in which his name was involved in England, though very few persons could ever have read the poem then; but it may be doubted whether in the end it did not help his fame by the fascination it exercises over a certain class of minds in the first stages of social and intellectual revolt or angry unrest so widespread in this century.

Alastor, 1815

  In “Alastor” we at last have the genuine, the immortal Shelley. It may indeed be said that the poem, though singularly lovely and full—charged with meaning, has a certain morbid vagueness of tone, a want of firm human body: and this is true enough. Nevertheless, “Alastor” is proportionately worthy of the author of “Prometheus Unbound” and “The Cenci,” the greatest Englishman of his age.

  The first of his poems, which really was worthy of his powers—“Alastor”—was written in the first year of this union. It is the first real indication of the new voice which had awakened in English literature. It was like nothing else then existing; nor do we know to what to compare it in the past. Shelley had no story to tell, no character to disclose; his was pure poetry, music such as charmed the ear and filled the mouth with sweetness. Never was poet so eager to teach, or with so many wild assertions to make, or so strong a conviction of the possibility of influencing humanity and changing the world; but the soul of his poetry was the same as that of music, not definite, scarcely articulate, only melodious, ineffably sweet.

The Revolt of Islam, 1817

  The Poem which I now present to the world is an attempt from which I scarcely dare to expect success, and in which a writer of established fame might fail without disgrace. It is an experiment on the temper of the public mind as to how far a thirst for a happier condition of moral and political society survives, among the enlightened and refined, the tempests which have shaken the age in which we live. I have sought to enlist the harmony of metrical language, the ethereal combinations of the fancy, the rapid and subtle transitions of human passion, all those elements which essentially compose a poem, in the cause of a liberal and comprehensive morality; and in the view of kindling within the bosoms of my readers a virtuous enthusiasm for those doctrines of liberty and justice, that faith and hope in something good, which neither violence, nor misrepresentation, nor prejudice, can ever totally extinguish among mankind.

  Whatever its imperfections of plan and execution, it is not alone a marvellous well-head of poetry, but, in conception and tone, and in its womanly ideal embodied in Cythna, a remarkably original work: it was greatly unlike any poem that had preceded (so far as I know), and even the demon of imitation has left it solitary.

  Even in its amended form it probably presents a better key to the poet’s wild opinions than any other of his works. It is a protest against the ordinary usages of society, which Shelley calls “custom.” Cythna and Laon declare war against this custom. The reader finds some difficulty in following the fertile imagination of the poet through the phases of alternate suffering and victory which the hero and the heroine experience. He fails to comprehend the means which enabled Cythna to enthrone herself as the Goddess of Liberty, or to appreciate the causes which produced the sudden downfall of her authority. Her flight with Laon on the black Tartarian steed is absurdly unnatural; and her subsequent conduct, or the narrative of it, is grossly indecent. Custom, in short, or, to speak more correctly, the custom which had made matrimony a necessity, was the tyranny against which Shelley’s eloquence is directed, and the poem is thus fitly dedicated, in some of the most beautiful verses Shelley ever wrote, to the lady who, for his sake, had broken the bands of custom.

  The storms are even better than the sunsets and dawns. The finest is at the beginning of the “Revolt of Islam.” It might be a description of one of Turner’s storm-skies. The long trains of tremulous mist that precede the tempest, the cleft in the storm-clouds, and seen through it, high above, the space of blue sky fretted with fair clouds, the pallid semicircle of the moon with mist on its upper horn, the flying rack of clouds below the serene spot—all are as Turner saw them; but painting cannot give what Shelley gives—the growth and changes of the storm.

  As a poet, in richness of language, brilliancy of fancy, and natural melody of versification, Shelley stands second among English poets only to Shakespeare. Yet so wedded was he to the wilfulness of his own imagination, so negligent to the sympathies of his readers, and, consequently, of the true ends of the art of poetry, that, beyond the circle of his ardent admirers, his more ambitious compositions have made little impression on the mind of the nation. For one reader of “The Revolt of Islam,” there are ten thousand readers of “Marmion.”

  “The Revolt of Islam” is more genuinely and intensely lyrical in its character than is any other poem in which the stanza is used. The poem is the expression of a lofty, aspiring, but feverish and much-bewildered spirit, who, at times, brings out of the instrument employed all its capabilities of “brilliancy and magnificence of sound.” But the reader of “The Revolt of Islam” cannot but feel that the instrument was constructed for the expression of other states and attitudes of mind and feeling than are generally exhibited in this poem.

Julian and Maddalo, 1818

  Is a Conversation or Tale, full of that thoughtful and romantic humanity, but rendered perplexing and unattractive by that veil of shadowy or of glittering obscurity, which distinguished Mr. Shelley’s writings. The depth and tenderness of his feelings seems often to have interfered with the expression of them, as the sight becomes blind with tears. A dull, waterish vapour, clouds the aspect of his philosophical poetry, like that mysterious gloom which he has himself described as hanging over the Medusa’s Head of Leonardo de Vinci.

  The familiarity of “Julian and Maddalo” is almost as foreign to that of “Beppo” as to that of the “Idiot Boy.” It is a high-bred, poetic familiarity, equally remote from the cynicism verging on vulgarity of the one, and from the rusticity verging on ugliness of the other; a manner happily mediating between the abstract intensity of Shelley’s ordinary verse and the rich concrete talk of Byron, under the “intoxication” of which it arose.

Prometheus Unbound, 1819

  PROMETHEUS UNBOUND. | A Lyrical Drama | in four acts | with other Poems | by | Percy Bysshe Shelley | Audisne hæc amphiarae, sub terram abdite? | London | C. and J. Ollier Vere Street Bond Street | 1820.

  To our apprehensions, Prometheus is little else but absolute raving; and were we not assured to the contrary, we should take it for granted that the author was a lunatic—as his principles are ludicrously wicked, and his poetry a mélange of nonsense, cockneyism, poverty, and pedantry.

	Shelley styles his new poem “Prometheus Unbound,”
	And ’tis like to remain so while time circles round;
	For surely an age would be spent in the finding
	A reader so weak as to pay for the binding!

  In short, it is quite impossible that there should exist a more pestiferous mixture of blasphemy, sedition, and sensuality, than is visible in the whole structure and strain of this poem—which, nevertheless, and notwithstanding all the detestation its principles excite, must and will be considered by all that read it attentively, as abounding in poetical beauties of the highest order—as presenting many specimens not easily to be surpassed, of the moral sublime of eloquence—as overflowing with pathos, and most magnificent in description. Where can be found a spectacle more worthy of sorrow than such a man performing and glorying in the performance of such things?

  In Mr. Shelley’s poetry, all is brilliance, vacuity, and confusion. We are dazzled by the multitude of words which sound as if they denoted something very grand or splendid: fragments of images pass in crowds before us; but when the procession has gone by, and the tumult of it is over, not a trace of it remains upon the memory. The mind, fatigued and perplexed, is mortified by the consciousness that its labour has not been rewarded by the acquisition of a single distinct conception; the ear, too, is dissatisfied; for the rhythm of the verse is often harsh and unmusical; and both the ear and the understanding are disgusted by new and uncouth words, and by the awkward and intricate construction of the sentences. The predominating characteristic of Mr. Shelley’s poetry, however, is its frequent and total want of meaning.

  It contains passages of the sublimest grandeur, and the most wonderful richness of imagination; but the effect of the whole is so vaporous and unsubstantial, the images which he evokes are so unsolid, that not even the unsurpassable purity of the diction, and the unequalled variety of the lyric music, can preserve us from weariness and a painful sense of dreamy confusion.

  “Prometheus Unbound” is the most ambitious of his poems. But it was written too fast. It was written, too, in a state of over-excitement, produced by the intoxication of an Italian spring, operating upon a morbid system, and causing it to flush over with hectic and half-delirious joy. Above all, it was written twenty years too soon, ere his views had consolidated, and ere his thought and language were cast in their final mould. Hence, on the whole, it is a strong and beautiful disease. Its language is loose and luxuriant as a “Moenad’s hair;” its imagery is wilder and less felicitous than in some of his other poems. The thought is frequently drowned in a diarrhœa of words; its dialogue is heavy and prolix; and lts lyrics have more flow of sound than beauty of image or depth of sentiment;—it is a false gallop rather than a great kindling race. Compared with the “Prometheus” of Æschylus, Shelley’s poem is wordy and diffuse; lacks unity and simplicity; above all, lacks whatever human interest is in the Grecian work. Nor has it the massive strength, the piled-up gold and gems, the barbaric but kingly magnificence of Keats’ “Hyperion.”

  The greatest and most attractive of all Shelley’s longer poems. That drama is from beginning to end a great lyrical poem, or I should rather say a congeries of lyrics, in which perhaps more than anywhere else Shelley’s lyrical power has highest soared.

  Of all Shelley’s works, the “Prometheus Unbound” is that which combines the greatest amount of individual power and peculiarity. There is an airy grandeur about it, reminding one of the vast masses of cloud scattered about in broken, yet magnificently suggestive forms, all over the summer sky after a thunderstorm. The fundamental ideas are grand, the superstructure, in many parts, so ethereal, that one hardly knows whether he is gazing on towers of solid masonry, rendered dim and unsubstantial by intervening vapour, or upon the golden turrets of cloudland, themselves born of the mist which surrounds them with a halo of glory.

  The “Prometheus Unbound” gives perhaps the most perfect expression anywhere to be found of the thought and passion of a great period of English poetry. It fully initiates the earnest student into the ideals of the Revolution—those ideals which, in their development, are determining the trend of our modern life. There is no need to speak of the imaginative fervor and pure lyricism of the drama: few English poems can be more effective to quicken and train æsthetic sensitiveness. So far as difficulty is concerned, the student who can understand the “Faery Queene” can understand the “Prometheus Unbound.”… The supreme æsthetic glory of the “Prometheus Unbound” is not its nature-descriptions nor its color-treatment, but its music. Never did melody so enfold the spirit of a poet. The form is transparent and supple as clear flame. Blank verse rises into the long, passionate swing of the anapæst, or is broken by the flute-like notes of short trochaic lines, or relieved by the half-lyrical effect of rhymed endings. The verse lends itself with equal beauty to the grandeur of sustained endurance, to the passionate yearning of love, to severe philosophic inquiry, to the ethereal notes of spirit-voices dying on the wind. The variety of metres is marvellous. Thirty-six distinct verse-forms are to be found, besides the blank verse. These forms are usually simple; but at times the versification-scheme is as complex as that of the most elaborate odes of Dryden or Collins. Yet the artificial and labored beauty of the eighteenth century verse is replaced in Shelley by song spontaneous as that of his own skylark. The conventions, the external barriers of poetry, are completely swept away by the new democracy.

  In the seventy-six years that have passed since Shelley conceived his “Prometheus,” as he sat gazing over the sombre ruins of the Campagna, no one has ever ventured into that seventh heaven of invention.

  “Prometheus Unbound” best combines the various elements of Shelley’s genius in their most complete expression, and unites harmoniously his lyrically creative power of imagination and his “passion for reforming the world.” It is the fruit of an outburst of poetic energy under the double stimulus of his enthusiastic Greek studies, begun under Peacock’s influence, and of his delight in the beauty of Italy, whither he had removed for health and rest. It marks his full mastery of his powers.

The Cenci, 1819

  THE CENCI. | A Tragedy, | in five acts. | By Percy B. Shelley. | Italy. | Printed for C. and J. Ollier | Vere Street, Bond Street. | London. | 1819.

  I have read the tragedy of “Cenci,” and am glad to see Shelley at last descending to what really passes among human creatures. The story is certainly an unfortunate one, but the execution gives me a new idea of Shelley’s powers. There are passages of great strength, and the character of Beatrice is certainly excellent.

  This is evidence enough that if Shelley had lived the “Cenci” would not now be the one great play written in the great manner of Shakespeare’s men that our literature has seen since the time of these. The proof of power is here as sure and as clear as in Shelley’s lyric work; he has shown himself, what the dramatist must needs be, as able to face the light of hell as of heaven, to handle the fires of evil as to brighten the beauties of things. This latter work indeed he preferred, and wrought at it with all the grace and force of thought and word which give to all his lyrics the light of a divine life; but his tragic truth and excellence are as certain and absolute as the sweetness and the glory of his songs. The mark of his hand, the trick of his voice, we can always recognise in their clear character and individual charm; but the range is various from the starry and heavenly heights to the tender and flowering fields of the world wherein he is god and lord: with here such a flower to gather as the spinners’ song of Beatrice, and here such a heaven to ascend as the Prologue to Hellas, which the zealous love of Mr. Garnett for Shelley has opened for us to enter and possess for ever; where the pleadings of Christ and Satan alternate as the rising and setting of stars in the abyss of luminous sound and sonorous light.

  Is not only a poem of great beauty, but a drama of true power, abnormally revolting in its theme, but singularly pure and delicate in treatment.

  The greatest tragedy composed in English since the death of Shakespere.

  Admiration is often expressed of his dramatic ability, and “The Cenci” has been spoken of as the greatest English tragedy since Shakespeare. In truth there seems to be little that is dramatic in it. It is a nightmare of a drama. We are plunged at once into the deepest gloom, and kept at the highest pitch of excitement all through till the final catastrophe. There is no relief except in the very last half-dozen lines, when we know that the women are to be executed. In rapidity of action “The Cenci” much resembles “Macbeth,” but what a contrast in other respects! Every one must feel the extreme beauty of the scene where Duncan is riding towards the castle and is met by Lady Macbeth, and Banquo tells us of the “temple-haunting martlet,” and how it is increased by contrast with the horrors that are so soon to follow. The mutual relations of Beatrice and Count Cenci are wonderfully depicted, and Beatrice’s character skilfully developed; but who could suppose that such a perfect monster as Cenci ever existed? His utter shamelessness and selfishness are superhuman. We feel, too, the fatal want of humour, but we are always on the solid ground, the sentiments are obvious enough, and the play had consequently some success, being the only one of Shelley’s poems that reached a second edition in his lifetime.

  The greatest English dramatic poem of the century.

Adonais, 1821

  ADONAIS | An Elegy on the Death of John Keats, | Author of Endymion, Hyperion, etc. | By | Percy B. Shelley | Αστήρ πρὶν μνὲ ἐλαμπες ενι ζῶοισιν εῶος. | Νυν δε θανῶν, λαμπεις ἔσπερος εν φθίμενοις. | Plato. | Pisa | With the Types of Didot | MDCCCXXI.

  There is much in the “Adonais” which seems now more applicable to Shelley himself, than to the young and gifted poet whom he mourned. The poetic view he takes of death, and the lofty scorn he displays towards his calumniators, are as a prophecy on his own destiny, when received among immortal names, and the poisonous breath of critics has vanished into emptiness before the fame he inherits.

  There is, in reading his poem, a feeling of deeper sorrow for the poet that wrote than for him that was lamented.

  An elegy only equalled in our language by “Lycidas,” and in the point of passionate eloquence even superior to Milton’s youthful lament for his friend.

  As an utterance of abstract pity and indignation, “Adonaïs” is unsurpassed in literature; with its hurrying train of beautiful spectral images, and the irresistible current and thrilling modulation of its verse, it is perhaps the most perfect and sympathetic effect of Shelley’s art; while its strain of transcendental consolation for mortal loss contains the most lucid exposition of his philosophy. But of Keats as he actually lived the elegy presents no feature, while the general impression it conveys of his character and fate is erroneous.

  “Adonais,” perhaps the most widely read of the longer poems of Shelley, owes something of its charm to the fact noted by Mrs. Shelley…. The elegy has contributed much to the feeling that links these two poets in one memory, though in life they were rather pleasant than intimate friends.

General

  There is no Original Poetry in this volume: [“Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire”]: there is nothing in it but downright scribble. It is really annoying to see the waste of paper which is made by such persons as the putters-together of these 64 pages. There is, however, one consolation for the critics who are obliged to read all this sort of trash. It is that the crime of publishing is generally followed by condign punishment in the shape of bills from the stationer and printer, and in the chilling tones of the bookseller, when, to the questions of the anxious rhymer how the book sells, he answers that not more than a half-a-dozen copies have been sold.

  I can no more understand Shelley than you can. His poetry is “thin-sown with profit or delight.”… For his theories and nostrums, they are oracular enough, but I either comprehend ’em not, or there is “miching malice” and mischief in ’em; but, for the most part, ringing with their own emptiness. Hazlitt said well of ’em, “Many are the wiser or better for reading Shakspeare, but nobody was ever wiser or better for reading Shelley.”

  Mr. Shelley’s style is to poetry what astrology is to natural science—a passionate dream, a straining after impossibilities, a record of fond conjectures, a confused embodying of vague abstractions,—a fever of the soul, thirsting and craving after what it cannot have, indulging its love of power and novelty at the expense of truth and nature, associating ideas by contraries, and wasting great powers by their application to unattainable objects.

  The disappearance of Shelley from the world, seems, like the tropical setting of that luminary (aside I hate that word) to which his poetical genius can alone be compared with reference to the companions of his day, to have been followed by instant darkness and owl-season; whether the vociferous Darley is to be the comet, or tender full-faced L. E. L. the milk-and-watery moon of our darkness, are questions for the astrologers: if I were the literary weather-guesser for 1825 I would safely prognosticate fog, rain, blight in due succession for its dullard months.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley was a man of far superior powers to Keats. He had many of the faculties of a great poet. He was, however, we verily believe it now, scarcely in his right mind.

  Shelley is one of the best artists of us all: I mean in workmanship of style.

  The strong imagination of Shelley made him an idolater in his own despite. Out of the most indefinite terms of a hard, cold, dark, metaphysical system, he made a gorgeous Pantheon, full of beautiful, majestic, and life-like forms. He turned atheism itself into a mythology, rich with visions as glorious as the gods that live in the marble of Phidias, or the virgin saints that smile on us from the canvass of Murillo. The Spirit of Beauty, the Principle of Good, the Principle of Evil, when he treated of them, ceased to be abstractions. They took shape and colour. They were no longer mere words, but “intelligible forms;” “fair humanities;” objects of love, of adoration, or of fear. As there can be no stronger sign of a mind destitute of the poetical faculty than that tendency which was so common among the writers of the French school to turn images into abstractions,—Venus, for example, into Love, Minerva into Wisdom, Mars into War, and Bacchus into festivity,—so there can be no stronger sign of a mind truly poetical than a disposition to reverse this abstracting process, and to make individuals out of generalities. Some of the metaphysical and ethical theories of Shelley were certainly most absurd and pernicious. But we doubt whether any modern poet has possessed in an equal degree the highest qualities of the great ancient masters. The words bard and inspiration, which seems so cold and affected when applied to other modern writers, have a perfect propriety when applied to him. He was not an author, but a bard. His poetry seems not to have been an art, but an inspiration. Had he lived to the full age of man, he might not improbably have given to the world some great work of the very highest rank in design and execution. But, alas,

	ὁ Δάφνις ἔβα ῤοον ἕηυσε δίνα
	Υὸν Μωσαις φιλον ἁνδρα, τὸν ὀυ Νὐμφαισιν ἀπεκθῆ

  Read the “Prometheus Unbound.” How gorgeous it is! I do not think Shelley is read or appreciated now as enthusiastically as he was, even in my recollection, some few years ago…. At home spent my time in reading Shelley. How wonderful and beautiful the “Prometheus” is! The unguessed heavens and earth and sea are so many storehouses from which Shelley brings gorgeous heaps of treasure and piles them in words like jewels. I read “The Sensitive Plant” and “Rosalind and Helen.” As for the latter—powerful enough, certainly—it gives me bodily aches to read such poetry.

	Sun-treader, life and light be thine forever!
	Thou art gone from us; years go by and spring
	Gladdens and the young earth is beautiful,
	Yet thy songs come not, other bards arise,
	But none like thee: they stand, thy majesties
	Like mighty works which tell some spirit there
	Hath sat regardless of neglect and scorn,
	Till, its long task completed, it hath risen
	And left us, never to return, and all
	Rush in to peer and praise when all in vain.
	*        *        *        *        *
	But thou art still for me who have adored
	Tho’ single, panting but to hear thy name
	Which I believed a spell to me alone,
	Scarce deeming thou wast as a star to men!

  The imaginative feelings of Byron and Shelley had but little similitude: those of Shelley were mystical and clouded; those of Byron, clear, distinct, direct, and bold. Shelley was more theoretical and abstract; Byron, however imaginative, had it always mixed up with humanity,—human passions and human forms. Shelley had gleams of poetry; Byron was always poetical; Shelley never put a master’s hand upon his subject; he could not mould it to his will.

  “The Ode to the Skylark” and “The Cloud,” which, in the opinion of many critics, bear a purer poetical stamp than any other of his productions. They were written as his mind prompted, listening to the carolling of the bird aloft in the azure sky of Italy; or marking the cloud as it sped across the heavens, while he floated in his boat on the Thames. No poet was ever warmed by a more genuine and unforced inspiration. His extreme sensibility gave the intensity of passion to his intellectual pursuits; and rendered his mind keenly alive to every perception of outward objects, as well as to his internal sensations. Such a gift is, among the sad vicissitudes of human life, the disappointments we meet, and the galling sense of our own mistakes and errors, fraught with pain; to escape from such, he delivered up his soul to poetry, and felt happy when he sheltered himself from the influence of human sympathies in the wildest regions of fancy.

  If Coleridge is the sweetest of our poets, Shelley is at once the most ethereal and most gorgeous; the one who has clothed his thoughts in draperies of the most evanescent and most magnificent words and imagery. Not Milton himself is more learned in Grecisms, or nicer in etymological propriety; and nobody, throughout, has a style so Orphic and primæval. His poetry is as full of mountains, seas, and skies, of light, and darkness, and the seasons, and all the elements of our being, as if Nature herself had written it, with the creation and its hopes newly cast around her; not, it must be confessed, without too indiscriminate a mixture of great and small, and a want of sufficient shade,—a certain chaotic brilliancy, “dark with excess of light.”

	And Shelley, in his white ideal
	All statue-blind.

  Had Shelley possessed humor, his might have been the third name in English poetry.

  If ever mortal “wreaked his thoughts upon expression,” it was Shelley. If ever poet sang (as a bird sings) impulsively, earnestly, with utter abandonment, to himself solely, and for the mere joy of his own song, that poet was the author of the “Sensitive Plant.” Of art—beyond that which is the inalienable instinct of genius—he either had little or disdained all. He really disdained that Rule which is the emanation from Law, because his own soul was law in itself. His rhapsodies are but the rough notes, the stenographic memoranda of poems,—memoranda which, because they were all-sufficient for his own intelligence, he cared not to be at the trouble of transcribing in full for mankind. In his whole life he wrought not thoroughly out a single conception. For this reason it is that he is the most fatiguing of poets. Yet he wearies in having done too little, rather than too much; what seems in him the diffuseness of one idea, is the conglomerate concision of many; and this concision it is which renders him obscure. With such a man, to imitate was out of the question; it would have answered no purpose—for he spoke to his own spirit alone, which would have comprehended no alien tongue;—he was, therefore, profoundly original.

  Most purely poetic genius of his age.

  I turn to one whom I love still more than I admire; the gentle, the gifted, the ill-fated Shelley…. Poor Shelley! Thou were the warmest of philanthropists, yet doomed to live at variance with thy country and thy time. Full of the spirit of genuine Christianity, yet ranking thyself among unbelievers, because in early life thou hadst been bewildered by seeing it perverted, sinking beneath those precious gifts which should have made a world thine own, intoxicated with thy lyric enthusiasm and thick-coming fancies, adoring Nature as a goddess, yet misinterpreting her oracles, cut off from life just as thou wert beginning to read it aright; O, most musical, most melancholy singer; who that has a soul to feel genius, a heart to grieve over misguided nobleness, can forbear watering the profuse blossoms of thy too early closed spring with tears of sympathy, of love, and (if we may dare it for one so superior in intellect) of pity?

  It is needless to disguise the fact, and it accounts for all—his mind was diseased: he never knew, even from boyhood, what it was to breathe the atmosphere of healthy life, to have the mens sana in corpore sano. His sensibilities were over acute; his morality was thoroughly morbid; his metaphysical speculations illogical, incongruous, incomprehensible—alike baseless and objectless. The suns and systems of his universe were mere nebulæ; his continents were a chaos of dead matter; his oceans “a world of waters, and without a shore.”… It is gratuitous absurdity to call his mystical speculations a search after truth; they are no such thing; and are as little worth the attention of reasoning and responsible man as the heterogeneous reveries of nightmare.

  I would rather consider Shelley’s poetry as a sublime fragmentary essay towards a presentment of the correspondency of the universe to Deity, of the natural to the spiritual, and of the actual to the ideal, than I would isolate and separately appraise the worth of many detachable portions which might be acknowledged as utterly perfect in a lower moral of view, under the mere conditions of art.

	See’st thou a Skylark whose glistening winglets ascending
	Quiver like pulses beneath the melodious dawn?
	Deep in the heart-yearning distance of heaven it flutters—
	Wisdom and beauty and love are the treasures it brings down at eve.

  In a literary point of view, there is no doubt but every succeeding poem showed the gradual clearing away of the mists and vapors with which, in spite of his exquisite rhythm, and a thousand beauties of detail, his fine genius was originally clouded.

	Nature baptized him in ethereal fire,
	And Death shall crown him with a wreath of flame.

  And it is worth remarking, that it is Shelley’s form of fever, rather than Byron’s, which has been of late years the prevailing epidemic. Since Shelley’s poems have become known in England, and a timid public, after approaching in fear and trembling the fountain which was understood to be poisoned, has begun first to sip, and then, finding the magic water at all events sweet enough, to quench its thirst with unlimited draughts, the Byron’s Head has lost its customers. Well—at least the taste of the age is more refined, if that be matter of congratulation. And there is an excuse for preferring eau sucré to waterside porter, heady with grains of paradise and quassia, salt and coccum indicum…. Among the many good-going gentleman and ladies, Byron is generally spoken of with horror—he is “so wicked,” forsooth; while poor Shelley, “poor dear Shelley,” is “very wrong, of course,” but “so refined,” “so beautiful,” “so tender”—a fallen angel, while Byron is a satyr and a devil. We boldly deny the verdict. Neither of the two are devils; as for angels, when we have seen one, we shall be better able to give an opinion; at present, Shelley is in our eyes far less like one of those old Hebrews and Miltonic angels, fallen or unfallen, than Byron is. And as for the satyr, the less that is said for Shelley, on that point, the better. If Byron sinned more desperately and flagrantly than he, it was done under the temptations of rank, wealth, disappointed love, and under the impulses of an animal nature, to which Shelley’s passions were

As moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine.

And, at all events, Byron never set to work to consecrate his own sin into a religion, and proclaim the worship of uncleanness as the last and highest ethical development of “pure” humanity. No—Byron may be brutal, but he never cants. If at moments he finds himself in hell, he never turns round to the world, and melodiously informs them that it is heaven, if they could but see it in its true light.

	Melodious Shelley caught thy softest song,
	And they who heard his music heard not thine;
	Gentle and joyous, delicate and strong,
	From the far tomb his voice shall silence mine.

	Through cloud and wave and star his insight keen
	Shone clear, and traced a God in each disguise,
	Protean, boundless. Like the buskined scene
	All Nature rapt him into ecstasies:
	In him, alas! had Reverence equal been
	With Admiration, those resplendent eyes
	Had wandered not through all her range sublime
	To miss the one great marvel of all time.

  It is impossible to deny that he loved with a great intensity; yet it was with a certain narrowness, and therefore a certain fitfulness. Possibly a somewhat wider nature, taking hold of other characters at more points,—fascinated as intensely but more variously, stirred as deeply but through more complicated emotions,—is requisite for the highest and most lasting feeling; passion, to be enduring, must be many-sided. Eager and narrow emotions urge like the gadfly of the poet, but they pass away; they are single; there is nothing to revive them. Various as human nature must be the passion which absorbs that nature into itself. Shelley’s mode of delineating women has a corresponding peculiarity; they are well described, but they are described under only one aspect. Every one of his poems, almost, has a lady whose arms are white, whose mind is sympathizing, and whose soul is beautiful. She has many names,—Cythna, Asia, Emily; but these are only external disguises; she is indubitably the same person, for her character never varies. No character can be simpler; she is described as the ideal object of love in its most simple and elemental form; the pure object of the essential passion. She is a being to be loved in a single moment, with eager eyes and gasping breath; but you feel that in that moment you have seen the whole,—there is nothing to come to afterwards. The fascination is intense, but uniform; there is not the ever-varying grace, the ever-changing charm, that alone can attract for all time the shifting moods of a various and mutable nature.

  Let it not be supposed that I mean to compare the sickly dreaming of Shelley over clouds and waves with the masculine and magnificent grasp of men and things which we find in Scott.

  Intense as is his ethical spirit, his desire to act upon man and society, his imagination cannot work with things as he finds them, with the actual stuff of historical life. His mode of thinking is not according to the terrestrial conditions of time, place, cause and effect, variety of race, climate, and costume. His persons are shapes, winged forms, modernized versions of Grecian mythology, or mortals highly allegorized; and their movements are vague, swift, and independent of ordinary physical laws. In the “Revolt of Islam,” for example, the story is that of two lovers who career through the plains and cities of an imaginary kingdom on a Tartar horse, or skim over leagues of ocean in a boat whose prow is of moonstone. But for the Cenci, and one or two other pieces, one would say that Shelley had scarcely any aptitude for the historical.

  Florence to the living Dante was not more cruelly unjust than England to the living Shelley. Only now, nearly forty years after his death, do we begin to discern his true glory. It is well that this glory is such as can afford to wait for recognition; that it is one of the permanent stars of heaven, not a rocket to be ruined by a night of storm and rain. I confess that I have long been filled with astonishment and indignation at the manner in which he is treated by the majority of our best living writers. Emerson is serenely throned above hearing him at all; Carlyle only hears him “shriek hysterically;” Mrs. Browning discovers him “blind with his white ideal;” Messrs. Ruskin and Kingsley treat him much as senior schoolboys treat the youngster who easily “walks over their heads” in class—with reluctant tribute of admiration copiously qualified with sneers, pinches, and kicks. Even Bulwer (who, intellectually worthless as he is, now and then serves well as a straw to show the way the wind blows among the higher and more educated classes), even Bulwer can venture to look down upon him with pity, to pat him patronisingly on the back, to sneer at him—in “Earnest Maltravers”—with a sneer founded upon a maimed quotation…. These distinctive marks of the highest poetry I find displayed in the works of Shelley more gloriously than in those of any other poet in our language. As we must study Shakespeare for knowledge of idealised human nature, and Fielding for knowledge of human nature unidealised, and Carlyle’s “French Revolution” as the unapproached model of history, and Currer Bell’s “Villette” to learn the highest capabilities of the novel, and Ruskin for the true philosophy of art, and Emerson for quintessential philosophy, so must we study, and so will future men more and more study Shelley for quintessential poetry.

  Since the seventeenth century, we have had no poet of the highest order, though Shelley, had he lived, would perhaps have become one. He had something of that burning passion, that sacred fire, which kindles the soul, as though it came fresh from the altar of the gods. But he was cut off in his early prime, when his splendid genius was still in its dawn.

  Emotion was found insufficient; ideas were called for. And so poor Shelley, poor Shelley! so disdained and cried down in his lifetime, succeeded Wordsworth in vogue. The amende honorable was made to him; he was proclaimed one of the glories of England. Men became passionately enamoured of his ethereal, subtle, intangible poetry, and the hollowness of his humanitarian dreams was forgiven him in virtue of the sublimity and beauty of his imagination. After which he shared the fate of his predecessors. As time went on his defects became more apparent. There was not enough human heart-beat, not enough life, not enough of the dramatic within him.

  The master-singer of our modern poets.

  Has anyone since Shakspeare and Spenser lighted on such tender and such grand ecstasies?

  The most truly spiritual of all English poets, Shelley…. That Shelley was immeasurably superior to Byron in all the rarer qualities of the specially poetic mind appears to us so unmistakably assured a fact, that difference of opinion upon it can only spring from a more fundamental difference of opinion as to what it is that constitutes this specially poetic quality…. We feel that Shelley transports the spirit to the highest bound and limit of the intelligible; and that with him thought passes through one superadded and more rarefying process than the other poet is master of.

  This uncritical negligence, the want of minute accuracy in the details of his verse, seems to us intimately connected with the whole character of Shelley’s mind, and especially with the lyrical sweep and intensity of his poetical genius. He had an intellect of the rarest delicacy and analytical strength, that intuitively perceived the most remote analogies, and discriminated with spontaneous precision the finest shades of sensibility, the subtilest differences of perception and emotion. He possessed a swift soaring and prolific imagination that clothed every thought and feeling with imagery in the moment of its birth, and instinctively read the spiritual meanings of material symbols. His fineness of sense was so exquisite that eye and ear and touch became, as it were, organs and inlets not merely of sensitive apprehension, but of intellectual beauty and ideal truth. Every nerve in his slight but vigorous frame seemed to vibrate in unison with the deeper life of nature in the world around him, and, like the wandering harp, he was swept to music by every breath of material beauty, every gust of poetical emotion. Above all, he had a strength of intellectual passion and a depth of ideal sympathy that in moments of excitement fused all the powers of his mind into a continuous stream of creative energy, and gave the stamp of something like inspiration to all the higher productions of his muse. His very method of composition reflects these characteristics of his mind. He seems to have been urged by a sort of irresistible impulse to write, and displayed a vehement and passionate absorption in the work that recalls the old traditions of poetical frenzy and divine possession.

  I heard of an enthusiastic American who went about English fields hunting a lark with Shelley’s poem in his hand, thinking no doubt to use it as a kind of guide-book to the intricacies and harmonies of the song. He reported not having heard any larks, though I have little doubt they were soaring and singing about him all the time, though of course they did not sing to his ear the song that Shelley heard…. Shelley’s poem is perhaps better known and has a higher reputation among literary folk than Wordsworth’s, but I like the latter best. Shelley’s is too long, though no longer than the lark’s song; but the lark cannot help it, and Shelley can.

  Shelley balloons it too much. He ascends easily, gracefully, and then is swayed by scented breezes from an exuberant imagination. It had been a gain could he oftener have dipped his mind deeper into the core of common things. He has too much elevation and not enough depth,—that is, not enough depth for his elevation.

  One cannot help thinking that Shelley’s natural place in the world would be that of a spiritualised Spenser; and if that calm could have come to him which alone can furnish the poet with the opportunity he ought to have, there is no knowing but he might have given us a work rich enough to justify this fancy of him. As it is, between writhings and groanings, the paroxysms of a much-tried spirit, he wrote those exquisite lyrics and poems, which we should be indeed loth to loose from our literature.

  Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley—these are, I believe, the four sublimest sons of song that England has to boast of among the mighty dead—say rather among the undying, the never-to-die. Let us remember also two exceptional phenomena, an “inspired ploughman,” Burns, and an unparalleled poetess, Mrs. Browning, and be thankful for such a national destiny. There are plenty of others: but those four are, if I mistake not, the four…. The poetic ecstacy took him constantly upwards; and, the higher he got, the more thoroughly did his thoughts and words become one exquisite and intense unit. With elevation of meaning, and splendour and beauty of perception, he combined the most searching, the most inimitable loveliness of verse-music; and he stands at this day, and perhaps will always remain, the poet who, by instinct of verbal selection and charm of sound, comes nearest to expressing the half-inexpressible—the secret things of beauty, the intolerable light of the arcane…. To sum up, there is no poet—and no man either—in whose behalf it is more befitting for all natures, and for some natures more inevitable, to feel the privileges and the delights of enthusiasm. The very soul rushes out towards Shelley as an unapproached poet, and embraces him as a dearest friend.

  Whether we consider his minor songs, his odes, or his more complicated choral dramas, we acknowledge that he was the loftiest and the most spontaneous singer of our language. In range of power he was also conspicuous above the rest. Not only did he write the best lyrics, but the best tragedy, the best translations, and the best familiar poems of his century. As a satirist and humourist, I cannot place him so high as some of his admirers do; and the purely polemical portions of his poems, those in which he puts forth his antagonism to tyrants and religions and custom in all its myriad forms, seem to me to degenerate at intervals into poor rhetoric.

  The materials with which he works are impalpable abstractions where other poets use concrete images. His poetry is like the subtle veil woven by the witch of Atlas from “threads of fleecy mist,” “long lines of light,” such as are kindled by the dawn and “starbeams.” When he speaks of natural scenery the solid earth seems to be dissolved, and we are in presence of nothing but the shifting phantasmagoria of cloudland, the glow of moonlight on eternal snow, or the “golden lightning of the setting sun.” The only earthly scenery which recalls Shelley to a more material mind is that which one sees from a high peak at sunrise, when the rising vapours tinged with prismatic colours shut out all signs of human life, and we are alone with the sky and the shadowy billows of the sea of mountains. Only in such vague regions can Shelley find fitting symbolism for those faint emotions suggested by the most abstract speculations, from which he alone is able to extract an unearthly music.

  The title of “the poet’s poet,” which has been bestowed for various reasons on very different authors, applies perhaps with a truer fitness to Shelley than to any of the rest. For all students of Shelley must in a manner feel that they have before them an extreme, almost an extravagant, specimen of the poetic character; and the enthusiastic love, or contemptuous aversion, which his works have inspired has depended mainly on the reader’s sympathy or distaste for that character when exhibited in its unmixed intensity.

	On flaming chariot Shelley soars
	Through starry realms serene.

  By instinct, intuition, whatever we have to call that fine faculty that feels truths before they are put into definite language, Shelley was an Evolutionist. He translated into his own pantheistic language the doctrine of the eternity of matter and the eternity of motion, of the infinite transformation of the different forms of matter into each other, of different forms of motion into each other, without any creation or destruction of either matter or motion.

  In choosing the Spenserian stanza for his great visionary poem, Shelley challenges comparison with Spenser himself, and with Byron; and it cannot be said that he appears to advantage in this comparison…. Compare the impetuous rapidity and pale intensity of Shelley’s verse with the lulling harmony, the lingering cadence, the voluptuous color of Spenser’s, or with the grandiose majesty of Byron’s. The stanzas of the “Faerie Queene” have something of the wholesome old-world mellowness of Haydn’s music; those of “Laon and Cythna” something of the morbid fever of Chopin’s…. In “Adonais,” indeed, a poem on which he bestowed much labor, he handles the stanza in a masterly manner, and endows it with an individual music beautiful and new; and even “Laon and Cythna” is full of exquisite passages, in which the very rhymes lend wings to his imagination, and become the occasion of sweet out-of-the-way modes of expression, full of ethereal poetry of the most Shelleyan kind.

	When that mist cleared, O Shelley! what dread veil
	Was rent for thee, to whom far-darkling Truth
	Reigned sovereign guide through thy brief ageless youth?
	Was the Truth thy Truth, Shelley?—Hush! All-Hail,
	Past doubt, thou gav’st it; and in Truth’s bright sphere
	Art first of praisers, being most praisèd here.

  Of Shelley he said: “He is often too much in the clouds for me. I admire his ‘Alastor,’ ‘Adonais,’ ‘Prometheus Unbound,’ and ‘Epipsychidion,’ and some of his short lyrics are exquisite. As for ‘The Lover’s Tale,’ that was written before I had ever seen a Shelley, though it is called Shelleyan.”

  Each poet gives what he has, and what he can offer; you spread before us fairy bread and enchanted wine, and shall we turn away, with a sneer, because, out of all the multitudes of singers, one is spiritual and strange, one has seen Artemis unveiled?

  After Milton, the next great poet who is eminently musical is Shelley…. In some of Shelley’s lyrics no formal quality seems to exist except the music; a clear intellectual meaning is always present, but often there is scarcely any suggestion of distinct imagery. The power that he shows in these lyrics of giving music of verse an existence apart from all other formal qualities is what makes Shelley more of a musical poet than Coleridge or Keats; and no other poet of the same period can be compared with these in this quality of verse.

  Shelley wrote even fewer sonnets than did Byron: but the few which Byron wrote he wrote well, and this cannot be said of Shelley…. It is strange that Shelley, the most poetic of poets, should have been unable to write a good sonnet as a sonnet; but probably the restrictions of the form pressed upon him with a special heaviness. Chopin, the Shelley of musical composers, wrote his beautiful mazurkas: looked at strictly as mazurkas they are unsatisfactory. In both instances, however, uncontrollable genius overbalanced propriety of form.

  How shall we name the third class of men, who live for the ideal alone, and yet are betrayed into weakness and error, and deeds which demand an atonement of remorse; men who can never quite reconcile the two worlds in which we have our being, the world of material fact and the spiritual world above and beyond it; who give themselves away for love or give themselves away for light yet sometimes mistake bitter for sweet, and darkness for light; children who stumble on the sharp stones and bruise their hands and feet, yet who can wing their way with angelic ease through spaces of the upper air. These are they whom we say the gods love, and who seldom reach the four-score years of Goethe’s majestic old age. They are dearer perhaps than any others to the heart of humanity, for they symbolise, in a pathetic way, both its weakness and its strength. We cannot class them with the exact and patient craftsmen; they are ever half defeated and can have no claim to take their seats beside their conquerors. Let us name them lovers; and if at any time they have wandered far astray, let us remember their errors with gentleness, because they have loved much. It is in this third class of those who serve mankind that Shelley has found a place.

  There is no longer, we imagine, any room for discussion of the position of Shelley as a lyric poet. He is second to no one in our language. If we want an exact definition of what we mean by “poetry,” we turn to his. It was his natural language. He wrote as a bird flies. And his flights are only to be compared to the strong-pinioned eagle, which soars in ever-widening spirals into the empyrean. Both go out of mortal ken. How prodigal he is! Image on image, flight above flight, imagination on imagination, scaling the heavens, and when the amazed reader thinks the climax is reached, lo! the unconscious ease with which he soars to more aërial regions. If you attempt to turn this verse into prose, the meaning escapes. It is poetry. The unapproachable melody of it, also! It is as untranslatable as music. It is possible for a person, sensitive to harmony, to read pages and pages of his poetry, with exquisite delight, having only the vaguest consciousness of the poet’s meaning, with that sense of enjoyment that one has in listening to an orchestra.

  I liked Shelley very much better, though his qualities were too ethereal in their exquisiteness to have any practical influence on my own work.

  I remember, at a very early age, falling in with a little dumpy 16mo edition of Shelley, and finding a kind of fearful fascination in secretly reading it. Not that his ideas anywise influenced my mind. Shelley is a magician, not a thinker, and his creations are chiefly a wondrous dream-work set to the most exquisite music. That music never ceased to charm me, and for many months I carried the book about in my pocket and read it whenever I found myself alone. I was already quite as democratic as the poet, but rather shuddered at his atheism. But I could not read “The Cloud,” or “The Skylark,” or “The Lines to an Indian Air,” or the dedication of “The Revolt of Islam,” even when I only partly understood them, without bringing a moisture into my eyes. Yet the book did not do much for me, for it did not properly give me any thoughts.

  Shelley, however, was not for long my idol. He so often seems to be singing in a falsetto voice; and when a man does that, he is pretty sure to shriek when he gets excited.

  Strange as it may seem, Shelley has given me very uniformly the delight of the invisible, the spiritual, resolving itself, in rapid, creative touch, into distinct, changeable, evanescent, beautiful form. No English poet quite equals him in making way for his thought where no way is; in leaving a vivid trail of light behind him where no light was. He completes the illusion of his own sight with marvelous facility, and leaves the distinct mirage of his vision where the elements must almost instantly swallow it up again. The gossamer web of the spider floats in the air, invisible save from some one position, from which it gleams through its whole length, a fluctuating silver thread. No poet ever cast in the air lighter conceptions, or made them, from his own outlook, more fascinatingly visible. To turn Nature, in all her manifold forms, into the inexhaustible vocabulary of the spirit, so that the image and the feeling it utters float off together as a living thing, this is the unwearied inspiration of Shelley. Yet no mind is more alien to me than that of Shelley in some of its aspects. Of logical incoherence, inconsequential narrative, and thoroughly mistaken opinion, Shelley is a supreme example. Deep and pure in his own affections, he missed the first principles of purity and strength in the living world of men. He wandered like a lost, not a fallen, angel among the evil passions of his kind, and understood nothing of their nature or their remedy. In his sympathetic rehearsal of the encounter of the serpent and the eagle, he takes part with the serpent, because the facts symbolized are wholly misplaced in his mind. An error so deep as this would fatally have weakened another man—it weakened Byron; but Shelley escapes from it constantly into a region pure, creative, remote. In the freedom of his own free spirit, he mistook unlicensed activity for liberty, and resentfully struggled with, and cast off, those social restraints which are, after all, the flowing garments of virtue.

  It is his poetry, above everything else, which for many people establishes that he is an angel. Of his poetry I have not space now to speak. But let no one suppose that a want of humour and a self-delusion such as Shelley’s have no effect upon a man’s poetry. The man Shelley, in very truth, is not entirely sane, and Shelley’s poetry is not entirely sane either. The Shelley of actual life is a vision of beauty and radiance, indeed, but availing nothing, effecting nothing. And in poetry, no less than in life, he is “a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.”

	Behold, I send thee to the heights of song,
	My brother! Let thine eyes awake as clear
	As morning dew, within whose glowing sphere
	Is mirrowed half a world; and listen long,
	Till in thine ears, famished to keenness, throng
	The bugles of the soul, till far and near
	Silence grows populous, and wind and mere
	Are phantom-choked with voices. Then be strong—
	Then halt not till thou seest the beacons flare
	Souls mad for truth have lit from peak to peak.
	Haste on to breathe the intoxicating air—
	Wine to the brave and poison to the weak—
	Far in the blue where angels’ feet have trod,
	Where earth is one with heaven and man with God.

  With the exception of Shakespeare, no English poet ever possessed a greater wealth of language or a finer sense of harmony. What he lacked was a general idea of Nature, and a knowledge of the manner in which the great majority of mankind think and feel. Hence the “Revolt of Islam,” “Prometheus Unbound,” and the “Witch of Atlas,” fail in what is most essential to epic and dramatic poets—design, action, manners, character. Shelley formed his idea of Nature and his conception of his subjects in a solitary and purely capricious spirit. Unless the reader is prepared to surrender his own thought and judgment to his author’s imagination, and to reason, judge, and believe, for the moment, as the poet would have him, he cannot fail to perceive that, in the poems I have mentioned, the “parts do not mutually support and explain each other.”

  His muse had only wings, and not feet. It could soar into ideal heights, but it could not walk on the earth.

  Shelley is more truly a son of Italy than any one of her own poets, for he had the sentiment and passion of her natural beauty, which cannot be said of the greatest of them. I think that Shelley can scarcely be well comprehended by those who are not intimately acquainted with Italian landscape. The exceeding truthfulness of his observation of and feeling for it cannot certainly be appreciated except by those who have lived amongst the sights and sounds which took so close a hold upon his imagination and his heart.

	A creature of impetuous breath,
	Our torpor deadlier than death
	He knew not; whatsoe’er he saith
	Flashes with life:
	He spurreth men, he quickeneth
	To splendid strife.
	And in his gusts of song he brings
	Wild odours shaken from strange wings,
	And unfamiliar whisperings
	From far lips blown,
	While all the rapturous heart of things
	Throbs through his own.

  Shelley is none of those of whom we are sometimes told in these days, whose mission is too serious to be transmitted with the arts of language, who are too much occupied with the substance to care about the form. All that is best in his exquisite collection of verse cries out against this wretched heresy. With all his modernity, his revolutionary instinct, his disdain of the unessential, his poetry is of the highest and most classical technical perfection. No one, among the moderns, has gone further than he in the just attention to poetic form.

	In Christ’s own town did fools of old condemn
	A sinless maid to burn in felon’s fire;
	She looked above; she spake from out the pyre
	To skies that made a star for Bethlehem,
	When, lo! the flames touching her garment’s hem
	Blossom’d to roses—warbled like a lyre—
	Made every fagot-twig a scented brier,
	And crowned her with a rose-bud diadem!
	Brothers in Shelley, we this morn are strong;
	Our Heart of Hearts hath conquered—conquered those
	Once fain to work the world and Shelley wrong;
	Their pyre of hate now bourgeons with the rose—
	Their every fagot, now a sweet-brier, throws
	Love’s breath upon the breeze of Shelley’s song!

  He could not solve the mystery of life—its shame, its wrong, its anguish; and like many another pure and ardent spirit bruised himself in many a wild fluttering against the iron bars of insoluble problems. And then he flew to Nature. In her freshness and grandeur, in the hospitality of her silence, and the friendliness of her unchangingness, he took refuge, and hid himself in her starry pavilion against the windy tempest of life’s futility and malice. He becomes her high-priest and confidant. He serves her with unquenchable devotion and delight. He thirsts for her beauty, and toils to mirror her glory in fit and perfect speech. At thirty he is gray-headed, and his face is lined and furrowed like an old man’s. The spirit of sorrow never leaves him; his verse is one long lament, and underneath its utmost triumph the voice sobs quietly and the sick heart aches. Then suddenly the end comes, and Nature weaves her blackest tempest for a pall and opens the door of rest in the dim green depths of that unresting ocean he had loved so well. He dies with purpose, character, and work alike unfinished. We know what he did, but know not what he might have done or been. But life is only just begun at thirty, and ended thus in its beginning, surely merits the grace of charity, of sympathy, of pity. That meed of reverent feeling has never yet been denied by any who have drunk of the magic stream of his poetry, and never will be wanting so long as English literature endures, and with it the name of Shelley.

	Now a hundred years agone among us came
	Down from some diviner sphere of purer flame,
	Clothed in flesh to suffer, maimed of wings to soar,
	One whom hate once hailed as now love hails by name,
	Chosen of love as chosen of hatred. Now no more
	Ear of man may hear or heart of man deplore
	Aught of dissonance or doubt that mars the strain
	Raised at last of love where love sat mute of yore.

	Be then the poet’s poet still! for none
	Of them whose minstrelsy the stars have blessed
	Has from expression’s wonderland so won
	The unexpressed,—
	So wrought the charm of its elusive note
	On us, who yearn in vain
	To mock the pæan and the plain
	Of tides that rise and fall with sweet mysterious rote.

  The cause Shelley served is still in its struggle; but those to whom social justice is a watchword, and the development of the individual everywhere in liberty, intelligence, and virtue is a cherished hope, must be thankful that Shelley lived, that the substance of his work is so vital, and his influence, inspiring as it is beyond that of any of our poets in these ways, was, and is, so completely on the side of the century’s advance. His words are sung by marching thousands in the streets of London. No poet of our time has touched the cause of progress in the living breath and heart-throb of men so close as that. Yet, remote as the poet’s dream always seems, it is rather that life-long singing of the golden age, in poem after poem which most restores and inflames those who, whether they be rude or refined, are the choicer spirits of mankind, and bring, with revolutionary violence or ideal imagination, the times to come.

	The star that burns on revolution smote
	Wild heats and change on thine ascendant sphere,
	Whose influence thereafter seemed to float
	Through many a strange eclipse of wrath and fear,
	Dimming awhile the radiance of thy love.
	But still supreme in thy nativity,
	All dark, invidious aspects far above,
	Beamed one clear orb for thee,—
	The star whose ministrations just and strong
	Controlled the tireless flight of Dante’s song.

  The sovereign transmutation that the dull, hard stuff of Godwin’s doctrines suffered in the crucible of Shelley’s imagination is known to all readers of the poems. In the “Epipsychidion” the nightingale pours forth a song suggested to her by the croaking of the frog.

  The common judgment of Shelley, at least as expressed in literary organs, has undergone a complete revolution since he was a living man. Nobody now would venture to publish an article about Shelley without copious protestations of admiration for the poet, whatever the opinion might be expressed about his conduct as a man. To acknowledge indifference to his poetry would be to set one’s self against an overwhelming weight of authoritative opinion. To deny him equal rank with any poet of his generation would be heresy. Enjoyment of Shelley is often put forward as a test of poetic sensibility; if Shelley does not delight you, you are set down as not being capable of knowing what poetry is. He is now par excellence the poet’s poet.

  It [“Defence of Poetry”] expresses Shelley’s deepest thoughts about poetry, and marks, as clearly as any writing of the last hundred years, the width of the gulf that separates the ideals of recent poetry from those of the century preceding the French Revolution. It may be compared with Sidney’s “Apologie” on the one hand, and with Wordsworth’s Preface to the “Lyrical Ballads,” or the more abstract parts of Carlyle’s critical writings upon the other. The fundamental conceptions of Shelley are the same as those of the Elizabethan critic and of his own great contemporaries. But he differs from Sidney and Wordsworth, and perhaps from Carlyle also, in laying more stress upon the outward form, and particularly the musical element, of poetry; and from Sidney in laying less stress upon its directly moral associations. He thus attains to a wider and truer view of his subject; and, while insisting as strongly as Wordsworth insists upon the kinship between the matter of poetry and that of truth or science, he also recognizes, as Wordsworth commonly did not, that there is a harmony between the imaginative conception of that matter and its outward expression, and that beautiful thought must necessarily clothe itself in beauty of language and of sound. There is not in our literature any clearer presentment of the inseparable connection between the matter and form of poetry, nor of the ideal element which, under different shapes, is the life and soul of both.

  Shelley was heart and soul a free-thinker; and free-thought is now in the ascendant wherever men think at all. He was an advocate of free love; and the failure of marriage has become so notorious as to be a common-place of modern novel-writers. He was a pioneer of communism; and the vast spread of socialist doctrines is the every-day complaint of a capitalist press. He was a humanitarian; and humanitarianism, having survived the phase of ridicule and misrepresentation, is taking its place among the chief-motive powers of civilised society.

  He has had a vast influence; but it has been in the main the influence, the inspiration of his unsurpassed exciting power. No one has borrowed or carried further any specially Shelleian turns of phrase, rhythm, or thought. Those who have attempted to copy and urge further the Shelleian attitude towards politics, philosophy, ethics, and the like, have made it generally ludicrous and sometimes disgusting. He is, in his own famous words, “something remote and afar.” His poetry is almost poetry in its elements, uncoloured by race, language, time, circumstance, or creed. He is not even so much a poet as Poetry accidentally impersonated and incarnate.

  Happily, Shelley’s treatment of Nature—his landscape would be too limiting a word—in those instances where he has concentrated his mind upon his object, I should myself hold, as in the case of Keats, on the whole, his most precious achievement in poetry…. Without adopting M. Arnold’s judgment that Shelley’s prose will prove his permanent memorial, I must here (with all due respect and apology) make the confession, probably unpopular, reached after long reluctance, that no true poet of any age has left us so gigantic a mass of wasted effort, exuberance so Asiatic, such oceans (to speak out) of fluent, well-intended platitude—such ineffectual beating of his wings in the persistent effort to scale heights of thought beyond the reach of youth;—youth closed so prematurely, so lamentably. Hence the difference between Shelley’s best and what is not best is enormous; the sudden transition from mere prose rendered more prosaic by its presentation in verse, to the most ethereal and exquisite poetry, frequent; and hence, also, it is in his shorter and mostly later lyrics that we find Shelley’s very finest, uniquest, most magically delightful work. Yet even here at times the matter is attenuated as the film of the soap-bubble, gaining through its very thinness its marvellous iridescent beauty.

  Shelley’s love-poems may be very good evidence, but we know well that they are “good for this day and train only.” We are able to believe that they spoke the truth for that one day, but we know by experience that they could not be depended on to speak it the next. That very supplication for a rewarming of Harriet’s chilled love was followed so suddenly by the poet’s plunge into an adoring passion for Mary Godwin that if it had been a check it would have lost its value before a lazy person could have gotten to the bank with it.

  He took Parnassus by storm. His poetical productiveness would have been admirable as the result of a long life; as the work in the main of little more than five years, it is one of the greatest marvels in the history of the human mind.

  Shelley:—The early editions of Shelley’s Poems and Prose Treatises were amongst the first of this class of books to attain high prices. Some may be noted here in chronological order:—“Zastrozzi: a Romance,” 1810, was published at 5s. Bound and cut copies have sold for £5, 15s., and £12, 5s. An uncut copy, in calf, fetched £12, 5s. in 1890, and an uncut copy in morocco brought fifteen guineas in 1897 (Sir C. S. Forbes). The most interesting of these pamphlets is the one which was the cause of its author being expelled from University College, Oxford. “The Necessity of Atheism. Worthing. Printed by E. & W. Phillips. Sold in London and Oxford,” n. d. (1811) f. 8vo, p. 13. Nearly all the copies were destroyed by the printers, and Mr. Slater values a clean copy at about £20, but probably it would realise much more than that. “St. Irvyne,” 1811, morocco uncut, Sir C. S. Forbes, 1897, £16, 10s. “An Address to the Irish People” (Dublin, 1812) was published at 5d., and Mr. Slater values a copy at £8 to £12, but one was sold at Alfred Crampton’s sale, 1896, for £42. “Queen Mab,” 1813, in the original boards, was sold in 1891 for £22, 10s. “The Refutation of Deism,” 1814, fetched £33 at an auction in 1887. The largest price, however, given for one of these pamphlets was £130 for “Œdipus Tyrannus,” 1820, at Crampton’s sale. The entire impression was destroyed except seven copies, only two or three of which were known to exist, but a reprint on vellum appeared in 1876. The British Museum possesses a copy, presented by Lady Shelley.

  Shelley was a true child of the Revolution; he inherited its vehement temper, he shared its impassioned illusions, he was the apt pupil of its doctrines; among his brother poets he must therefore take precedence. His radical spirit expressed itself in two ways: in an unrestrained denunciation of the past with its tyrannical government of priests and kings, and in an unshakable faith for a future with its perfect humanity and exemption from government. Like Rousseau and his dreaming disciples, he broke absolutely with a historic method; he failed to connect the gap between past and future with a passable bridge. History for him was but a record of human misery and depravity; he could read it only with a shudder. From that his mind turned, with its incandescent idealism, to flash upon the screen of the future the radiant panorama of the Golden Age. Imagination bestrode his reason, as Dean Swift would say; blind faith and hope obscured his sense of fact; desire gave wings to his thoughts, and they flew until, to use his own phrase, they were “pinnacled dim in the intense inane.” Shelley was a true apostle of the Revolution’s method; he objectified his own ideals and called them realities.

  Shelley’s was the passion of weakness, but not the passion of strength. Here is the true cause of his essential inferiority to Byron; here is the reason, as Mr. Richard Holt Hutton well showed, why Shelley’s poetry is not sublime. There is no sublimity without power and Shelley’s power was only the pseudo-power which morbid and introspective people can discover in weakness.