to the Spirit of Delight. This Spirit, the poet complains, has deserted him; it forgets all but those who need it not; and such an one as he, can never win it back again, for it is dismayed with sorrow, and reproach it will not hear. Yet, he goes on to say, "I love all that thou lovest, Spirit of Delight! The fresh earth in new leaves dressed, And the starry night, Autumn evening, and the morn I love snow, and all the forms I love waves and winds and storms,― Which is Nature's, and may be Untainted by man's misery. I love tranquil solitude, As is quiet, wise, and good. Between thee and me What difference? But thou dost possess The things I seek, not love them less." But Shelley's spirit rises on the wings of his sublime enthusiasm for liberty high into the clear air above all these mournful moods. His ode To a Skylark, the poem which indicates the transition to the poetry of liberty, is written in a perfect intoxication of joy and freedom from care. It is almost safe to assert that there had been nothing in the older English literature finer in its way than the best of Wordsworth's songs to the lark, which are so typical of the spirit and art of the Lake School. "Leave to the nightingale her shady wood; A privacy of glorious light is thine," writes Wordsworth; and, as the true conservative poet, he goes on to apostrophise the lark as "Type of the wise, who soar, but never roam True to the kindred points of Heaven and Home." Turn from this to Shelley's lark :— "Like a cloud of fire The blue deep thou wingest, And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest." We seem to hear all the winds ringing with its "shrill delight," and seem to glide into and be engulfed by a sea of eternally fresh melody. This is the youngest, freshest, gladdest pæan of the pure spirit of freedom. It forms the transition to the long series of poems of freedom, the great group of works in which Shelley's genius is the loud herald of the approaching revolutions. His poetry of freedom is one long war-cry, garbed in ever-changing melodies. Whether it takes the shape of odes to liberty and its champions (poems as beautiful and grand as the Marseillaise), of political satires levelled at customs or persons, of Aristophanic comedy ridiculing the abuses and follies of the day in England, or of mythical or historical tragedy, it is in its essence always the same mighty wail over injustice and hypocrisy, the same powerful appeal to all of his contemporaries who were still capable of feeling anything whatsoever a degradation. Immediately after his first marriage Shelley began to play the part of a political agitator. He went to Dublin to further the cause of Catholic emancipation, wrote a very juvenile address to the Irish people, in which he besought them to refrain from the violent deeds with which the French Revolution had been stained, and was childish enough to throw down copies of it from the balcony of his hotel, in front of any of the passers-by who looked as if they might be responsive. We gain some idea of the childish spirit in which both he and his young wife regarded the matter, from reading that, one day when they were walking together, he could not resist amusing himself by popping the address into the hood of a lady's cloak, a performance which made his wife, as she herself writes, "almost die of laughing." Shelley attended several political meetings, and on occasion spoke for more than an hour in the presence of O'Connell and other celebrities. The accounts of his eloquence given by contemporaries are so enthusiastic that they might almost lead us to believe him to have been even greater as an orator than as a poet. The next time Shelley came into collision with the party in power, the collision was of a much more violent and tragic nature. Harriet was dead, and her father had filed a petition in Chancery to determine which was the fit and proper person to educate her children-he, their grandfather, the retired hotel-keeper, or their father, Shelley, the author of Queen Mab and Alastor, who was accused of atheism, and would in all probability bring up his children as atheists. Lord Eldon's judgment was to the effect that, seeing that Shelley's conduct had hitherto been highly immoral, and that, far from being ashamed of this, he was proud of his immoral principles and tried to impress them upon others, the law was in its right in depriving him entirely of the custody of his children, and at the same time decreeing that he should be deprived of a fifth of his income for their maintenance. The children were placed in charge of a clergyman of the Church of England. Shelley felt this blow so terribly that even his most intimate friends never dared speak of the children to him. In his poem To the Lord Chancellor, he cries: "I curse thee by a parent's outraged love; By hopes long cherished and too lately lost; By the false cant which on their innocent lips Their pathway from the cradle to the tomb. (By) the despair which bids a father groan, And cry, 'My children are no longer mine; Mary And in the poem to William Shelley, his little son by Mar he writes: "They have taken thy brother and sister dear, They have made them unfit for thee; Fear not the tyrants will rule for ever, Whose waves they have tainted with death. Fearing that this son of his second marriage might also be taken from him, Shelley left his native country, never to return. At the time when the Lord Chancellor was branding him as less fit for the most rudimentary duties of social life than any other man in England, he was preparing to prove that he was one of the few men then in existence who were predestined to immortality. He left England, stamped as a criminal, and most of the Englishmen whom he met abroad feared and hated him as capable of any crime. He appears to have been actually once or twice subjected to personal molestation. As already mentioned, Shelley in 1817 published a pamphlet on the subject of Parliamentary Reform. As a proof of the moderation and practicability of the views elaborated in its pages, it need only be mentioned that the Tories in 1867 passed almost the very scheme of Reform which the "atheist and republican" had planned fifty years before. He "disavowed any wish to establish universal suffrage at once, or to do away with monarchy and aristocracy." And on many other occasions he declared himself to be against precipitate changes. His Radicalism consisted simply in his being fifty years ahead of his day. Attacked and persecuted by the narrow-minded society of the period, Shelley now hurled his poems of liberty at England. His political poems are written with his blood. The employment of such similes for Castlereagh and Sidmouth as "two bloodless wolves whose dry throats rattle" and "two vipers tangled into one," was allowable in his case. It must not be forgotten that to him Castlereagh, Sidmouth, and Eldon, were not men, but personifications of a principle of the great, fateful principle of reaction to which his career and his happiness had been sacrificed. in The Masque of Anarchy: "I met Murder on the way— Clothed with the bible as with light, One fled past, a maniac maid, 'My father Time is weak and grey 'He has had child after child, He writes It was not, however, only in bellicose lyrics that Shelley incorporated his political and social ideas and passions at this period. In the year 1818 he wrote two very characteristic narrative poems, Julian and Maddalo and Rosalind and Helen. The first-mentioned gives a vivid description of the poet's life in Venice with Byron, and affords one of the many proofs of his noble and ardent admiration for Byron's |