those massive ruins where, in his day, art and nature were inextricably blended, the Palatine, the Colosseum, and the Baths of Caracalla. In a letter to Peacock, he gives a description of the last mentioned, which is interesting as exhibiting points of resemblance with the imaginary scenery of some of his own poetry.

The next most considerable relic of antiquity, considered as a ruin, is the Thermæ of Caracalla. These consist of six enormous chambers above two hundred feet in height, and each enclosing a vast space like that of a field. There are, in addition, a number of towers and labyrinthine recesses, hidden and woven over by the wild growth of weeds and ivy. Never was any desolation more sublime and lovely. The perpendicular wall of ruin is cloven into steep ravines filled up with flowering shrubs, whose thick, twisted roots are knotted in the rifts of the stones. At every step the aerial pinnacles of shattered stone group into new combinations of effect, and tower above the lofty yet level walls as the distant mountains change their aspect to one travelling rapidly along the plain. . . . These walls surround green and level spaces of lawn, on which some elms have grown, and which are interspersed towards their skirts by masses of the fallen ruin overtwined with the broad leaves of the creeping weeds. The blue sky canopies it, and is as the everlasting roof of these enormous halls. But the most interesting effect remains. In one of the buttresses that supports an immense and lofty arch which "bridges the very winds of heaven are the crumbling remains of an antique winding staircase, whose sides are open in many places to the precipice. This you ascend and arrive on the summit of these piles. There grow on every side thick entangled wildernesses of myrtle, and the myrletus, and bay, and the flowering laurustinus, whose white blossoms are just developed, the wild fig, and a thousand nameless plants sown by the wandering winds. These woods are intersected on every side by paths, like sheep tracks through the copse wood of steep mountains, which wind to every part of this immense labyrinth. From the midst rise those pinnacles and masses, themselves like immense mountains, which have been seen

from below. . . . Come to Rome. It is a scene by which expression is overpowered, which words cannot convey. Still farther, winding up one-half of the shattered pyramids by the path through the blooming copse-wood, you come to a little mossy lawn surrounded by wild shrubs; it is overgrown with anemones, wallflowers, and violets, whose stalks pierce the starry moss, and with radiant blue flowers whose names I know not, and which scatter through the air the divinest odour, which, as you recline under the shade of the ruin, produces sensations of voluptuous faintness like the combinations of sweet music. The paths still wind on, threading the perplexed windings, other lawns, and deep dells of wood and lofty rocks and terrific chasms. When I tell you that these ruins cover several acres, and that the paths above penetrate at least half their extent, your imagination will fill up all that I am unable to express of this astonishing scene.

Amidst such scenes the poet wandered while he composed the second and third acts of the Prometheus. Nature and art, however, were not enough. He felt keenly the contempt of the world for him as a man, its neglect of him as a poet. "I am regarded by all who know or hear me, except, I think, on the whole, five individuals, as a prodigy of crime and pollution whose look even might infect. . . . Such is the spirit of the English abroad as well as at home." In June another sorrow befell Shelley and his wife, their remaining child died. Shelley wrote to Peacock: "Yesterday, after an illness of only a few days, my little William died. There was no hope from the moment of the attack. You will be kind enough to tell all my friends, so that I need not write to them. It is a great exertion to me to write this, and it seems to me as if, hunted by calamity as I have been, that I should never recover my cheerfulness again."

The

The summer of 1819 was spent in Leghorn and its neighborhood. Its chief literary outcome was The Cenci. inspiration had come from the story and picture of Beatrice, with both of which he had become acquainted at Rome.

A

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

"The

poems, their author was always opposed to violence. 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 Persa 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.

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