"WITH DEATHLESS MINDS, WHICH LEAVE WHERE THEY HAVE PASSED A PATH OF LIGHT, MY SOUL COMMUNION KNEW."-Shelley. "TO BE GOOD, JOYOUS, BEAUTIFUL, and free,—(SHELLEY) PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY. 389 Percy Bysshe Shelley. 66 [PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY was the son and heir of Sir Timothy Shelley, Bart., of Castle Goring, in Sussex, and was born at Field Place, in that county, on the 4th of August 1792. He was educated at Eton, and afterwards at Oxford, where his enthusiastic genius early displayed itself in a contempt of traditional forms and conventionalities, and a resistance to all arbitrary authority. He became not only a Republican but an Atheist, and avowed his opinions with all the energy and fervour of his excitable nature. Harshly treated by the college authorities, and expelled from Oxford, he was nevertheless ready to sacrifice station, and fortune, and his dearest affections, at what he conceived to be the shrine of truth. At the age of eighteen he produced a wild irregular poem, Queen Mab," many of whose sentiments he lived to disavow; married a Miss Harriet Westbrook, a beauty, but nothing more; travelled in England, Ireland, and Wales; studied medicine; and wrote poetry. His wife left him; but he found a more congenial spirit in Mary Wollstonecraft, the daughter of Godwin the novelist, and whom he afterwards married (in 1816). Settling at Marlow, on the bank of the Thames, he composed his "Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude," in which the beauties of Nature are described with earnest feeling, rich fancy, and great picturesqueness of language. He also wrote in this sylvan retreat his "Revolt of Islam," a gorgeous vision of a regenerated world. In 1818 he quitted England, and took up his residence in Italy, where he successively produced his classical, mystical, and metaphysical drama of "Prometheus Unbound;" his noble tragedy of "The Cenci," which most critics will consider the poet's masterpiece; "Hellas;" "The Witch of Atlas;" "Rosalind and Helen;" "Julian and Maddalo;" and 'Adonais," an elegy to the memory of Keats. His favourite amusement was boating; and while on his homeward voyage from Leghorn, on the 8th of July 1822, his yacht was overtaken by a squall in the Bay of Spezzia, and all on board perished. His body was washed ashore, reduced to ashes by fire, and interred in the Protestant burial-ground at Rome. Such was the brief and eventful career of Percy Bysshe Shelley, a poet whose powers only needed years and experience to have ripened into a splendid maturity. He possessed imagination, fancy, an exquisite sense of melody, a high and spiritual feeling; but he lacked judgment, unity, and depth of thought, and the power of realizing his abstract conceptions. In reading his poetry we are constantly coming upon some gorgeously radiant idea; but when we investigate it, we are disappointed, like Ixion: the supposed goddess melts into a luminous mist. "He seems to have written under the notion," says Sir Henry Taylor, "that no phenomena can be perfectly poetical, until they shall have been so decomposed from their natural order and coherency as to be brought before the reader in the likeness of a phantasma or a vision. A poet is, in his estimation, purely and pre-eminently a visionary. Much beauty, exceeding splendour of diction and imagery, cannot but be perceived in his poetry, as well as exquisite THIS IS ALONE LIFE, JOY, AND VICTORY!"-P. B. SHELLEY. "THE VERY WORM THAT CRAWLS BENEATH THE SOD, IN LOVE AND WORSHIP LIFTS ITSELF TO GOD."-PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY. "WE MIGHT BE OTHERWISE-WE MIGHT be all we DREAM OF, HAPPY, HIGH, MAJESTICAL."-SHELLEY. I heard, as all have heard, life s VARIOUS STORY,-(shelley) charms of versification; and a reader of an apprehensive fancy will doubt- "In spite of all his faults," says Mr. Kingsley, "in spite of bombast, Higher still and higher, From the earth thou springest, Like a cloud of fire! The blue deep thou wingest, And singing still dost soar; and soaring, ever singest. In the golden lightning Of the sunken sun, O'er which clouds are bright'ning, Thou dost float and run; Like an unbodied joy, whose race has just begun. AND IN NO CARELESS HEART TRANSCRIBED THE TALE."-SHELLEY. "WHERE IS THE BEAUTY, LOVE, AND TRUTH WE SEEK, BUT IN OUR MINDS?"-PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY. "TWO POWERS O'ER MORTAL THINGS DOMINION HOLD, TO A SKYLARK The pale purple even Melts around thy Like a star of heaven In the broad day- Thou art unseen, but yet "THERE IS ONE ROAD TO PEACE, AND THAT IS TRUTH, WHICH FOLLOW YE."-PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY. 391 "MAN IS OF SOUL AND BODY FORMED FOR DEEDS OF HIGH RESOLVE."-PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY. With thy voice is laud, ["Higher still and higher, from the earth As, when night is bare, From one lonely cloud The moon rains out her beams, and heaven is over flowed. 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. RULING THE WORLD WITH A DIVIDED LOT."-SHELLEY. "MOST WRETCHED MEN ARE CRADLED INTO POETRY BY WRONG:-(SHELLEY) " 392 ALAS, THAT LOVE SHOULD BE A BLIGHT AND SNARE (SHELLEY) PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY. Like a poet hidden In the light of thought, Till the world is wrought To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not. "THEY LEARN IN SUFFERING WHAT THEY TEACH IN SONG."-PERCY B. SHELLEY. With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower. Like a glow-worm golden In a dell of dew, TO THOSE WHO SEEK ALL SYMPATHIES IN ONE!"-P. B. SHELLEY. "THOUGHTS OF GREAT DEEDS WERE MINE, DEAR FRiend, when first 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. "TO LOVE, AND BEAR; TO HOPE TILL HOPE CREATES FROM ITS OWN WRECK THE THING IT CONTEMPLATES."-SHELLEY. Sound of vernal showers Rain-awakened flowers, All that ever was Joyous, and clear, and fresh, thy music doth surpass. Teach me, sprite or bird, What sweet thoughts are thine : I have never heard Praise of love or wine That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine. Chorus hymeneal, Or triumphal chant, Matched with thine would be all But an empty vaunt A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want. What objects are the fountains Of thy happy strain? What fields, or waves, or mountains? What shapes of sky or plain? What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of pain? THE CLOUDS WHICH WRAP THIS WORLD FROM YOUTH DID PASS." -SHELLEY. "WAR IS THE STATESMAN'S GAME, THE priest's deLIGHT, THE LAWYER'S JEST, THE HIRED ASSASSIN'S TRADE."-SHELLEY. |