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his exiguous publications, attract the slightest interest. Shelley was, more than any other English poet has been, le banni de liesse. Then, without warning, he was drowned while yachting in the Gulf of Spezzia. He left behind him unrevised, amid a world of exquisite fragments, a noble but vague gnomic poem, The Triumph of Life, in which Petrarch's Trionfi are summed up and sometimes excelled.

A life of disappointment and a death in obscurity were gradually followed by the growth of an almost exaggerated reputation. Fifty years after his death Shelley had outshone all his contemporaries-nay, with the exception of Shakespeare, was probably the most passionately admired of all the English poets. If this extremity of fame has once more slightly receded, if Shelley holds his place among the sovereign minstrels of England, but rather abreast of than in front of them, it is because time has reduced certain of his violent paradoxes to commonplaces, and because the world, after giving several of his axioms of conduct full and respectful consideration, has determined to refrain from adopting them. Shelley, when he was not inspired and an artist, was a prophet vaguely didactic or neurotically prejudiced; his is the highest ideal of poetic art produced by the violence of the French Revolution, but we are too constantly reminded of that moral parentage, and his sans-culottism is no longer exhilarating, it is merely tiresome. There are elements, then, even in Shelley, which have to be pared away; but, when these are removed, the remainder is beautiful beyond the range of praise-perfect in aerial, choral melody, perfect in the splendour and purity of its imagery, perfect in the divine sweetness. and magnetic tenderness of its sentiment. He is probably the English writer who has achieved the highest successes in pure lyric, whether of an elaborate and antiphonal order, or of that which springs in a stream of soaring music straight from the heart.

Closely allied as he was with Byron in several respects, both of temperament and circumstance, it is fortunate that Shelley was very little affected by the predominance of his vehement rival. His intellectual ardour threw out, not puffs of smoke, as Byron's did, but a white vapour. He is not always transparent, but always translucent, and his mind moves ethereally among incorporeal images and pantheistic attributes, dimly at times, yet always clothed about with radiant purity. Of the gross Georgian mire not a particle stuck to the robes of Shelley. His diction is curiously compounded of forcible, fresh mintages, mingled with the verbiage of the lyric poets of the eighteenth century, so that at his best he seems like Eschylus, and at his worst merely like Akenside. For all his excessive attachment to revolutionary ideas, Shelley retains much more of the age of Gray than either Keats, Coleridge, or Wordsworth; his style, carefully considered, is seen to rest on a basis built about 1760, from which it is every moment springing and sparkling like a fountain in columns of ebullient lyricism. But sweep away from Shelley whatever gives us exquisite pleasure,

and the residuum will be found to belong to the eighteenth century. Hence, paradoxical as it sounds, the attitude of Shelley to style was in the main retrograde; he was, for instance, no admirer of the arabesques of the Cockney school. He was, above all else, a singer, and in the direction of song he rises at his best above all other English, perhaps above all other modern European poets. There is an ecstasy in his best lyrics and odes that claps its wings and soars until it is lost in the empyrean of transcendental melody. This rhapsodical charm is entirely inimitable; and in point of fact Shelley, passionately admired, has been very little followed, and with success, perhaps, only by Mr. Swinburne. His genius lay outside the general trend of our poetical evolution; he is exotic and unique, and such influence as he has had, apart from the effect on the pulse of the individual of the rutilant beauty of his strophes, has not been very

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advantageous. He is often hectic, and sometimes hysterical, and, to use his own singular image, those who seek for mutton-chops will discover that Shelley keeps a gin-palace.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) was the eldest son of Timothy Shelley and his wife, Elizabeth Pilfold; his grandfather, Bysshe Shelley, a man of brilliant gifts, was the head of one branch of a wealthy and ancient Sussex family, and was made a baronet in 1806. The poet was born at Field Place, Horsham, on the 4th of August 1792. In 1798 he was sent, with his sisters, to a private school at Warnham, and in 1802 to Sion House, Brentford; in 1805 he proceeded to Eton. Here the peculiarities of his nature began to be felt; "tamed by affection, but unconquered by blows, what chance was there that Shelley should be happy at a public school?" He gave himself to the study of chemistry under Dr. Lind, but towards the end of his Etonian life he seems to have turned to literature. During

QUEEN MAB:

PHILOSOPHICAL POEM:

WITH NOTES.

BY

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY.

ECRASEZ L'INFAME!

Correspondance de Voltaire.

the winter of 1809 he first began seriously to write, and to this date belong The Wandering Jew in verse, and the romance of Zastrozzi in prose. The latter absurdity was actually published early in 1810, and a little later in the same year appeared Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire (which was long lost, and was rediscovered in 1898), and a Republican hoax, the Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson. Shelley was therefore an experienced author when he matriculated at University College, Oxford, on the 10th of April 1810; he took up his residence in the following term. Here he immediately made acquaintance with T. J. Hogg, who has left us invaluable memories of this period in Shelley's life. During his brief stay at Oxford, Shelley was keen in the pursuit of miscellaneous knowledge; "no student ever read more assiduously. He was to be found, book in hand, at all hours, reading in season and out of season." But he hated the prescribed curriculum, and indulged already in speculations which were outside the range of Oxford daring. One of them was the paramount importance of liberty and of toleration. In February 1811, Shelley printed and circulated a pamphlet entitled The Necessity of Atheism, to which the attention of the Master of his college was presently drawn, and on the 25th of March he and Hogg were expelled from the University. His father forbade him to return to Field Place, and the friends settled in lodgings at No. 15 Poland Street, London. After a short period of pinching poverty, Shelley was reconciled to his father, and received an allowance of £200 a year. Late in the summer of 1811 a foolish schoolgirl, Harriet Westbrook, threw herself on Shelley's protection, and, without loving her, he married her in Edinburgh. The eccentric movements of the next few months have occupied the biographers of the poet somewhat in excess of their real importance. The absurd young couple went to York, to Keswick, to Dublin, in each place proposing to stay "for ever." In February 1812 they issued their revolutionary Address to the Irish People, and other pamphlets. They were warned to leave Dublin, and in April we find them settled. at Nantgwilt in North Wales, and a little later at Lynmouth. Their movements now became incessant, but in April 1813 they were again in London, where in June their first child, Ianthe, was born. In this year was published Queen Mab, the last and best of the works of Shelley's crude first period. Meanwhile he had made the acquaintance of Godwin, with whose family he formed a violent friendship, culminating in love. for Godwin's daughter Mary, a girl of sixteen, with whom he eloped to France in

Avia Pieridum peragro loca, nullius ante
Trita solo; juvat integros accedere fouteis;
Atque haurire: juratque novos decerpere flores.

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Unde prius nulli velarint tempora musæ.
Primum quod magnis doceo de rebus; et arctis
Religionum animnos nodis exsolvere pergo.
Lucret. lib. iv.

Δος το ςῶ, καὶ κοσμον κινήσω.

LONDON:

Archimedes,

PRINTED BY P. B. SHELLEY,
23, Chapel Street, Grosvenor Square.
1813.

Title-page of the First Edition of
Shelley's "Queen Mab."

July 1814; he never saw Harriet again, and in December 1816 she committed suicide, not, however, it is only just to say, from any apparent disappointment at ceasing to live with Shelley. The poet, Mary Godwin, and her cousin Jane Clairemont, crossed France partly on foot, entered Switzerland over the Jura, and stayed at Brunnen till their money was exhausted, when they returned to England by the Rhine in September. In 1815 Sir Timothy succeeded to the title and estates, and an arrangement was made by which the poet received £1000 a year. The wanderings were now resumed on a bolder scale, and Shelley gained that knowledge of natural scenery which was in future to be so prominent a feature of his work. Up to this time he had written hardly anything which was of real merit; his genius now woke up, and the first-fruits of

ADONAIS

AUTHOR OF ENDYMION, HYPERION ETC.

BY

PERCY. B. SHELLEY

Αστήρ πρὶν μὲν ἔλαμπες τι ζώοισιν είδος.
Νυν δε θανών, λαμπεις ἔσπερος εν αλίμενος.

PISA

PLATU

it was Alastor, published in 1816. In May of that year Shelley and Byron met for the first time at Geneva, and were thrown into mutual daily intercourse. Returning to England in the autumn, Shelley took a cottage at AN ELEGY ON THE DEATH OF JOHN KEATS, Great Marlowe, and in December he married Mary Godwin. In 1817, although worried with a Chancery suit about the custody of his children by his first wife, Shelley wrote his long poem of Laon and Cythna (The Revolt of Islam). His health now began to give him much apprehension, and in the winter of 1817 he seemed to be sinking in a consumption. In March 1818, to find a warmer climate, the Shelleys left England in company with Jane Clairemont and Byron's child Allegra. The rest of the year was spent wandering through Italy in search of a home to suit them. During this year they saw much of Byron. The winter of 1818 was spent by Shelley at Naples in "constant and poignant physical suffering," and in deep depression of spirits. His health was, notwithstanding, steadily tending towards recovery; there was no organic disease, and if Shelley had escaped drowning he might have become a tough old man. The Shelleys lived in Italy almost without other acquaintances than Byron, and an agreeable family at Leghorn, the Gisbornes. In 1819 he published Rosalind and Helen and The Cenci; in June he lost in Rome his dearly-loved son William, who now lies buried beside his father and Keats. In November another son, afterwards Sir Percy Florence Shelley, was born to them in Florence. The poet was now at the very height of his genius, composing continuously, and before 1819 was closed he had finished Prometheus Unbound, which, with some of the most splendid of all Shelley's lyrics, was published the following year. None of these publications, however, attracted either the critics or the public, and in the summer of 1819 Shelley was violently attacked by the Quarterly Review. He was branded as a dangerous atheist, and, as Trelawney records, was now universally shunned by English visitors

WITH THE TYPES OF DIDOT
#DCCCXXI.

Title-page of the First Edition of
Shelley's "Adonais"

to Italy, and treated as a monster. It is even said that a brute of an Englishman

The Gulf of Spezia

From a Drawing by Clarkson Stanfield

knocked him down with his fist on hearing his name in the post-office at Pisa, where the Shelleys settled early in January 1820. Byron came to the Villa Lanfranchi to be near them, and here they enjoyed the friendship of Trelawney, Medwin, and the Williamses. Shelley's publications during the year were Prometheus Unbound and the anonymous satirico-political drama of Edipus Tyrannus. At Pisa, however, his faculties were blunted and depressed, and it is far from certain that

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constant intercourse with so mannered a character as that of Byron was beneficial to

Shelley. In the beginning of 1821, however, he was greatly roused by his Platonic attachment to the imprisoned novice, Emilia Viviani, about whom he composed Epipsychidion, and published it anonymously as the work of a man who "died at Florence as he was preparing for a voyage to the Cyclades." The death of Keats also deeply moved Shelley, and he wrote the elegy of Adonais, which he printed at Pisa in 1821. A visit of Prince Mavrocordato to the Shelleys in April roused the poet to a ferment of enthusiasm for the cause of Greek liberty, and he sat down to the composition of his choral drama of Hellas. He wrote, "Our roots never struck so deeply as at Pisa;" and this continued his real home to the last, although in April 1822, in order to escape the heat, the whole

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circle of friends transported themselves to the Gulf of Spezzia. They rented near

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