visit to Florence gave him an opportunity of enjoying the splendid works of art gathered there. "All worldly thoughts and cares,” he wrote, “seem to vanish from before the sublime emotions such spectacles create; and I am deeply impressed with the great difference of happiness enjoyed by those who live at a distance from these incarnations of all that the finest minds have conceived of beauty, and those who can resort to their company at pleasure. What should we think if we were forbidden to read the great writers who have left us their works? And yet to be forbidden to live at Florence or Rome is an evil of the same kind and hardly of less magnitude." But his sympathies were not lacking for more mundane matters; he considered poetry, he said about this time, very subordinate to moral and political science. It was this summer that a great Reform meeting at Manchester had been dispersed by military force at the expense of several lives. The event led Shelley to write a series of political poems, The Masque of Anarchy, Song to the Men of England, etc. Whatever the bitterness of these poems, their author was always opposed to violence. "The true patriot," he writes, "will endeavor to enlighten and to unite the nation and animate it with enthusiasm and confidence. . . . Lastly, if circumstances had collected a considerable number, as at Manchester on the memorable 16th of August, if the tyrants send their troops to fire upon them or cut them down unless they disperse, he will exhort them peaceably to defy the danger, and to expect without resistance the onset of the cavalry, and wait with folded arms the event of the fire of the artillery, and receive with unshrinking bosoms the bayonets of charging battalions. . . . And this not because active resistance is not justifiable, but because in this instance temperance and courage would produce greater advantages than the most decisive victory."

Shelley's works were almost unread in his own lifetime.

In so far as he was known to the public, he was known through second-hand reports of the immorality of Queen Mab and through the notoriety of the chancery suit. In this year, however, he was reviewed in two leading periodicals. The Quarterly attacked The Revolt of Islam and the personal character of its author. On the other hand, his work received the most appreciative notice which it ever received during the life of the poet, in three articles in Blackwood written by Professor Wilson ("Christopher North"). Another joyful event of the same year was the birth of a son, Percy.

During the last two years of Shelley's life (1820-1822) a circle of friends gathered about him. One of these was the Greek leader, Prince Mavrocordato, through whom the poet came into close relations with the revolutionary movement which was passing over Europe. To him was dedicated the lyrical drama Hellas (1821), based on the contemporary events of the Greek uprising, and framed after the model of the Persæ of Æschylus. Another person to join the circle was Medwin, Shelley's former schoolfellow and subsequent biographer. There were, besides, several Italians of whom he saw a good deal. Towards the close of 1821 he became acquainted with Emilia Viviani, a young Italian lady, whose unhappiness, beauty, and sensibility elevated her, for a short time, in the poet's estimation into an incarnation of womanly perfection. This experience he embodied in Epipsychidion. A friendship not less important for his poetic work, and more important in his personal life, was that formed with Mr. and Mrs. Edward Williams. The former was a year or two younger than Shelley, of a simple and bright disposition, with literary interests, gentle, generous, and fearless. He shared in Shelley's fondness for boating, and the two friends made many expeditions on the water together. Mrs. Williams, the Jane so often addressed in Shelley's later lyrics,

was possessed of great grace and sweetness. She seemed to Shelley to realize the idea he had formed of the lady in The Sensitive Plant. She also played and sang charmingly. In the happiness of this wedded pair and their mutual sympathy, Shelley saw the realization of a paradise such as he had dreamed might be his own, but which he had never yet found.

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In 1821 a bitter attack was made upon Shelley in The London Literary Gazette, on the occasion of the publication (notwithstanding Shelley's efforts to suppress it) of a pirated edition of Queen Mab. Shocking accusations, too, were circulated among personal friends in Italy by former household servants. Under all this Shelley suffered. A visit to Byron at Ravenna seemed to intensify this feeling of depression; for Shelley regarded Byron's genius as greatly superior to his own, and intercourse with Byron made him dissatisfied with his own work. Weighed down by these various influences, he writes from Ravenna to Mary: My greatest content would be utterly to desert all human society. I would retire with you and our child to a solitary island in the sea and build a boat, and shut upon my retreat the flood-gates of the world. I would read no reviews and talk with no authors. If I dared trust my imagination, it would tell me that there are one or two chosen companions besides yourself whom I should desire. But to this I would not listen-where two or three are gathered together the devil is among them. And good, far more than evil impulses, love, far more than hatred, has been to me, except as you have been its object, the source of all sorts of mischief. So on this plan I would be alone, and would devote either to oblivion or to future generations the overflowings of a mind which, timely withdrawn. from contagion, should be kept fit for no baser object."

The sadness of Shelley's last years is mirrored in his later poems, and his power of giving it expression is the

unique distinction of his work. It was not merely that there was little of joy and much of positive evil in the life of the homeless wanderer; a nature so visionary, so ardent, so blind to practical considerations was inevitably doomed to disappointment. Even his hopeful and unpractical spirit must have often become conscious that the millennium whose speedy approach he had in his early days anticipated was far remote; sometimes the chilling thought may have come home to him that it could never be realized. In the narrower

sphere of his own personal concerns his faith in human nature had received many a shock; the anticipations of youthful love and friendship had been repeatedly disappointed. Miss Hitchener, Harriet, Mary, Emilia, Hogg, Southey, Godwin, had all fallen short of the poet's ideal. His own life and work must have seemed a failure. Not merely had he been wholly unsuccessful in reforming the world he had not even caught the public ear. His poetic gifts were almost unrecognized. He was a mark for scorn, and was avoided as a social leper. And so his sensitive nature gave utterance to that wonderful lyric note of loneliness, sadness, and yearning which pervades his work, and even to that strange cry for annihilation, for the dissolution of the finite in the infinite, which closes the Adonais and the last chorus of Hellas.

In the autumn of 1821 Byron moved to Pisa, where Shelley was residing. The two poets determined to establish a periodical for the dissemination of advanced views, to be named The Liberal, and to be edited by Leigh Hunt. The desire of assisting Hunt was Shelley's chief motive for embarking in the enterprise. The circle at Pisa was increased in the beginning of 1822 by the addition of Edward John Trelawny, whose Records give by far the most vivid and satisfying impression of Shelley in his last days. Trelawny became acquainted with the poet through the Williamses,

and thus narrates his first meeting:{ "The Williamses received me in their earnest, cordial manner; we had a great deal to communicate to each other, and were in loud and animated conversation, when I was rather put out by observing in the passage near the open door, opposite to where I sat, a pair of glittering eyes steadily fixed on mine; it was too dark to make out whom they belonged to. With the acuteness of a woman, Mrs. Williams's eyes followed the direction of mine, and, going to the doorway, she laughingly said, ‘Come in, Shelley; it's only our friend Tre just arrived.' Swiftly gliding in, blushing like a girl, a tall, thin stripling held out his hands; and, although I could hardly believe as I looked at his flushed, feminine, and artless face that it could be the Poet, I returned his warm pressure. After the ordinary greetings and courtesies he sat down and listened. I was silent from astonishment. Was it possible this mild-looking, beardless boy could be the veritable monster at war with all the world, excommunicated by the Fathers of the Church, deprived of his civil rights by the fiat of a grim Lord Chancellor, discarded by every member of his family, and denounced by the rival sages of our literature as the founder of a Satanic school? I could not believe it; it must be a hoax. . . . He was habited like a boy, in a black jacket and trousers which he seemed to have outgrown, or his tailor, as is the custom, had most shamefully stinted him in his 'sizings.' Mrs. Williams saw my embarrassment, and to relieve me asked Shelley what book he had in his hand. His face brightened and he answered briskly, 'Calderon's Magico Prodigioso; I am translating some passages in it.' 'Oh, read it to us!' Shoved off from the shore of commonplace incidents that could not interest him, and fairly launched on a theme that did, he instantly became oblivious of everything but the book in his hand. The masterly manner in which he analyzed the genius of the author, his lucid inter