When I walked forth upon the glittering grass, And wept, I knew not why: until there rose From the near school-room voices that, alas! Were but one echo from a world of woesThe harsh and grating strife of tyrants and of foes. And then I clasped my hands and looked around, My tears, my heart grew calm, and I was meek and bold. And from that hour did I with earnest thought more Within me, till there came upon my mind A sense of loneliness, a thirst with which I pined. With these feelings and predilections, Shelley went to Oxford. He studied hard but irregularly, and spent much of his leisure in chemical experiments. He incessantly speculated, thought, and read, as he himself has stated. At the age of fifteen he wrote two short prose romances. He had also great facility in versification, and threw off various effusions. The forbidden mines of lore' which had captivated his boyish mind at Eton were also diligently explored, and he was soon an avowed republican and sceptic. He published a volume of political rhymes, entitled Margaret Nicholson's Remains, the said Margaret being the unhappy maniac who attempted to stab George III.; and he issued a syllabus from Hume's Essays, at the same time challenging the authorities of Oxford to a public controversy on the subject. Shelley was at this time just seventeen years of age! In conjunction with a fellow-collegian, Mr Hogg, he composed a small treatise, The Necessity of Atheism; and the result was that both the heterodox students were expelled from college. They went to London, where Shelley still received support from his family; Mr Hogg removed to York, and nearly half a century afterwards (1858) became the biographer of the early life of his poet-friend. Mrs Shelley, widow of the poet, has thus traced the early bias of his mind, and its predisposing causes: Refusing to fag at Eton, he was treated with revolting cruelty by masters and boys; this roused instead of taming his spirit, and he rejected the duty of obedience when it was enforced by menaces and punishment. To aversion to the society of his fellow-creatures-such as he found them when collected together into societies, where one egged on the other to acts of tyranny-was joined the deepest sympathy and compassion; while the attachment he felt for individuals, and the admiration with which he regarded their powers and their virtues, led him to entertain a high opinion of the perfectibility of human nature; and he believed that all could reach the highest grade of moral improvement, did not the customs and prejudices of society foster evil passions and excuse evil actions. The oppression which, trembling at every nerve, yet resolute to heroism, it was his ill-fortune to encounter at school and at college, led him to dissent in many things from those whose arguments were blows, whose faith appeared to engender blame and execration. "During my existence," he wrote to a friend in 1812, "I have incessantly speculated, thought, and read." His readings were not always well chosen; among them were the works of the French philosophers: as far as metaphysical argument went, he temporarily became a convert. At the same time it was the cardinal article of his faith, that if men were but taught and induced to treat their fellows with love, charity, and equal rights, this earth would realise Paradise. He looked upon religion as it was professed, and, above all, practised, as hostile, instead of friendly, to the cultivation of those virtues which would make men brothers.' Mrs Shelley conceives that, in the peculiar circumstances, this was not to be wondered at. 'At the age of seventeen, fragile in health and frame, of the purest habits in morals, full of devoted generosity and universal kindness, glowing with ardour to attain wisdom, resolved, at every personal sacrifice, to do right, burning with a desire for affection and sympathy, he was treated as a reprobate, cast forth as a criminal. The cause was, that he was sincere, that he believed the opinions which he entertained to be true, and he loved truth with a martyr's love: he was ready to sacrifice station, and fortune, and his dearest affections, at its shrine. The sacrifice was demanded from, and made by, a youth of seventeen.' It appears that in his youth Shelley was equally inclined to poetry and metaphysics, and hesitated to which he should devote himself. He ended in uniting them, by no means to the advantage of his poetry. At the age of eighteen he produced a wild atheistical poem, Queen Mab, written in the rhythm of Southey's Thalaba, and abounding in passages of great power and melody. He had been strongly attached to his cousin, an accomplished young lady, Miss Grove, but after his expulsion from college and from home, communication with this lady was prohibited. He then became enamoured of another beauty-a handsome blonde of sixteen, but in social position inferior to himself. This was a Miss Harriet Westbrook, daughter of a person who had kept the Mount Street Coffee-house, London-a place of fashionable resort-and had retired from business with apparently competent means. Mr Westbrook had put his daughter to a boardingschool, at which one of Shelley's sisters was also placed. The result was an elopement after a few weeks' acquaintance, and a marriage at Gretna Green in August 1811. This still further exasperated his friends, and his father cut off his allowance. An uncle, Captain Pilfold-one of Nelson's captains at the Nile and Trafalgar-generously supplied the youthful pair with money, and they lived for some time in Cumberland, where Shelley made the acquaintance of Southey, Wordsworth, De Quincey, and Wilson. His literary ambition must have been excited by this intercourse; but he suddenly departed for Dublin, whence he again removed to the Isle of Man, and afterwards to Wales. They ran about from place to place, dissipating the small means allowed them, and the child-wife' appears to have been wholly ignorant of all housekeeping. Harriet was well-educated and possessed some taste for literature, but she gained no lasting influence over the wayward poet. Two children were born to them. At length Shelley became enamoured of the daughter of Mr Godwin, whose philosophy he admired and adopted. All the parties considered marriage a useless, if not detestable institution, and Shelley left England in 1814 in the company of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. They made a six weeks' tour on the continent, of which he wrote a journal, and returned to London in August, when the poet, finding it necessary to have some professional means of subsistence, applied himself to medicine, and walked one of the hospitals. Fortunately, however, it was discovered that by the provisions of the deed of entail, the fee-simple of the Shelley estate was vested in the poet after his father's death, and he had thus power to raise money and dispose of the property by will as he pleased. Sir Timothy Shelley then arranged with his son that the latter should receive £800 per annum, and such a sum was more than sufficient to supply the poet's wants and luxuries. He established himself on the banks of the Thames, and there composed his poem, Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude, designed, as he states, to represent a youth of uncorrupted feelings and adventurous genius, led forth by an imagination inflamed and purified through familiarity with all that is excellent and majestic, to the contemplation of the universe. The mind of his hero, however, becomes awakened, and thirsts for intercourse with an intelligence similar to itself. He seeks in vain for a prototype of his conception; and blasted by his disappointment, he descends to an untimely grave. In this picture, Shelley undoubtedly drew from his own experience, and in none of his subsequent works has he excelled the descriptive passages in Alastor. The copious picturesqueness of his language, and the boldness of his imagination, are here strikingly exemplified. Symptoms of pulmonary disease having appeared, Shelley again repaired to the continent, in the summer of 1816, and first met with Lord Byron at the Lake of Geneva. His health being restored, he returned to England, and settled himself at Great Marlow in Buckinghamshire. For two years, Shelley's unfortunate wife, Harriet Westbrook, had been sinking into misery. Her father had died insolvent; she was without friends or fortune, and in a moment of depression and despair she committed suicide by throwing herself into the basin of the Green Park, November 10, 1816. Shelley married Miss Godwin a few weeks afterwards (December 30th), the prospect of succession for his children to a large entailed estate having apparently removed his repugnance to matrimony. A new source of obloquy and misery was, however, opposed to his happiness. A Chancery decree deprived him of the guardianship of his children, on the ground of his immorality and atheism. He felt this deeply; and in a poetical fragment on the subject, he invokes a curse on the administrator of the law, 'by a parent's outraged love,' and in one exquisite verse By all the happy see in children's growth, Source of the sweetest hopes and saddest fears! In his picturesque retreat at Marlow, Shelley composed the Revolt of Islam, a poem more energetic than Alastor, yet containing the same allegorical features and peculiarities of thought and style, and rendered more tedious by the want of human interest. It is honourable to Shelley that, during his residence at Marlow, he was indefatigable in his attentions to the poor; his widow relates that, in the winter, while bringing out his poem, he had a severe attack of ophthalmia, caught while visiting the poor cottages. This certainly stamps with reality his pleadings for the human race, though the nature of his philosophy and opinions would have deprived them of the highest of earthly consolations. The poet now prepared to go abroad. A strong sense of injury, and a burning desire to redress what he termed the wrongs of society, rendered him miserable in England, and he hoped also that his health would be improved by a milder climate. Accordingly, on the 12th of March 1818, he quitted this country, never to return. He went direct to Italy, and whilst residing at Rome, composed his classic drama of Prometheus Unbound. This poem,' he says, 'was chiefly written upon the mountainous ruins of the Baths of Caracalla, among the flowery glades and thickets of odoriferous blossoming trees, which are extended in ever-winding labyrinths upon its immense platforms and dizzy arches suspended in the air. The bright-blue sky of Rome, and the effect of the vigorous awakening of spring in that divinest climate, and the new life with which it drenches the spirits even to intoxication, were the inspiration of this drama. No change of scene, however, could permanently affect the nature of Shelley's speculations, and his Prometheus is as mystical and metaphysical, and as daringly sceptical, as any of his previous works. The cardinal point of his system is described by Mrs Shelley as a belief that man could be so perfectionised as to be able to expel evil from his own nature, and from the greater part of the creation; and the subject he loved best to dwell on was the image of one warring with the evil principle, oppressed not only by it, but by all, even the good, who were deluded into considering evil a necessary portion of humanity. His next work was The Cenci, a tragedy, published in 1819, and dedicated to Mr Leigh Hunt. Those writings,' he remarks in the dedication, which I have hitherto published, have been little else than visions which impersonate my own apprehensions of the beautiful and the just. I can also perceive in them the literary defects incidental to youth and impatience; they are dreams of what ought to be, or may be. The drama which I now present to you is a sad reality. I lay aside the presumptuous attitude of an morning calm erases, and whose traces remain only, as on the wrinkled sand which paves it. These and corresponding conditions of being are experienced principally by those of the most delicate sensibility and the most enlarged imagination; and the state of mind produced by them is at war with every base desire. The enthusiasm of virtue, love, patriotism, and friendship, is essentially linked with such emotions; and whilst they last, self appears as what it is, an atom to a universe. Poets are not only subject to these experiences as spirits of the most refined organisation, but they can colour all that they combine with the evanescent hues of this ethereal world; a word, a trait in the representation of a scene or passion, will touch the enchanted chord, and reanimate, in those who have ever experienced those emotions, the sleeping, the cold, the buried image of the past. Poetry thus makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the world; it arrests the vanishing apparitions which haunt the interlunations of life, and veiling them, or in language or in form, sends them forth among mankind, bearing sweet news of kindred joy to those with whom their sisters abide-abide, because there is no portal of expression from the caverns of the spirit which they inhabit into the universe of things. Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man.' instructor, and am content to paint, with such colours as my own heart furnishes, that which has been.' The painting is dark and gloomy; but, in spite of a revolting plot, and the insane, unnatural, character of the Cenci, Shelley's tragedy is one of the best of modern times. As an effort of intellectual strength, and an embodiment of human passion, it may challenge a comparison with any dramatic work since Otway; and it is incomparably the best of the poet's productions. His remaining works are Hellas; The Witch of Atlas; Adonais; Rosalind and Helen; and a variety of shorter productions, with scenes translated from Calderon and the Faust of Goethe. In Italy, Shelley renewed his acquaintance with Lord Byron, who thought his philosophy 'too spiritual and romantic.' He was temperate in his habits, gentle, affectionate, and generous; so that even those who most deeply deplored or detested his opinions, were charmed with the intellectual purity and benevolence of his life. His favourite amusement was boating and sailing; and whilst returning one day, the 8th of July 1822, from Leghorn-whither he had gone to welcome Leigh Hunt to Italy-the boat in which he sailed, accompanied by Mr Williams, formerly of the 8th Dragoons, and a single seaman, went down in the Bay of Spezia, and all perished. A volume of Keats's poetry was found open in Shelley's coat- The remote abstract character of Shelley's poetry, pocket when his body was washed ashore, The and its general want of anything real or tangible, remains of the poet were reduced to ashes by fire, by which the sympathies of the heart are awakened, and being taken to Rome, were deposited in the must always prevent its becoming popular. His Protestant burial-ground, near those of a child he mystic idealism renders him obscure, and his imagery had lost in that city. A complete edition of is sometimes accumulated, till both precision and Shelley's Poetical Works, with notes by his widow, effect are lost, and the poet becomes harsh and has been published in four volumes; and the same involved in expression. He sought to reason high accomplished lady gave to the world two volumes in verse-not like Dryden, Pope, or Johnson, but in of his prose Essays, Letters from Abroad, Trans-cold and glittering metaphysics, where the idealism lations and Fragments. Shelley's life was a dream of Plato or Berkeley stood in the place of the moral of romance-a tale of mystery and grief. That he truths and passions of actual life. There is no was sincere in his opinions, and benevolent in his melancholy grandeur in his pictures, or simple unity intentions, is now undoubted. He looked upon the in his designs. Another fault is his partiality for world with the eyes of a visionary, bent on unattain-painting ghastly and repulsive scenes. He had, howable schemes of intellectual excellence and suprem- ever, many great and shining qualities—a rich and acy. His delusion led to misery, and made him, fertile imagination, a passionate love of nature, and for a time, unjust to others. It alienated him from a diction singularly classical and imposing in sound his family and friends, blasted his prospects in life, and structure. He was a close student of the Greek and distempered all his views and opinions. It is and Italian poets. The descriptive passages in probable that, had he lived to a riper age, he might Alastor, and the river-voyage at the conclusion of have modified some of those extreme speculative the Revolt of Islam, are among the most finished of and pernicious tenets, and we have no doubt that his productions. His morbid ghastliness is there he would have risen into a purer atmosphere of laid aside, and his better genius leads him to the poetical imagination. The troubled and stormy pure waters and the depth of forest shades, which dawn was fast yielding to the calm noonday bright- none of his contemporaries knew better how to ness. He had worn out some of his fierce anti- describe. Some of the minor poems are also pathies and morbid affections; a happy domestic imbued with a true poetical spirit. One striking circle was gathered around him; and the refined peculiarity of his style is his constant personifisimplicity of his tastes and habits, joined to wider cation of inanimate objects. In The Cenci we have and juster views of human life, would imperceptibly a strong and almost terrible illustration of this have given a new tone to his thoughts and studies. feature of his poetry: He had a high idea of the art to which he devoted his faculties. 'Poetry,' he says in one of his essays, 'is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds. We are aware of evanescent visitations of thought and feeling, sometimes associated with place or person, sometimes regarding our own mind alone, and always arising unforeseen and departing unbidden, but elevating and delightful beyond all expression; so that, even in the desire and the regret they leave, there cannot but be pleasure, participating as it does in the nature of its object. It is, as it were, the interpenetration of a diviner nature through our own; but its footsteps are like those of a wind over the sea, which the I remember, Two miles on this side of the fort, the road You hear, but see not, an impetuous torrent The Flight of the Hours in Prometheus is equally vivid, and touched with a higher grace: Behold! The rocks are cloven, and through the purple night And now, even now, they clasped it. Their bright locks Stream like a comet's flashing hair: they all These are the immortal Hours, Of whom thou didst demand. One waits for thee. [Opening of Queen Mab.] How wonderful is Death, When, throned on ocean's wave, Hath then the gloomy Power, Must then that peerless form As breathing marble, perish? Leave nothing of this heavenly sight Spare nothing but a gloomy theme On which the lightest heart might moralise? Or is it only a sweet slumber Stealing o'er sensation, Which the breath of roseate morning Will Ianthe wake again, And give that faithful bosom joy Her dewy eyes are closed, And on their lids, whose texture fine Scarce hides the dark-blue orbs beneath, The baby Sleep is pillowed: Her golden tresses shade The bosom's stainless pride, Curling like tendrils of the parasite Around a marble column. Hark! whence that rushing sound? 'Tis like the wondrous strain That round a lonely ruin swells, Which, wandering on the echoing shore, I sift the snow on the mountains below, In a cavern under is fettered the thunder, Lured by the love of the genii that move In the depths of the purple sea; Wherever he dream, under mountain or stream, And I all the while bask in heaven's blue smile, Whilst he is dissolving in rains. The sanguine sunrise, with his meteor eyes, The odes To the Skylark and The Cloud, 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 caroling 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.'-Mrs Shelley, Pref. to Poet. Works. As on the jag of a mountain crag, Which an earthquake rocks and swings, An eagle alit, one moment may sit In the light of its golden wings; And when sunset may breathe from the lit sea beneath, Its ardours of rest and of love, And the crimson pall of eve may fall From the depth of heaven above, With wings folded I rest on mine airy nest, As still as a brooding dove. That orbed maiden with white fire laden, And wherever the beat of her unseen feet, May have broken the woof of my tent's thin roof, And I laugh to see them whirl and flee, Like a swarm of golden bees, When I widen the rent in my wind-built tent, Like strips of the sky fallen through me on high, I bind the sun's throne with a burning zone, The volcanoes are dim, and the stars reel and swim, From cape to cape, with a bridge-like shape, Sunbeam proof, I hang like a roof, The mountains its columns be. The triumphal arch through which I march, With hurricane, fire, and snow, When the powers of the air are chained to my chair, Is the million-coloured bow; The sphere-fire above, its soft colours wove, I am the daughter of the earth and water, I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores; For after the rain, when, with never a stain, The pavilion of heaven is bare, And the winds and sunbeams, with their convex In the golden lightening Of the sunken sun, O'er which clouds are brightening, Thou dost float and run, Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun. The pale purple even Melts around thy flight; Like a star of heaven, In the broad daylight Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight. Keen are the arrows Of that silver sphere, Whose intense lamp narrows In the white dawn clear, Until we hardly see, we feel that it is there. All the earth and air With thy voice is loud, As, when night is bare, From one lonely cloud The moon rains out her beams, and heaven is overflowed. What thou art we know not; What is most like thee? From rainbow clouds there flow not Drops so bright to see, As from thy presence showers a rain of melody. In the light of thought, Till the world is wrought To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not. Like a high-born maiden Soul in secret hour With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower. Like a glowworm golden In a dell of dew, Scattering unbeholden Its aërial hue Among the flowers and grass, which screen it from the view. Like a rose embowered In its own green leaves," Makes faint with too much sweet these heavy-winged thieves. |