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Percy Bysshe Shelley

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Title: Percy Bysshe Shelley

Author: John Addington Symonds


        
Release date: October 1, 2003 [eBook #4555]
                Most recently updated: December 28, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4555

Credits: Produced by Rebecca Trump and Sue Asscher.  HTML version by Al Haines.


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY ***




Produced by Rebecca Trump and Sue Asscher.  HTML version by Al Haines.









ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS

EDITED BY JOHN MORLEY.



PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

BY

JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS.




CONTENTS.


CHAPTER 1. BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD.

CHAPTER 2. ETON AND OXFORD.

CHAPTER 3. LIFE IN LONDON, AND FIRST MARRIAGE.

CHAPTER 4. SECOND RESIDENCE IN LONDON, AND SEPARATION FROM HARRIET.

CHAPTER 5. LIFE AT MARLOW, AND JOURNEY TO ITALY.

CHAPTER 6. RESIDENCE AT PISA.

CHAPTER 7. LAST DAYS.

CHAPTER 8. EPILOGUE.




LIST OF AUTHORITIES.

1.  The Poetical and Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, edited by Mrs.
    Shelley. Moxon, 1840, 1845. 1 volume.

2.  The Poetical Works, edited by Harry Buxton Forman. Reeves and Turner,
    1876-7. 4 volumes.

3.  The Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, edited by W.M. Rossetti. Moxon,
    1870. 2 volumes.

4.  Hogg's Life of Shelley. Moxon, 1858. 2 volumes.

5.  Trelawny's Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author. Pickering,
    1878. 2 volumes.

6.  Shelley Memorials, edited by Lady Shelley. Smith and Elder. 1 volume.

7.  Medwin's Life of Shelley. Newby, 1847. 2 volumes.

8.  Shelley's Early Life, by D.F. McCarthy. Chatto and Windus. 1 volume.

9.  Leigh Hunt's Autobiography. Smith and Elder.

10. W.M. Rossetti's Life of Shelley, included in the edition above
    cited, Number 3.

11. Shelley, a Critical Biography, by G.B. Smith. David Douglas, 1877.

12. Relics of Shelley, edited by Richard Garnett. Moxon, 1862.

13. Peacock's Articles on Shelley in "Fraser's Magazine," 1858 and 1860.

14. Shelley in Pall Mall, by R. Garnett, in "Macmillan's Magazine,"
    June, 1860.

15. Shelley's Last Days, by R. Garnett, in the "Fortnightly Review,"
    June, 1878.

16. Two Lectures on Shelley, by W.M. Rossetti, in the "University
    Magazine," February and March, 1878.




SHELLEY.



CHAPTER 1.

BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD.

It is worse than useless to deplore the irremediable; yet no man,
probably, has failed to mourn the fate of mighty poets, whose dawning
gave the promise of a glorious day, but who passed from earth while yet
the light that shone in them was crescent. That the world should know
Marlowe and Giorgione, Raphael and Mozart, only by the products of their
early manhood, is indeed a cause for lamentation, when we remember what
the long lives of a Bach and Titian, a Michelangelo and Goethe, held in
reserve for their maturity and age. It is of no use to persuade
ourselves, as some have done, that we possess the best work of men
untimely slain. Had Sophocles been cut off in his prime, before the
composition of "Oedipus"; had Handel never merged the fame of his
forgotten operas in the immortal music of his oratorios; had Milton been
known only by the poems of his youth, we might with equal plausibility
have laid that flattering unction to our heart. And yet how shallow
would have been our optimism, how fallacious our attempt at consolation.
There is no denying the fact that when a young Marcellus is shown by
fate for one brief moment, and withdrawn before his springtime has
bought forth the fruits of summer, we must bow in silence to the law of
waste that rules inscrutably in nature.

Such reflections are forced upon us by the lives of three great English
poets of this century. Byron died when he was thirty-six, Keats when he
was twenty-five, and Shelley when he was on the point of completing his
thirtieth year. Of the three, Keats enjoyed the briefest space for the
development of his extraordinary powers. His achievement, perfect as it
is in some poetic qualities, remains so immature and incomplete that no
conjecture can be hazarded about his future. Byron lived longer, and
produced more than his brother poets. Yet he was extinguished when his
genius was still ascendant, when his "swift and fair creations" were
issuing like worlds from an archangel's hands. In his case we have
perhaps only to deplore the loss of masterpieces that might have
equalled, but could scarcely have surpassed, what we possess. Shelley's
early death is more to be regretted. Unlike Keats and Byron, he died by
a mere accident. His faculties were far more complex, and his aims were
more ambitious than theirs. He therefore needed length of years for
their co-ordination; and if a fuller life had been allotted him, we have
the certainty that from the discords of his youth he would have wrought
a clear and lucid harmony.

These sentences form a somewhat gloomy prelude to a biography. Yet the
student of Shelley's life, the sincere admirer of his genius, is almost
forced to strike a solemn key-note at the outset. We are not concerned
with one whose "little world of man" for good or ill was perfected, but
with one whose growth was interrupted just before the synthesis of which
his powers were capable had been accomplished.

August 4, 1792, is one of the most memorable dates in the history of
English literature. On this day Percy Bysshe Shelley was born at Field
Place, near Horsham, in the county of Sussex. His father, named Timothy,
was the eldest son of Bysshe Shelley, Esquire, of Goring Castle, in the
same county. The Shelley family could boast of great antiquity and
considerable wealth. Without reckoning earlier and semi-legendary
honours, it may here be recorded that it is distinguished in the elder
branch by one baronetcy dating from 1611, and by a second in the younger
dating from 1806. In the latter year the poet's grandfather received
this honour through the influence of his friend the Duke of Norfolk. Mr.
Timothy Shelley was born in the year 1753, and in 1791 he married
Elizabeth, daughter of Charles Pilford, Esquire, a lady of great beauty,
and endowed with fair intellectual ability, though not of a literary
temperament. The first child of this marriage was the poet, named Bysshe
in compliment to his grandfather, the then living head of the family,
and Percy because of some remote connexion with the ducal house of
Northumberland. Four daughters, Elizabeth, Mary, Hellen, and Margaret,
and one son, John, who died in the year 1866, were the subsequent issue
of Mr. Timothy Shelley's marriage. In the year 1815, upon the death of
his father, he succeeded to the baronetcy, which passed, after his own
death, to his grandson, the present Sir Percy Florence Shelley, as the
poet's only surviving son.

Before quitting, once and for all, the arid region of genealogy, it may
be worth mentioning that Sir Bysshe Shelley by his second marriage with
Miss Elizabeth Jane Sydney Perry, heiress of Penshurst, became the
father of five children, the eldest son of whom assumed the name of
Shelley-Sidney, received a baronetcy, and left a son, Philip Charles
Sidney, who was created Lord De l'Isle and Dudley. Such details are not
without a certain value, inasmuch as they prove that the poet, who won
for his ancient and honourable house a fame far more illustrious than
titles can confer, was sprung from a man of no small personal force and
worldly greatness. Sir Bysshe Shelley owed his position in society, the
wealth he accumulated, and the honours he transmitted to two families,
wholly and entirely to his own exertions. Though he bore a name already
distinguished in the annals of the English landed gentry, he had to make
his own fortune under conditions of some difficulty. He was born in
North America, and began life, it is said, as a quack doctor. There is
also a legend of his having made a first marriage with a person of
obscure birth in America. Yet such was the charm of his address, the
beauty of his person, the dignity of his bearing, and the vigour of his
will, that he succeeded in winning the hands and fortunes of two English
heiresses; and, having begun the world with nothing, he left it at the
age of seventy-four, bequeathing 300,000 pounds in the English Funds,
together with estates worth 20,000 pounds a year to his descendents.

Percy Bysshe Shelley was therefore born in the purple of the English
squirearchy; but never assuredly did the old tale of the swan hatched
with the hen's brood of ducklings receive a more emphatic illustration
than in this case. Gifted with the untameable individuality of genius,
and bent on piercing to the very truth beneath all shams and fictions
woven by society and ancient usage, he was driven by the circumstances
of his birth and his surroundings into an exaggerated warfare with the
world's opinion. His too frequent tirades against:--

    The Queen of Slaves,
    The hood-winked Angel of the blind and dead,
    Custom,--

owed much of their asperity to the early influences brought to bear upon
him by relatives who prized their position in society, their wealth, and
the observance of conventional decencies, above all other things.

Mr. Timothy Shelley was in no sense of the word a bad man; but he was
everything which the poet's father ought not to have been. As member for
the borough of Shoreham, he voted blindly with his party; and that party
looked to nothing beyond the interests of the gentry and the pleasure of
the Duke of Norfolk. His philosophy was limited to a superficial
imitation of Lord Chesterfield, whose style he pretended to affect in
his familiar correspondence, though his letters show that he lacked the
rudiments alike of logic and of grammar. His religious opinions might be
summed up in Clough's epigram:--

    At church on Sunday to attend
    Will serve to keep the world your friend.

His morality in like manner was purely conventional, as may be gathered
from his telling his eldest son that he would never pardon a
mesalliance, but would provide for as many illegitimate children as he
chose to have. For the rest, he appears to have been a fairly good
landlord, and a not unkind father, sociable and hospitable, somewhat
vain and occasionally odd in manner, but qualified for passing muster
with the country gentlemen around him. In the capacity to understand a
nature which deviated from the ordinary type so remarkably as Shelley's,
he was utterly deficient; and perhaps we ought to regard it as his
misfortune that fate made him the father of a man who was among the
greatest portents of originality and unconventionality that this century
has seen. Toward an ordinary English youth, ready to sow his wild oats
at college, and willing to settle at the proper age and take his place
upon the bench of magistrates, Sir Timothy Shelley would have shown
himself an indulgent father; and it must be conceded by the poet's
biographer that if Percy Bysshe had but displayed tact and consideration
on his side, many of the misfortunes which signalized his relations to
his father would have been avoided.

Shelley passed his childhood at Field Place, and when he was about six
years old began to be taught, together with his sisters, by Mr. Edwards,
a clergyman who lived at Warnham. What is recorded of these early years
we owe to the invaluable communications of his sister Hellen. The
difference of age between her and her brother Bysshe obliges us to refer
her recollections to a somewhat later period--probably to the holidays
he spent away from Sion House and Eton. Still, since they introduce us
to the domestic life of his then loved home, it may be proper to make
quotations from them in this place. Miss Shelley tells us her brother
"would frequently come to the nursery, and was full of a peculiar kind
of pranks. One piece of mischief, for which he was rebuked, was running
a stick through the ceiling of a low passage to find some new chamber,
which could be made effective for some flights of his vivid
imagination." He was very much attached to his sisters, and used to
entertain them with stories, in which "an alchemist, old and grey, with
a long beard," who was supposed to abide mysteriously in the garret of
Field Place, played a prominent part. "Another favourite theme was the
'Great Tortoise,' that lived in Warnham Pond; and any unwonted noise was
accounted for by the presence of this great beast, which was made into
the fanciful proportions most adapted to excite awe and wonder." To his
friend Hogg, in after-years, Shelley often spoke about another reptile,
no mere creature of myth or fable, the "Old Snake," who had inhabited
the gardens of Field Place for several generations. This venerable
serpent was accidentally killed by the gardener's scythe; but he lived
long in the poet's memory, and it may reasonably be conjectured that
Shelley's peculiar sympathy for snakes was due to the dim recollection
of his childhood's favourite. Some of the games he invented to please
his sisters were grotesque, and some both perilous and terrifying. "We
dressed ourselves in strange costumes to personate spirits or fiends,
and Bysshe would take a fire-stove and fill it with some inflammable
liquid, and carry it flaming into the kitchen and to the back door."
Shelley often took his sisters for long country rambles over hedge and
fence, carrying them when the difficulties of the ground or their
fatigue required it. At this time "his figure was slight and
beautiful,--his hands were models, and his feet are treading the earth
again in one of his race; his eyes too have descended in their wild
fixed beauty to the same person. As a child, I have heard that his skin
was like snow, and bright ringlets covered his head." Here is a little
picture which brings the boy vividly before our eyes: "Bysshe ordered
clothes according to his own fancy at Eton, and the beautifully fitting
silk pantaloons, as he stood as almost all men and boys do, with their
coat-tails near the fire, excited my silent though excessive
admiration."

When he was ten years of age, Shelley went to school at Sion house,
Brentford, an academy kept by Dr. Greenlaw, and frequented by the sons
of London tradesmen, who proved but uncongenial companions to his gentle
spirit. It is fortunate for posterity that one of his biographers, his
second cousin Captain Medwin, was his schoolfellow at Sion House; for to
his recollections we owe some details of great value. Medwin tells us
that Shelley learned the classic languages almost by intuition, while he
seemed to be spending his time in dreaming, now watching the clouds as
they sailed across the school-room window, and now scribbling sketches
of fir-trees and cedars in memory of Field Place. At this time he was
subject to sleep-walking, and, if we may credit this biographer, he
often lost himself in reveries not far removed from trance. His
favourite amusement was novel-reading; and to the many "blue books" from
the Minerva press devoured by him in his boyhood, we may ascribe the
style and tone of his first compositions. For physical sports he showed
no inclination. "He passed among his school-fellows as a strange and
unsocial being; for when a holiday relieved us from our tasks, and the
other boys were engaged in such sports as the narrow limits of our
prison-court allowed, Shelley, who entered into none of them, would pace
backwards and forwards--I think I see him now--along the southern wall,
indulging in various vague and undefined ideas, the chaotic elements, if
I may say so, of what afterwards produced so beautiful a world."

Two of Shelley's most important biographical compositions undoubtedly
refer to this period of his boyhood. The first is the passage in the
Prelude to "Laon and Cythna" which describes his suffering among the
unsympathetic inmates of a school:--

    Thoughts of great deeds were mine, dear Friend, when first
    The clouds which wrap this world from youth did pass.
    I do remember well the hour which burst
    My spirit's sleep: a fresh May-dawn it was,
    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 woes--
    The harsh and grating strife of tyrants and of foes.

    And then I clasped my hands and looked around--
    --But none was near to mock my streaming eyes,
    Which poured their warm drops on the sunny ground--
    So without shame I spake:--"I will be wise,
    And just, and free, and mild, if in me lies
    Such power, for I grow weary to behold
    The selfish and the strong still tyrannize
    Without reproach or check." I then controlled
    My tears, my heart grew calm, and I was meek and bold.

    And from that hour did I with earnest thought
    Heap knowledge from forbidden mines of lore,
    Yet nothing that my tyrants knew or taught
    I cared to learn, but from that secret store
    Wrought linked armour for my soul, before
    It might walk forth to war among mankind.
    Thus power and hope were strengthened more and more
    Within me, till there came upon my mind
    A sense of loneliness, a thirst with which I pined.

The second is a fragment on friendship preserved by Hogg. After defining
that kind of passionate attachment which often precedes love in fervent
natures, he proceeds: "I remember forming an attachment of this kind at
school. I cannot recall to my memory the precise epoch at which this
took pace; but I imagine it must have been at the age of eleven or
twelve. The object of these sentiments was a boy about my own age, of a
character eminently generous, brave, and gentle; and the elements of
human feeling seemed to have been, from his birth, genially compounded
within him. There was a delicacy and a simplicity in his manners,
inexpressibly attractive. It has never been my fortune to meet with him
since my school-boy days; but either I confound my present recollections
with the delusions of past feelings, or he is now a source of honour and
utility to every one around him. The tones of his voice were so soft and
winning, that every word pierced into my heart; and their pathos was so
deep, that in listening to him the tears have involuntarily gushed from
my eyes. Such was the being for whom I first experienced the sacred
sentiments of friendship." How profound was the impression made on his
imagination and his feelings by this early friendship, may again be
gathered from a passage in his note upon the antique group of Bacchus
and Ampelus at Florence. "Look, the figures are walking with a
sauntering and idle pace, and talking to each other as they walk, as you
may have seen a younger and an elder boy at school, walking in some
grassy spot of the play-ground with that tender friendship for each
other which the age inspires."

These extracts prove beyond all question that the first contact with the
outer world called into activity two of Shelley's strongest moral
qualities--his hatred of tyranny and brutal force in any form, and his
profound sentiment of friendship. The admiring love of women, which
marked him no less strongly, and which made him second only to
Shakespere in the sympathetic delineation of a noble feminine ideal, had
been already developed by his deep affection for his mother and sisters.
It is said that he could not receive a letter from them without manifest
joy.

"Shelley," says Medwin, "was at this time tall for his age, slightly and
delicately built, and rather narrow-chested, with a complexion fair and
ruddy, a face rather long than oval. His features, not regularly
handsome, were set off by a profusion of silky brown hair, that curled
naturally. The expression of his countenance was one of exceeding
sweetness and innocence. His blue eyes were very large and prominent.
They were at times, when he was abstracted, as he often was in
contemplation, dull, and as it were, insensible to external objects; at
others they flashed with the fire of intelligence. His voice was soft
and low, but broken in its tones,--when anything much interested him,
harsh and immodulated; and this peculiarity he never lost. He was
naturally calm, but when he heard of or read of some flagrant act of
injustice, oppression, or cruelty, then indeed the sharpest marks of
horror and indignation were visible in his countenance."

Such as the child was, we shall find the man to have remained unaltered
through the short space of life allowed him. Loving, innocent,
sensitive, secluded from the vulgar concerns of his companions, strongly
moralized after a peculiar and inborn type of excellence, drawing his
inspirations from Nature and from his own soul in solitude, Shelley
passed across the stage of this world, attended by a splendid vision
which sustained him at a perilous height above the kindly race of men.
The penalty of this isolation he suffered in many painful episodes. The
reward he reaped in a measure of more authentic prophecy, and in a
nobler realization of his best self, than could be claimed by any of his
immediate contemporaries.



CHAPTER 2.

ETON AND OXFORD.

In 1805 Shelley went from Sion House to Eton. At this time Dr. Keate was
headmaster and Shelley's tutor was a Mr. Bethel, "one of the dullest men
in the establishment." At Eton Shelley was not popular either with his
teachers or his elder school-fellows, although the boys of his own age
are said to have adored him. "He was all passion," writes Mrs. Shelley;
"passionate in his resistance to an injury, passionate in his love:" and
this vehemence of temperament he displayed by organizing a rebellion
against fagging, which no doubt won for him the applause of his juniors
and equals. It was not to be expected that a lad intolerant of rule and
disregardful of restriction, who neglected punctuality in the
performance of his exercises, while he spent his leisure in translating
half of Pliny's history, should win the approbation of pedagogues. At
the same time the inspired opponent of the fagging system, the scorner
of games and muscular amusements, could not hope to find much favour
with such martinets of juvenile convention as a public school is wont to
breed. At Eton, as elsewhere, Shelley's uncompromising spirit brought
him into inconvenient contact with a world of vulgar usage, while his
lively fancy invested the commonplaces of reality with dark hues
borrowed from his own imagination. Mrs. Shelley says of him, "Tamed by
affection, but unconquered by blows, what chance was there that Shelley
should be happy at a public school?" This sentence probably contains the
pith of what he afterwards remembered of his own school life, and there
is no doubt that a nature like his, at once loving and high-spirited,
had much to suffer. It was a mistake, however, to suppose that at Eton
there were any serious blows to bear, or to assume that laws of love
which might have led a spirit so gentle as Shelley's, were adapted to
the common stuff of which the English boy is formed. The latter mistake
Shelley made continually throughout his youth; and only the advance of
years tempered his passionate enthusiasm into a sober zeal for the
improvement of mankind by rational methods. We may also trace at this
early epoch of his life that untamed intellectual ambition--that neglect
of the immediate and detailed for the transcendental and
universal--which was a marked characteristic of his genius, leading him
to fly at the highest while he overleaped the facts of ordinary human
life. "From his earliest years," says Mrs. Shelley, "all his amusements
and occupations were of a daring, and in one sense of the term, lawless
nature. He delighted to exert his powers, not as a boy, but as a man;
and so with manly powers and childish wit, he dared and achieved
attempts that none of his comrades could even have conceived. His
understanding and the early development of imagination never permitted
him to mingle in childish plays; and his natural aversion to tyranny
prevented him from paying due attention to his school duties. But he was
always actively employed; and although his endeavours were prosecuted
with puerile precipitancy, yet his aim and thoughts were constantly
directed to those great objects which have employed the thoughts of the
greatest among men; and though his studies were not followed up
according to school discipline, they were not the less diligently
applied to." This high-soaring ambition was the source both of his
weakness and his strength in art, as well as in his commerce with the
world of men. The boy who despised discipline and sought to extort her
secrets from nature by magic, was destined to become the philanthropist
who dreamed of revolutionizing society by eloquence, and the poet who
invented in "Prometheus Unbound" forms of grandeur too colossal to be
animated with dramatic life.

A strong interest in experimental science had been already excited in
him at Sion House by the exhibition of an orrery; and this interest grew
into a passion at Eton. Experiments in chemistry and electricity, of the
simpler and more striking kind, gave him intense pleasure--the more so
perhaps because they were forbidden. On one occasion he set the trunk of
an old tree on fire with a burning-glass: on another, while he was
amusing himself with a blue flame, his tutor came into the room and
received a severe shock from a highly-charged Leyden jar. During the
holidays Shelley carried on the same pursuits at Field Place. "His own
hands and clothes," says Miss Shelley, "were constantly stained and
corroded with acids, and it only seemed too probable that some day the
house would be burned down, or some serious mischief happen to himself
or others from the explosion of combustibles." This taste for science
Shelley long retained. If we may trust Mr. Hogg's memory, the first
conversation which that friend had with him at Oxford consisted almost
wholly of an impassioned monologue from Shelley on the revolution to be
wrought by science in all realms of thought. His imagination was
fascinated by the boundless vistas opened to the student of chemistry.
When he first discovered that the four elements were not final, it gave
him the acutest pleasure: and this is highly characteristic of the
genius which was always seeking to transcend and reach the life of life
withdrawn from ordinary gaze. On the other hand he seems to have
delighted in the toys of science, playing with a solar microscope, and
mixing strangest compounds in his crucibles, without taking the trouble
to study any of its branches systematically. In his later years he
abandoned these pursuits. But a charming reminiscence of them occurs in
that most delightful of his familiar poems, the "Letter to Maria
Gisborne."

While translating Pliny and dabbling in chemistry, Shelley was not
wholly neglectful of Etonian studies. He acquired a fluent, if not a
correct, knowledge of both Greek and Latin, and astonished his
contemporaries by the facility with which he produced verses in the
latter language. His powers of memory were extraordinary, and the
rapidity with which he read a book, taking in seven or eight lines at a
glance, and seizing the sense upon the hint of leading words, was no
less astonishing. Impatient speed and indifference to minutiae were
indeed among the cardinal qualities of his intellect. To them we may
trace not only the swiftness of his imaginative flight, but also his
frequent satisfaction with the somewhat less than perfect in artistic
execution.

That Shelley was not wholly friendless or unhappy at Eton may be
gathered from numerous small circumstances. Hogg says that his Oxford
rooms were full of handsome leaving books, and that he was frequently
visited by old Etonian acquaintances. We are also told that he spend the
40 pounds gained by his first novel, "Zastrozzi," on a farewell supper
to eight school-boy friends. A few lines, too, might be quoted from his
own poem, the "Boat on the Serchio," to prove that he did not entertain
a merely disagreeable memory of his school life. (Forman's edition,
volume 4 page 115.) Yet the general experience of Eton must have been
painful; and it is sad to read of this gentle and pure spirit being
goaded by his coarser comrades into fury, or coaxed to curse his father
and the king for their amusement. It may be worth mentioning that he was
called "the Atheist" at Eton; and though Hogg explains this by saying
that "the Atheist" was an official character among the boys, selected
from time to time for his defiance of authority, yet it is not
improbable that Shelley's avowed opinions may even then have won for him
a title which he proudly claimed in after-life. To allude to his boyish
incantations and nocturnal commerce with fiends and phantoms would
scarcely be needful, were it not that they seem to have deeply tinged
his imagination. While describing the growth of his own genius in the
"Hymn to Intellectual Beauty," he makes the following reference to
circumstances which might otherwise be trivial:--

    While yet a boy, I sought for ghosts, and sped
    Thro' many a listening chamber, cave, and ruin,
    And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing
    Hopes of high talk with the departed dead.
    I call'd on poisonous names with which our youth is fed,
    I was not heard, I saw them not--
    When, musing deeply on the lot
    Of life, at that sweet time when winds are wooing
    All vital things that wake to bring
    News of birds and blossoming,--
    Sudden, thy shadow fell on me;
    I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy!

Among the Eton tutors was one whose name will always be revered by
Shelley's worshippers; for he alone discerned the rare gifts of the
strange and solitary boy, and Shelley loved him. Dr. Lind was an old
man, a physician, and a student of chemistry. Shelley spent long hours
at his house, conversing with him, and receiving such instruction in
philosophy and science as the grey-haired scholar could impart. The
affection which united them must have been of no common strength or
quality; for when Shelley lay ill of a fever at Field Place, and had
conceived the probably ill-founded notion that his father intended to
place him in a mad-house, he managed to convey a message to his friend
at Eton, on the receipt of which Dr. Lind travelled to Horsham, and by
his sympathy and skill restored the sick boy's confidence. It may
incidentally be pointed out that this story, credited as true by Lady
Shelley in her Memorials, shows how early an estrangement had begun
between the poet and his father. We look, moreover, vainly for that
mother's influence which might have been so beneficial to the boy in
whom "love and life were twins, born at one birth." From Dr. Lind
Shelley not only received encouragement to pursue his chemical studies;
but he also acquired the habit of corresponding with persons unknown to
him, whose opinions he might be anxious to discover or dispute. This
habit, as we shall see in the sequel, determined Shelley's fate on two
important occasions of his life. In return for the help extended to him
at Eton, Shelley conferred undying fame on Dr. Lind; the characters of
Zonaras in "Prince Athanase," and of the hermit in "Laon and Cythna,"
are portraits painted by the poet of his boyhood's friend.

The months which elapsed between Eton and Oxford were an important
period in Shelley's life. At this time a boyish liking for his cousin,
Harriet Grove, ripened into real attachment; and though there was
perhaps no formal engagement between them, the parents on both sides
looked with approval on their love. What it concerns us to know about
this early passion, is given in a letter from a brother of Miss Grove.
"Bysshe was at that time (just after leaving Eton) more attached to my
sister Harriet than I can express, and I recollect well the moonlight
walks we four had at Strode and also at St. Irving's; that, I think, was
the name of the place, then the Duke of Norfolk's, at Horsham." For some
time after the date mentioned in this letter, Shelley and Miss Grove
kept up an active correspondence; but the views he expressed on
speculative subjects soon began to alarm her. She consulted her mother
and her father, and the engagement was broken off. The final separation
does not seem to have taken place until the date of Shelley's expulsion
from Oxford; and not the least cruel of the pangs he had to suffer at
that period, was the loss of one to whom he had given his whole heart
unreservedly. The memory of Miss Grove long continued to haunt his
imagination, nor is there much doubt that his first unhappy marriage was
contracted while the wound remained unhealed. The name of Harriet
Westbrook and something in her face reminded him of Harriet Grove; it is
even still uncertain to which Harriet the dedication of Queen Mab is
addressed. (See Medwin, volume 1 page 68.)

In his childhood Shelley scribbled verses with fluency by no means
unusual in the case of forward boys; and we have seen that at Sion House
he greedily devoured the sentimental novels of the day. His favourite
poets at the time of which I am now writing, were Monk Lewis and
Southey; his favourite books in prose were romances by Mrs. Radcliffe
and Godwin. He now began to yearn for fame and publicity. Miss Shelley
speaks of a play written by her brother and her sister Elizabeth, which
was sent to Matthews the comedian, and courteously returned as unfit for
acting. She also mentions a little volume of her own verses, which the
boy had printed with the tell-tale name of "H-ll-n Sh-ll-y" on the
title-page. Medwin gives a long account of a poem on the story of the
Wandering Jew, composed by him in concert with Shelley during the winter
of 1809-1810. They sent the manuscript to Thomas Campbell, who returned
it with the observation that it contained but two good lines:--

    It seemed as if an angel's sigh
    Had breathed the plaintive symphony.

Undeterred by this adverse criticism, Shelley subsequently offered "The
Wandering Jew" to two publishers, Messrs. Ballantyne and Co. of
Edinburgh, and Mr. Stockdale of Pall Mall; but it remained in MS. at
Edinburgh till 1831, when a portion was printed in "Fraser's Magazine."

Just before leaving Eton he finished a novel of "Zastrozzi", which some
critics trace to its source in "Zofloya the Moor," perused by him at
Sion House. The most astonishing fact about this incoherent medley of
mad sentiment is that it served to furnish forth the 40-pound Eton
supper already spoken of, that it was duly ushered into the world of
letters by Messrs. Wilkie and Robinson on the 5th of June, 1810, and
that it was seriously reviewed. The dates of Shelley's publications now
come fast and frequent. In the late summer of 1810 he introduced himself
to Mr. J.J. Stockdale, the then fashionable publisher of poems and
romances, at his house of business in Pall Mall. With characteristic
impetuosity the young author implored assistance in a difficulty. He had
commissioned a printer in Horsham to strike off the astounding number of
1480 copies of a volume of poems; and he had no money to pay the
printer's bill. Would Stockdale help him out of this dilemma, by taking
up the quires and duly ushering the book into the world? Throughout his
life Shelley exercised a wonderful fascination over the people with whom
he came in contact, and almost always won his way with them as much by
personal charm as by determined and impassioned will. Accordingly on
this occasion Stockdale proved accommodating. The Horsham printer was
somehow satisfied; and on the 17th of September, 1810, the little book
came out with the title of "Original Poetry, by Victor and Cazire." This
volume has disappeared; and much fruitless conjecture has been expended
upon the question of Shelley's collaborator in his juvenile attempt.
Cazire stands for some one; probably it is meant to represent a woman's
name, and that woman may have been either Elizabeth Shelley or Harriet
Grove. The "Original Poetry" had only been launched a week, when
Stockdale discovered on a closer inspection of the book that it
contained some verses well known to the world as the production of M.G.
Lewis. He immediately communicated with Shelley, and the whole edition
was suppressed--not, however, before about one hundred copies had passed
into circulation. To which of the collaborators this daring act of petty
larceny was due, we know not; but we may be sure that Shelley satisfied
Stockdale on the point of piracy, since the publisher saw no reason to
break with him. On the 14th of November in the same year he issued
Shelley's second novel from his press, and entered into negotiations
with him for the publication of more poetry. The new romance was named
"St. Irvyne, or the Rosicrucian." This tale, no less unreadable than
"Zastrozzi," and even more chaotic in its plan, contained a good deal of
poetry, which has been incorporated in the most recent editions of
Shelley's works. A certain interest attaches to it as the first known
link between Shelley and William Godwin, for it was composed under the
influence of the latter's novel, "St. Leon." The title, moreover,
carries us back to those moonlight walks with Harriet Grove alluded to
above. Shelley's earliest attempts in literature have but little value
for the student of poetry, except in so far as they illustrate the
psychology of genius and its wayward growth. Their intrinsic merit is
almost less than nothing, and no one could predict from their perusal
the course which the future poet of "The Cenci" and "Epipsychidion" was
to take. It might indeed be argued that the defects of his great
qualities, the over-ideality, the haste, the incoherence, and the want
of grasp on narrative, are glaringly apparent in these early works. But
while this is true, the qualities themselves are absent. A cautious
critic will only find food in "Zastrozzi" and "St. Irvyne" for wondering
how such flowers and fruits of genius could have lain concealed within a
germ apparently so barren. There is even less of the real Shelley
discernible in these productions, than of the real Byron in the "Hours
of Idleness."

In the Michaelmas Term of 1810 Shelley was matriculated as a Commoner of
University College, Oxford; and very soon after his arrival he made the
acquaintance of a man who was destined to play a prominent part in his
subsequent history, and to bequeath to posterity the most brilliant, if
not in all respects the most trustworthy, record of his marvellous
youth. Thomas Jefferson Hogg was unlike Shelley in temperament and
tastes. His feet were always planted on the earth, while Shelley flew
aloft to heaven with singing robes around him, or the mantel of the
prophet on his shoulders. (He told Trelawny that he had been attracted
to Shelley simply by his "rare talents as a scholar;" and Trelawny has
recorded his opinion that Hogg's portrait of their friend was faithful,
in spite of a total want of sympathy with his poetic genius. This
testimony is extremely valuable.) Hogg had much of the cynic in his
nature; he was a shrewd man of the world, and a caustic humorist.
Positive and practical, he chose the beaten path of life, rose to
eminence as a lawyer, and cherished the Church and State opinions of a
staunch Tory. Yet, though he differed so essentially from the divine
poet, he understood the greatness of Shelley at a glance, and preserved
for us a record of his friend's early days, which is incomparable for
the vividness of its portraiture. The pages which narrate Shelley's
course of life at Oxford have all the charm of a romance. No novel
indeed is half so delightful as that picture, at once affectionate and
satirical, tender and humorous, extravagant and delicately shaded, of
the student life enjoyed together for a few short months by the
inseparable friends. To make extracts from a masterpiece of such
consummate workmanship is almost painful. Future biographers of Shelley,
writing on a scale adequate to the greatness of their subject, will be
content to lay their pens down for a season at this point, and let Hogg
tell the tale in his own wayward but inimitable fashion. I must confine
myself to a few quotations and a barren abstract, referring my readers
to the ever-memorable pages 48--286 of Hogg's first volume, for the life
that cannot be transferred to these.

"At the commencement of Michaelmas term," says this biographer, "that
is, at the end of October, in the year 1810, I happened one day to sit
next to a freshman at dinner; it was his first appearance in hall. His
figure was slight, and his aspect remarkably youthful, even at our
table, where all were very young. He seemed thoughtful and absent. He
ate little, and had no acquaintance with any one." The two young men
began a conversation, which turned upon the respective merits of German
and Italian poetry, a subject they neither of them knew anything about.
After dinner it was continued in Hogg's rooms, where Shelley soon led
the talk to his favourite topic of science. "As I felt, in truth, but a
slight interest in the subject of his conversation, I had leisure to
examine, and I may add, to admire, the appearance of my very
extraordinary guest. It was a sum of many contradictions. His figure was
slight and fragile, and yet his bones and joints were large and strong.
He was tall, but he stooped so much, that he seemed of a low stature.
His clothes were expensive, and made according to the most approved mode
of the day; but they were tumbled, rumpled, unbrushed. His gestures were
abrupt, and sometimes violent, occasionally even awkward, yet more
frequently gentle and graceful. His complexion was delicate and almost
feminine, of the purest red and white; yet he was tanned and freckled by
exposure to the sun, having passed the autumn, as he said, in shooting.
His features, his whole face, and particularly his head, were, in fact,
unusually small; yet the last APPEARED of a remarkable bulk, for his
hair was long and bushy, and in fits of absence, and in the agonies (if
I may use the word) of anxious thought, he often rubbed it fiercely with
his hands, or passed his fingers quickly through his locks
unconsciously, so that it was singularly wild and rough. In times when
it was the mode to imitate stage-coachmen as closely as possible in
costume, and when the hair was invariably cropped, like that of our
soldiers, this eccentricity was very striking. His features were not
symmetrical (the mouth, perhaps, excepted), yet was the effect of the
whole extremely powerful. They breathed an animation, a fire, an
enthusiasm, a vivid and preternatural intelligence, that I never met
with in any other countenance. Nor was the moral expression less
beautiful than the intellectual; for there was a softness, a delicacy, a
gentleness, and especially (though this will surprise many) that air of
profound religious veneration, that characterizes the best works, and
chiefly the frescoes (and into these they infused their whole souls), of
the great masters of Florence and of Rome. I recognized the very
peculiar expression in these wonderful productions long afterwards, and
with a satisfaction mingled with much sorrow, for it was after the
decease of him in whose countenance I had first observed it."

In another place Hogg gives some details which complete the impression
of Shelley's personal appearance, and which are fully corroborated by
Trelawny's recollections of a later date. "There were many striking
contrasts in the character and behaviour of Shelley, and one of the most
remarkable was a mixture, or alternation, of awkwardness with
agility--of the clumsy with the graceful. He would stumble in stepping
across the floor of a drawing room; he would trip himself up on a
smooth-shaven grass-plot, and he would tumble in the most inconceivable
manner in ascending the commodious, facile, and well-carpeted staircase
of an elegant mansion, so as to bruise his nose or his lip on the upper
steps, or to tread upon his hands, and even occasionally to disturb the
composure of a well-bred footman; on the contrary, he would often glide
without collision through a crowded assembly, thread with unerring
dexterity a most intricate path, or securely and rapidly tread the most
arduous and uncertain ways."

This word-portrait corresponds in its main details to the descriptions
furnished by other biographers, who had the privilege of Shelley's
friendship. His eyes were blue, unfathomably dark and lustrous. His hair
was brown; but very early in life it became grey, while his unwrinkled
face retained to the last a look of wonderful youth. It is admitted on
all sides that no adequate picture was ever painted of him. Mulready is
reported to have said that he was too beautiful to paint. And yet,
although so singularly lovely, he owed less of his charm to regularity
of feature or to grace of movement, than to an indescribable personal
fascination. One further detail Hogg pointedly insists upon. Shelley's
voice "was excruciating; it was intolerably shrill, harsh and
discordant." This is strongly stated; but, though the terms are
certainly exaggerated, I believe that we must trust this first
impression made on Shelley's friend. There is a considerable mass of
convergent testimony to the fact that Shelley's voice was high pitched,
and that when he became excited, he raised it to a scream. The epithets
"shrill," "piercing," "penetrating," frequently recur in the
descriptions given of it. At the same time its quality seems to have
been less dissonant than thrilling; there is abundance of evidence to
prove that he could modulate it exquisitely in the reading of poetry,
and its tone proved no obstacle to the persuasive charms of his
eloquence in conversation. Like all finely tempered natures, he vibrated
in harmony with the subjects of his thought. Excitement made his
utterance shrill and sharp. Deep feeling of the sense of beauty lowered
its tone to richness; but the timbre was always acute, in sympathy with
his intense temperament. All was of one piece in Shelley's nature. This
peculiar voice, varying from moment to moment, and affecting different
sensibilities in divers ways, corresponds to the high-strung passion of
his life, his fine-drawn and ethereal fancies, and the clear vibrations
of his palpitating verse. Such a voice, far-reaching, penetrating, and
unearthly, befitted one who lived in rarest ether on the topmost heights
of human thought.

The acquaintance begun that October evening soon ripened into close
friendship. Shelley and Hogg from this time forward spent a large part
of their days and nights together in common studies, walks and
conversations. It was their habit to pass the morning, each in his own
rooms, absorbed in private reading. At one o'clock they met and lunched,
and then started for long rambles in the country. Shelley frequently
carried pistols with him upon these occasions, and would stop to fix his
father's franks upon convenient trees and shoot at them. The practice of
pistol shooting, adopted so early in life, was afterwards one of his
favourite amusements in the company of Byron. Hogg says that in his use
of fire-arms he was extraordinarily careless. "How often have I lamented
that Nature, which so rarely bestows upon the world a creature endowed
with such marvellous talents, ungraciously rendered the gift less
precious by implanting a fatal taste for perilous recreations, and a
thoughtlessness in the pursuit of them, that often caused his existence
from one day to another to seem in itself miraculous." On their return
from these excursions the two friends, neither of whom cared for dining
in the College Hall, drank tea and supped together, Shelley's rooms
being generally chosen as the scene of their symposia.

These rooms are described as a perfect palace of confusion--chaos on
chaos heaped of chemical apparatus, books, electrical machines,
unfinished manuscripts, and furniture worn into holes by acids. It was
perilous to use the poet's drinking-vessels, less perchance a
seven-shilling piece half dissolved in aqua regia should lurk at the
bottom of the bowl. Handsome razors were used to cut the lids of wooden
boxes, and valuable books served to support lamps or crucibles; for in
his vehement precipitation Shelley always laid violent hands on what he
found convenient to the purpose of the moment. Here the friends talked
and read until late in the night. Their chief studies at this time were
in Locke and Hume and the French essayists. Shelley's bias toward
metaphysical speculation was beginning to assert itself. He read the
School Logic with avidity, and practised himself without intermission in
dialectical discussion. Hogg observes, what is confirmed by other
testimony, that in reasoning Shelley never lost sight of the essential
bearings of the topic in dispute, never condescended to personal or
captious arguments, and was Socratically bent on following the dialogue
wherever it might lead, without regard for consequences. Plato was
another of their favourite authors; but Hogg expressly tells us that
they only approached the divine philosopher through the medium of
translations. It was not until a later period that Shelley studied his
dialogues in the original: but the substance of them, seen through Mdme.
Dacier's version, acted powerfully on the poet's sympathetic intellect.
In fact, although at the time he had adopted the conclusions of
materialism, he was at heart all through his life an idealist. Therefore
the mixture of the poet and the sage in Plato fascinated him. The
doctrine of anamnesis, which offers so strange a vista to speculative
reverie, by its suggestion of an earlier existence in which our
knowledge was acquired, took a strong hold upon his imagination; he
would stop in the streets to gaze wistfully at babies, wondering whether
their newly imprisoned souls were not replete with the wisdom stored up
in a previous life.

In the acquisition of knowledge he was then as ever unrelaxing. "No
student ever read more assiduously. He was to be found, book in hand, at
all hours; reading in season and out of season; at table, in bed, and
especially during a walk; not only in the quiet country, and in retired
paths; not only at Oxford, in the public walks, and High Street, but in
the most crowded thoroughfares of London. Nor was he less absorbed by
the volume that was open before him, in Cheapside, in Cranbourne Alley,
or in Bond Street, than in a lonely lane, or a secluded library.
Sometimes a vulgar fellow would attempt to insult or annoy the eccentric
student in passing. Shelley always avoided the malignant interruption by
stepping aside with his vast and quiet agility." And again:--"I never
beheld eyes that devoured the pages more voraciously than his; I am
convinced that two-thirds of the period of the day and night were often
employed in reading. It is no exaggeration to affirm, that out of
twenty-four hours, he frequently read sixteen. At Oxford, his diligence
in this respect was exemplary, but it greatly increased afterwards, and
I sometimes thought that he carried it to a pernicious excess: I am
sure, at least, that I was unable to keep pace with him." With Shelley
study was a passion, and the acquisition of knowledge was the entrance
into a thrice-hallowed sanctuary. "The irreverent many cannot comprehend
the awe--the careless apathetic worldling cannot imagine the
enthusiasm--nor can the tongue that attempts only to speak of things
visible to the bodily eye, express the mighty emotion that inwardly
agitated him, when he approached, for the first time, a volume which he
believed to be replete with the recondite and mystic philosophy of
antiquity: his cheeks glowed, his eyes became bright, his whole frame
trembled, and his entire attention was immediately swallowed up in the
depths of contemplation. The rapid and vigorous conversion of his soul
to intellect can only be compared with the instantaneous ignition and
combustion, which dazzle the sight, when a bundle of dry reeds, or other
light inflammable substance, is thrown upon a fire already rich with
accumulated heat."

As at Eton, so at Oxford, Shelley refused to keep the beaten track of
prescribed studies, or to run in ordinary grooves of thought. The mere
fact that Aristotle was a duty, seems to have disgusted him with the
author of the Organon, from whom, had his works been prohibited to
undergraduates, he would probably have been eager to learn much. For
mathematics and jurisprudence he evinced a marked distaste. The common
business of the English Parliament had no attraction for him, and he
read few newspapers. While his mind was keenly interested in great
political questions, he could not endure the trivial treatment of them
in the daily press, and cared far more for principles than for the
incidents of party warfare. Here again he showed that impatience of
detail, and that audacity of self-reliant genius, which were the source
of both his weakness and his strength. He used to speak with aversion of
a Parliamentary career, and told Hogg that though this had been
suggested to him, as befitting his position, by the Duke of Norfolk, he
could never bring himself to mix with the rabble of the House. It is
none the less true, however, that he entertained some vague notion of
eventually succeeding to his father's seat.

Combined with his eager intellectual activity, there was something
intermittent and fitful in the working of his mental faculties. Hogg, in
particular, mentions one of his habits in a famous passage, which, since
it brings the two friends vividly before us, may here be quoted. "I was
enable to continue my studies afterwards in the evening, in consequence
of a very remarkable peculiarity. My young and energetic friend was then
overcome by extreme drowsiness, which speedily and completely vanquished
him; he would sleep from two to four hours, often so soundly that his
slumbers resembled a deep lethargy; he lay occasionally upon the sofa,
but more commonly stretched upon the rug before a large fire, like a
cat; and his little round head was exposed to such a fierce heat, that I
used to wonder how he was able to bear it. Sometimes I have interposed
some shelter, but rarely with any permanent effect; for the sleeper
usually contrived to turn himself, and to roll again into the spot where
the fire glowed the brightest. His torpor was generally profound, but he
would sometimes discourse incoherently for a long while in his sleep. At
six he would suddenly compose himself, even in the midst of a most
animated narrative, or of earnest discussion; and he would lie buried in
entire forgetfulness, in a sweet and mighty oblivion, until ten, when he
would suddenly start up, and, rubbing his eyes with great violence, and
passing his fingers swiftly through his long hair, would enter at once
into a vehement argument, or begin to recite verses, either of his own
composition or from the works of others, with a rapidity and an energy
that were often quite painful."

Shelley's moral qualities are described with no less enthusiasm than his
intellectual and physical beauty by the friend from whom I have already
drawn so largely. Love was the root and basis of his nature: this love,
first developed as domestic affection, next as friendship, then as a
youth's passion, now began to shine with steady lustre as an
all-embracing devotion to his fellow-men. There is something inevitably
chilling in the words "benevolence" and "philanthropy." A disillusioned
world is inclined to look with languid approbation on the former, and to
disbelieve in the latter. Therefore I will not use them to describe that
intense and glowing passion of unselfishness, which throughout his life
led Shelley to find his strongest interests in the joys and sorrows of
his fellow-creatures, which inflamed his imagination with visions of
humanity made perfect, and which filled his days with sweet deeds of
unnumbered charities. I will rather collect from the page of his
friend's biography a few passages recording the first impression of his
character, the memory of which may be carried by the reader through the
following brief record of his singular career:--

"His speculations were as wild as the experience of twenty-one years has
shown them to be; but the zealous earnestness for the augmentation of
knowledge, and the glowing philanthropy and boundless benevolence that
marked them, and beamed forth in the whole deportment of that
extraordinary boy, are not less astonishing than they would have been if
the whole of his glorious anticipations had been prophetic; for these
high qualities, at least, I have never found a parallel."

"In no individual perhaps was the moral sense ever more completely
developed than in Shelley; in no being was the perception of right and
of wrong more acute.

"As his love of intellectual pursuits was vehement, and the vigour of
his genius almost celestial, so were the purity and sanctity of his life
most conspicuous."

"I never knew any one so prone to admire as he was, in whom the
principle of veneration was so strong."

"I have had the happiness to associate with some of the best specimens
of gentlemen; but with all due deference for those admirable persons
(may my candour and my preference be pardoned), I can affirm that
Shelley was almost the only example I have yet found that was never
wanting, even in the most minute particular, of the infinite and various
observances of pure, entire, and perfect gentility."

"Shelley was actually offended, and indeed more indignant than would
appear to be consistent with the singular mildness of his nature, at a
coarse and awkward jest, especially if it were immodest, or uncleanly;
in the latter case his anger was unbounded, and his uneasiness
pre-eminent; he was, however, sometimes vehemently delighted by
exquisite and delicate sallies, particularly with a fanciful, and
perhaps somewhat fantastical facetiousness--possibly the more because he
was himself utterly incapable of pleasantry."

"I could never discern in him any more than two fixed principles. The
first was a strong irrepressible love of liberty; of liberty in the
abstract, and somewhat after the pattern of the ancient republics,
without reference to the English constitution, respecting which he knew
little and cared nothing, heeding it not at all. The second was an
equally ardent love of toleration of all opinions, but more especially
of religious opinions; of toleration, complete, entire, universal,
unlimited; and, as a deduction and corollary from which latter
principle, he felt an intense abhorrence of persecution of every kind,
public or private."

The testimony in the foregoing extracts as to Shelley's purity and
elevation of moral character is all the stronger, because it is given by
a man not over-inclined to praise, and of a temperament as unlike the
poet's as possible. If we were to look only upon this side of his
portrait, we should indeed be almost forced to use the language of his
most enthusiastic worshippers, and call him an archangel. But it must be
admitted that, though so pure and gentle and exalted, Shelley's virtues
were marred by his eccentricity, by something at times approaching
madness, which paralyzed his efficiency by placing him in a glaringly
false relation to some of the best men in the world around him. He
possessed certain good qualities in excess; for, though it sounds
paradoxical, it is none the less true that a man may be too tolerant,
too fond of liberty: and it was precisely the extravagance of these
virtues in Shelley which drove him into acts and utterances so
antagonistic to society as to be intolerable.

Of Shelley's poetical studies we hear but little at this epoch. His
genius by a stretch of fancy might be compared to one of those double
stars which dart blue and red rays of light: for it was governed by two
luminaries, poetry and metaphysics; and at this time the latter seems to
have been in the ascendant. It is, however, interesting to learn that he
read and re-read Landor's "Gebir"--stronger meat than either Southey's
epics or the ghost-lyrics of Monk Lewis. Hogg found him one day busily
engaged in correcting proofs of some original poems. Shelley asked his
friend what he thought of them, and Hogg answered that it might be
possible by a little alteration to turn them into capital burlesques.
The idea took the young poet's fancy; and the friends between them soon
effected a metamorphosis in Shelley's serious verses, by which they
became unmistakably ridiculous. Having achieved their purpose, they now
bethought them of the proper means of publication. Upon whom should the
poems, a medley of tyrannicide and revolutionary raving, be fathered?
Peg Nicholson, a mad washerwoman, had recently attempted George the
Third's life with a carving-knife. No more fitting author could be
found. They would give their pamphlet to the world as her work, edited
by an admiring nephew. The printer appreciated the joke no less than the
authors of it. He provided splendid paper and magnificent type; and
before long the book of nonsense was in the hands of Oxford readers. It
sold for the high price of half-a-crown a copy; and, what is hardly
credible, the gownsmen received it as a genuine production. "It was
indeed a kind of fashion to be seen reading it in public, as a mark of
nice discernment, of a delicate and fastidious taste in poetry, and the
best criterion of a choice spirit." Such was the genesis of "Posthumous
Fragments of Margaret Nicholson", edited by John Fitz Victor. The name
of the supposititious nephew reminds us of "Original Poems" by Victor
and Cazire, and raises the question whether the poems in that lost
volume may not have partly furnished forth this Oxford travesty.

Shelley's next publication, or quasi-publication, was neither so
innocent in substance nor so pleasant in its consequences. After leaving
Eton, he continued the habit, learned from Dr. Lind, of corresponding
with distinguished persons whom he did not personally know. Thus we find
him about this time addressing Miss Felicia Browne (afterwards Mrs.
Hemans) and Leigh Hunt. He plied his correspondents with all kinds of
questions; and as the dialectical interest was uppermost at Oxford, he
now endeavoured to engage them in discussions on philosophical and
religious topics. We have seen that his favourite authors were Locke,
Hume, and the French materialists. With the impulsiveness peculiar to
his nature, he adopted the negative conclusions of a shallow
nominalistic philosophy. It was a fundamental point with him to regard
all questions, however sifted and settled by the wise of former ages, as
still open; and in his inordinate thirst for liberty, he rejoiced to be
the Deicide of a pernicious theological delusion. In other words, he
passed at Oxford by one leap from a state of indifferentism with regard
to Christianity, into an attitude of vehement antagonism. With a view to
securing answers to his missives, he printed a short abstract of Hume's
and other arguments against the existence of a Deity, presented in a
series of propositions, and signed with a mathematically important
"Q.E.D." This document he forwarded to his proposed antagonists,
expressing his inability to answer its arguments, and politely
requesting them to help him. When it so happened that any incautious
correspondents acceded to this appeal, Shelley fell with merciless
severity upon their feeble and commonplace reasoning. The little
pamphlet of two pages was entitled "The Necessity of Atheism"; and its
proposed publication, beyond the limits of private circulation already
described, is proved by an advertisement (February 9, 1811) in the
"Oxford University and City Herald". It was not, however, actually
offered for sale.

A copy of this syllabus reached a Fellow of another college, who made
the Master of the University acquainted with the fact. On the morning of
March 25, 1811, Shelley was sent for to the Senior Common Room, and
asked whether he acknowledged himself to be the author of the obnoxious
pamphlet. On his refusal to answer this question, he was served with a
formal sentence of expulsion duly drawn up and sealed. The college
authorities have been blamed for unfair dealing in this matter. It is
urged that they ought to have proceeded by the legal method of calling
witnesses; and that the sentence was not only out of all proportion to
the offence, but that it ought not to have been executed till persuasion
had been tried. With regard to the former indictment, I do not think
that a young man still in statu pupillari, who refused to purge himself
of what he must have known to be a serious charge, had any reason to
expect from his tutors the formalities of an English court of law. There
is no doubt that the Fellows were satisfied of his being the real
author; else they could not have ventured on so summary a measure as
expulsion. Their question was probably intended to give the culprit an
occasion for apology, of which they foresaw he would not avail himself.
With regard to the second, it is true that Shelley was amenable to
kindness, and that gentle and wise treatment from men whom he respected
might possibly have brought him to retract his syllabus. But it must be
remembered that he despised the Oxford dons with all his heart; and they
were probably aware of this. He was a dexterous, impassioned reasoner,
whom they little cared to encounter in argument on such a topic. During
his short period of residence, moreover, he had not shown himself so
tractable as to secure the good wishes of superiors, who prefer
conformity to incommensurable genius. It is likely that they were not
averse to getting rid of him as a man dangerous to the peace of their
society; and now they had a good occasion. Nor was it to be expected
that the champion and apostle of Atheism--and Shelley was certainly
both, in spite of Hogg's attempts to tone down the purpose of his
document--should be unmolested in his propaganda by the aspirants to fat
livings and ecclesiastical dignities. Real blame, however, attaches to
these men: first, for their dulness to discern Shelley's amiable
qualities; and, secondly, for the prejudgment of the case implied in the
immediate delivery of their sentence. Both Hogg and Shelley accused
them, besides, of a gross brutality, which was, to say the least,
unseemly on so serious an occasion. At the beginning of this century the
learning and the manners of Oxford dons were at a low ebb; and the
Fellows of University College acted harshly but not altogether unjustly,
ignorantly but after their own kind, in this matter of Shelley's
expulsion. $Non ragionem di lor, ma guarda e passa. Hogg, who stood by
his friend manfully at this crisis, and dared the authorities to deal
with him as they had dealt with Shelley, adding that they had just as
much real proof to act upon in his case, and intimating his intention of
returning the same answer as to the authorship of the pamphlet, was
likewise expelled. The two friends left Oxford together by coach on the
morning of the 26th of March.

Shelley felt his expulsion acutely. At Oxford he had enjoyed the
opportunities of private reading which the University afforded in those
days of sleepy studies and innocuous examinations. He delighted in the
security of his "oak," and above all things he found pleasure in the
society of his one chosen friend. He was now obliged to exchange these
good things for the tumult and discomfort of London. His father, after
clumsily attempting compromises, had forbidden his return to Field
Place. The whole fabric of his former life was broken up. The last hope
of renewing his engagement with his cousin had to be abandoned. His
pecuniary position was precarious, and in a short time he was destined
to lose the one friend who had so generously shared his fate. Yet the
notion of recovering his position as a student in one of our great
Universities, of softening his father's indignation, or of ameliorating
his present circumstances by the least concession, never seems to have
occurred to him. He had suffered in the cause of truth and liberty, and
he willingly accepted his martyrdom for conscience' sake.



CHAPTER 3.

LIFE IN LONDON AND FIRST MARRIAGE.

It is of some importance at this point to trace the growth and analyse
the substance of Shelley's atheistical opinions. The cardinal
characteristic of his nature was an implacable antagonism to shams and
conventions, which passed too easily into impatient rejection of
established forms as worse than useless. Born in the stronghold of
squirearchical prejudices, nursed amid the trivial platitudes that then
passed in England for philosophy, his keen spirit flew to the opposite
pole of thought with a recoil that carried him at first to inconsiderate
negation. His passionate love of liberty, his loathing for intolerance,
his impatience of control for self and others, and his vivid logical
sincerity, combined to make him the Quixotic champion of extreme
opinions. He was too fearless to be wise, too precipitate to suspend his
judgment, too convinced of the paramount importance of iconoclasm, to
mature his views in silence. With the unbounded audacity of youth, he
hoped to take the fortresses of "Anarch Custom" by storm at the first
assault. His favourite ideal was the vision of a youth, Laon or Lionel,
whose eloquence had power to break the bonds of despotism, as the sun
thaws ice upon an April morning. It was enough, he thought, to hurl the
glove of defiance boldly at the tyrant's face--to sow the "Necessity of
Atheism" broadcast on the bench of Bishops, and to depict incest in his
poetry, not because he wished to defend it, but because society must
learn to face the most abhorrent problems with impartiality. Gifted with
a touch as unerring as Ithuriel's spear for the unmasking of hypocrisy,
he strove to lay bare the very substance of the soul beneath the crust
of dogma and the froth of traditional beliefs; nor does it seem to have
occurred to him that, while he stripped the rags and patches that
conceal the nakedness of ordinary human nature, he might drag away the
weft and woof of nobler thought. In his poet-philosopher's imagination
there bloomed a wealth of truth and love and beauty so abounding, that
behind the mirage he destroyed, he saw no blank, but a new Eternal City
of the Spirit. He never doubted whether his fellow-creatures were
certain to be equally fortunate.

Shelley had no faculty for compromise, no perception of the blended
truths and falsehoods through which the mind of man must gradually win
its way from the obscurity of myths into the clearness of positive
knowledge, for ever toiling and for ever foiled, and forced to content
itself with the increasing consciousness of limitations. Brimming over
with love for men, he was deficient in sympathy with the conditions
under which they actually think and feel. Could he but dethrone the
Anarch Custom, the millennium, he argued, would immediately arrive; nor
did he stop to think how different was the fibre of his own soul from
that of the unnumbered multitudes around him. In his adoration of what
he recognized as living, he retained no reverence for the ossified
experience of past ages. The principle of evolution, which forms a
saving link between the obsolete and the organically vital, had no place
in his logic. The spirit of the French Revolution, uncompromising,
shattering, eager to build in a day the structure which long centuries
of growth must fashion, was still fresh upon him. We who have survived
the enthusiasm of that epoch, who are exhausted with its passions, and
who have suffered from its reactive impulses, can scarcely comprehend
the vivid faith and young-eyed joy of aspiration which sustained Shelley
in his flight toward the region of impossible ideals. For he had a vital
faith; and this faith made the ideals he conceived seem possible--faith
in the duty and desirability of overthrowing idols; faith in the gospel
of liberty, fraternity, equality; faith in the divine beauty of nature;
faith in a love that rules the universe; faith in the perfectibility of
man; faith in the omnipresent soul, whereof our souls are atoms; faith
in affection as the ruling and co-ordinating substance of morality. The
man who lived by this faith was in no vulgar sense of the word an
Atheist. When he proclaimed himself to be one, he pronounced his hatred
of a gloomy religion, which had been the instrument of kings and priests
for the enslavement of their fellow-creatures. As he told his friend
Trelawny, he used the word Atheism "to express his abhorrence of
superstition; he took it up as a knight took up a gauntlet, in defiance
of injustice." But Shelley believed too much to be consistently
agnostic. He believed so firmly and intensely in his own religion--a
kind of passionate positivism, a creed which seemed to have no God
because it was all God--that he felt convinced he only needed to destroy
accepted figments, for the light which blazed around him to break
through and flood the world with beauty. Shelley can only be called an
Atheist, in so far as he maintained the inadequacy of hitherto received
conceptions of the Deity, and indignantly rejected that Moloch of
cruelty who is worshipped in the debased forms of Christianity. He was
an Agnostic only in so far as he proclaimed the impossibility of solving
the insoluble, and knowing the unknowable. His clear and fearless
utterances upon these points place him in the rank of intellectual
heroes. But his own soul, compact of human faith and love, was far too
religious and too sanguine to merit either epithet as vulgarly applied.

The negative side of Shelley's creed had the moral value which attaches
to all earnest conviction, plain speech, defiance of convention, and
enthusiasm for intellectual liberty at any cost. It was marred, however,
by extravagance, crudity, and presumption. Much that he would fain have
destroyed because he found it customary, was solid, true, and
beneficial. Much that he thought it desirable to substitute, was
visionary, hollow, and pernicious. He lacked the touchstone of mature
philosophy, whereby to separate the pinchbeck from the gold of social
usage; and in his intense enthusiasm he lost his hold on common sense,
which might have saved him from the puerility of arrogant iconoclasm.
The positive side of his creed remains precious, not because it was
logical, or scientific, or coherent, but because it was an ideal,
fervently felt, and penetrated with the whole life-force of an
incomparable nature. Such ideals are needed for sustaining man upon his
path amid the glooms and shadows of impenetrable ignorance. The form the
seal and pledge of his spiritual dignity, reminding him that he was not
born to live like brutes, or like the brutes to perish without effort.

    Fatti non foste a viver come bruti,
    Ma per seguir virtude e conoscenza.

These criticisms apply to the speculations of Shelley's earlier life,
when his crusade against accepted usage was extravagant, and his
confidence in the efficacy of mere eloquence to change the world was
overweening. The experience of years, however, taught him wisdom without
damping his enthusiasm, refined the crudity of his first fervent
speculations, and mellowed his philosophy. Had he lived to a ripe age,
there is no saying with what clear and beneficent lustre might have
shone that light of aspiration which during his turbid youth burned
somewhat luridly, and veiled its radiance in the smoke of mere
rebelliousness and contradiction.

Hogg and Shelley settled in lodgings at No. 15, Poland Street, soon
after their arrival in London. The name attracted Shelley: "it reminded
him of Thaddeus of Warsaw and of freedom." He was further fascinated by
a gaudy wall-paper of vine-trellises and grapes, which adorned the
parlour; and vowed that he would stay there for ever. "For ever," was a
word often upon Shelley's lips in the course of his chequered life; and
yet few men have been subject to so many sudden changes through the
buffetings of fortune from without and the inconstancy of their own
purpose, than he was. His biographer has no little trouble to trace and
note with accuracy his perpetual flittings and the names of his
innumerable temporary residences. A month had not elapsed before Hogg
left him in order to begin his own law studies at York; and Shelley
abode "alone in the vine-trellised chamber, where he was to remain, a
bright-eyed, restless fox amidst sour grapes, not, as his poetic
imagination at first suggested, for ever, but a little while longer."

The records of this first residence in London are meagre, but not
unimportant. We hear of negotiations and interviews with Mr. Timothy
Shelley, all of which proved unavailing. Shelley would not recede from
the position he had taken up. Nothing would induce him to break off his
intimacy with Hogg, or to place himself under the tutor selected for him
by his father. For Paley's, or as Mr. Shelley called him "Palley's,"
Evidences he expressed unbounded contempt. The breach between them
gradually widened. Mr. Shelley at last determined to try the effect of
cutting off supplies; but his son only hardened his heart, and sustained
himself by a proud consciousness of martyrdom. I agree with Shelley's
last and best biographer, Mr. W.M. Rossetti, in his condemnation of the
poet's behaviour as a son. Shelley did not treat his father with the
common consideration due from youth to age; and the only instances of
unpardonable bad taste to be found in his correspondence or the notes of
his conversation, are insulting phrases applied to a man who was really
more unfortunate than criminal in his relations to this changeling from
the realms of faery. It is not too much to say that his dislike of his
father amounted to derangement; and certainly some of his suspicions
with regard to him were the hallucinations of a heated fancy. How so
just and gentle a nature was brought into so false a moral situation,
whether by some sudden break-down of confidence in childhood or by a
gradually increasing mistrust, is an interesting but perhaps insoluble
problem. We only know that in his early boyhood Shelley loved his father
so much as to have shown unusual emotion during his illness on one
occasion, but that, while at Eton he had already become possessed by a
dark suspicion concerning him. This is proved by the episode of Dr.
Lind's visit during his fever. Then and ever afterwards he expected
monstrous treatment at his hands, although the elder gentleman was
nothing worse than a muddle-headed squire. It has more than once
occurred to me that this fever may have been a turning point in his
history, and that a delusion, engendered by delirium, may have fixed
itself upon his mind, owing to some imperfection in the process of
recovery. But the theory is too speculative and unsupported by proof to
be more than passingly alluded to.

At this time Shelley found it difficult to pay his lodgings and to buy
food. It is said that his sisters saved their pocket-money to support
him: and we know that he paid them frequent visits at their school on
Clapham Common. It was here that his characteristic hatred of tyranny
displayed itself on two occasions. "One day," writes Miss Hellen
Shelley, "his ire was greatly excited at a black mark hung round one of
our throats, as a penalty for some small misdemeanour. He expressed
great disapprobation, more of the system than that one of his sisters
should be so punished. Another time he found me, I think, in an iron
collar, which certainly was a dreadful instrument of torture in my
opinion. It was not worn as a punishment, but because I POKED; but
Bysshe declared that it would make me grow crooked, and ought to be
discontinued immediately." The acquaintance which he now made with one
of his sister's school friends was destined to lead to most important
results. (It is probable that he saw her for the first time in January,
1811.) Harriet Westbrook was a girl of sixteen years, remarkably
good-looking, with a brilliant pink and white complexion, beautiful
brown hair, a pleasant voice, and a cheerful temper. She was the
daughter of a man who kept a coffee-house in Mount Street, nick-named
"Jew" Westbrook, because of his appearance. She had an elder sister,
called Eliza, dark of complexion, and gaunt of figure, with the abundant
hair that plays so prominent a part in Hogg's relentless portrait.
Eliza, being nearly twice as old as Harriet, stood in the relation of a
mother to her. Both of these young ladies, and the "Jew" their father,
welcomed Shelley with distinguished kindness. Though he was penniless
for the nonce, exiled from his home, and under the ban of his family's
displeasure, he was still the heir to a large landed fortune and a
baronetcy. It was not to be expected that the coffee-house people should
look upon him with disfavour.

Shelley paid Harriet frequent visits, both at Mrs. Fenning's school and
at Mount Street, and soon began a correspondence with her, hoping, as he
expressly stated in a letter of a later date, by converting her to his
theories, to add his sister and her "to the list of the good, the
disinterested and the free." At first she seems to have been horrified
at the opinions he expressed; but in this case at least he did not
overrate the powers of eloquence. With all the earnestness of an
evangelist, he preached his gospel of freethought or atheism, and had
the satisfaction of forming his young pupil to his views. He does not
seem to have felt any serious inclination for Harriet; but in the
absence of other friends, he gladly availed himself of her society.
Gradually she became more interesting to him, when he heard mysterious
accounts of suffering at home and tyranny at school. This was enough to
rouse in Shelley the spirit of Quixotic championship, if not to sow the
seeds of love. What Harriet's ill-treatment really was, no one has been
able to discover; yet she used to affirm that her life at this time was
so irksome that she contemplated suicide.

During the summer of 1811, Shelley's movements were more than usually
erratic, and his mind was in a state of extraordinary restlessness. In
the month of May, a kind of accommodation was come to with his father.
He received permission to revisit Field Place, and had an allowance made
him of 200 pounds a year. His uncle, Captain Pilfold of Cuckfield, was
instrumental in effecting this partial reconciliation. Shelley spent
some time at his uncle's country house, oscillating between London,
Cuckfield, and Field Place, with characteristic rapidity, and paying one
flying visit to his cousin Grove at Cwm Elan, near Rhayader, in North
Wales. This visit is worth mention, since he now for the first time saw
the scenery of waterfalls and mountains. He was, however, too much
preoccupied to take much interest in nature. He was divided between his
old affection for Miss Grove, his new but somewhat languid interest in
Harriet, and a dearly cherished scheme for bringing about a marriage
between his sister Elizabeth and his friend Hogg. The letters written to
Hogg at this period (volume 1 pages 387-418) are exceedingly important
and interesting, revealing as they do the perturbation of his feelings
and the almost morbid excitement of his mind. But they are unluckily so
badly edited, whether designedly or by accident, that it would be
dangerous to draw minute conclusions from them. As they stand, they
raise injurious suspicions, which can only be set at rest by a proper
assignment of dates and explanation.

Meanwhile his destiny was shaping itself with a rapidity that plunged
him suddenly into decisive and irrevocable action. It is of the greatest
moment to ascertain precisely what his feelings were during this summer
with regard to Harriet. Hogg has printed two letters in immediate
juxtaposition: the first without date, the second with the post-mark of
Rhayader. Shelley ends the first epistle thus: "Your jokes on Harriet
Westbrook amuse me: it is a common error for people to fancy others in
their own situation, but if I know anything about love, I am NOT in
love. I have heard from the Westbrooks, both of whom I highly esteem."
He begins the second with these words: "You will perhaps see me before
you can answer this; perhaps not; heaven knows! I shall certainly come
to York, but HARRIET WESTBROOK will decide whether now or in three
weeks. Her father has persecuted her in a most horrible way, by
endeavouring to compel her to go to school. She asked my advice:
resistance was the answer, at the same time that I essayed to mollify
Mr. W. in vain! And in consequence of my advice SHE has thrown herself
upon MY protection. I set off for London on Monday. How flattering a
distinction!--I am thinking of ten million things at once. What have I
said? I declare, quite LUDICROUS. I advised her to resist. She wrote to
say that resistance was useless, but that she would fly with me, and
threw herself upon my protection. We shall have 200 pounds a year; when
we find it run short, we must live, I suppose, upon love! Gratitude and
admiration, all demand that I should love her FOR EVER. We shall see you
at York. I will hear your arguments for matrimonialism, by which I am
now almost convinced. I can get lodgings at York, I suppose. Direct to
me at Graham's, 18 Sackville Street, Piccadilly." From a letter recently
published by Mr. W.M. Rossetti (the University Magazine, February 1878),
we further learn that Harriet, having fallen violently in love with her
preceptor, had avowed her passion and flung herself into his arms.

It is clear from these documents, first, that Shelley was not deeply in
love with Harriet when he eloped with her; secondly, that he was not
prepared for the step; thirdly, that she induced him to take it; and
fourthly, that he took it under a strong impression of her having been
ill-treated. She had appealed to his most powerful passion, the hatred
of tyranny. She had excited his admiration by setting conventions at
defiance, and showing her readiness to be his mistress. Her confidence
called forth his gratitude. Her choice of him for a protector flattered
him: and, moreover, she had acted on his advice to carry resistance a
outrance. There are many good Shelleyan reasons why he should elope with
Harriet; but among them all I do not find that spontaneous and
unsophisticated feeling, which is the substance of enduring love.

In the same series of letters, so incoherently jumbled together by
Hogg's carelessness or caprice, Shelley more than once expresses the
utmost horror of matrimony. Yet we now find him upon the verge of
contracting marriage with a woman whom he did not passionately love, and
who had offered herself unreservedly to him. It is worth pausing to
observe that even Shelley, fearless and uncompromising as he was in
conduct, could not at this crisis practise the principles he so
eloquently impressed on others. Yet the point of weakness was
honourable. It lay in his respect for women in general, and in his
tender chivalry for the one woman who had cast herself upon his
generosity. (See Shelley's third letter to Godwin (Hogg 2 page 63) for
another defence of his conduct. "We agreed," etc.)

"My unfortunate friend Harriet," he writes under date August 15, 1811,
from London, whether he had hurried to arrange the affairs of his
elopement, "is yet undecided; not with respect to me, but to herself.
How much, my dear friend, have I to tell you. In my leisure moments for
thought, which since I wrote have been few, I have considered the
important point on which you reprobated my hasty decision. The ties of
love and honour are doubtless of sufficient strength to bind congenial
souls--they are doubtless indissoluble, but by the brutish force of
power; they are delicate and satisfactory. Yet the arguments of
impracticability, and what is even worse, the disproportionate sacrifice
which the female is called upon to make--these arguments, which you have
urged in a manner immediately irresistible, I cannot withstand. Not that
I suppose it to be likely that _I_ shall directly be called upon to
evince my attachment to either theory. I am become a perfect convert to
matrimony, not from temporizing, but from YOUR arguments; nor, much as I
wish to emulate your virtues and liken myself to you, do I regret the
prejudices of anti-matrimonialism from your example or assertion. No.
The ONE argument, which you have urged so often with so much energy; the
sacrifice made by the woman, so disproportioned to any which the man can
give--this alone may exculpate me, were it a fault, from uninquiring
submission to your superior intellect."

Whether Shelley from his own peculiar point of view was morally
justified in twice marrying, is a question of casuistry which has often
haunted me. The reasons he alleged in extenuation of his conduct with
regard to Harriet prove the goodness of his heart, his openness to
argument, and the delicacy of his unselfishness. But they do not square
with his expressed code of conduct; nor is it easy to understand how,
having found it needful to submit to custom, for his partner's sake, he
should have gone on denouncing an institution which he recognized in his
own practice. The conclusion seems to be that, though he despised
accepted usage, and would fain have fashioned the world afresh to suit
his heart's desire, the instincts of a loyal gentleman and his practical
good sense were stronger than his theories.

A letter from Shelley's cousin, Mr. C.H. Grove, gives the details of
Harriet's elopement. "When Bysshe finally came to town to elope with
Miss Westbrook, he came as usual to Lincoln's Inn Fields, and I was his
companion on his visits to her, and finally accompanied them early one
morning--I forget now the month, or the date, but it might have been
September--in a hackney coach to the Green Dragon, in Gracechurch
Street, where we remained all day, till the hour when the mail-coaches
start, when they departed in the northern mail for York." From York the
young couple made their way at once to Edinburgh, where they were
married according to the formalities of the Scotch law.

Shelley had now committed that greatest of social crimes in his father's
eyes--a mesalliance. Supplies and communications were at once cut off
from the prodigal; and it appears that Harriet and he were mainly
dependent upon the generosity of Captain Pilfold for subsistence. Even
Jew Westbrook, much as he may have rejoiced at seeing his daughter
wedded to the heir of several thousands a year, buttoned up his pockets,
either because he thought it well to play the part of an injured parent,
or because he was not certain about Shelley's expectations. He
afterwards made the Shelleys an allowance of 200 pounds a year, and
early in 1812 Shelley says that he is in receipt of twice that income.
Whence we may conclude that both fathers before long relented to the
extent of the sum above mentioned.

In spite of temporary impecuniosity, the young people lived happily
enough in excellent lodgings in George Street. Hogg, who joined them
early in September, has drawn a lively picture of their domesticity.
Much of the day was spent in reading aloud; for Harriet, who had a fine
voice and excellent lungs, was never happy unless she was allowed to
read and comment on her favourite authors. Shelley sometimes fell asleep
during the performance of these rites; but when he woke refreshed with
slumber, he was no less ready than at Oxford to support philosophical
paradoxes with impassioned and persuasive eloquence. He began to teach
Harriet Latin, set her to work upon the translation of a French story by
Madame Cottin, and for his own part executed a version of one of
Buffon's treatises. The sitting-room was full of books. It was one of
Shelley's peculiarities to buy books wherever he went, regardless of
their volume or their cost. These he was wont to leave behind, when the
moment arrived for a sudden departure from his temporary abode; so that,
as Hogg remarks, a fine library might have been formed from the waifs
and strays of his collections scattered over the three kingdoms. This
quiet course of life was diversified by short rambles in the
neighbourhood of Edinburgh, and by many episodes related with Hogg's
caustic humour. On the whole, the impression left upon the reader's mind
is that Shelley and Harriet were very happy together at this period, and
that Harriet was a charming and sweet-tempered girl, somewhat too much
given to the study of trite ethics, and slightly deficient in
sensibility, but otherwise a fit and soothing companion for the poet.

They were not, however, content to remain in Edinburgh. Hogg was obliged
to leave that city, in order to resume his law studies at York, and
Shelley's programme of life at this period imperatively required the
society of his chosen comrade. It was therefore decided that the three
friends should settle at York, to remain "for ever" in each other's
company. They started in a post-chaise, the good Harriet reading aloud
novels by the now forgotten Holcroft with untiring energy, to charm the
tedium of the journey. At York more than one cloud obscured their triune
felicity. In the first place they were unfortunate in their choice of
lodgings. In the second Shelley found himself obliged to take an
expensive journey to London, in the fruitless attempt to come to some
terms with his father's lawyer, Mr. Whitton. Mr. Timothy Shelley was
anxious to bind his erratic son down to a settlement of the estates,
which, on his own death, would pass into the poet's absolute control. He
suggested numerous arrangements; and not long after the date of
Shelley's residence in York, he proposed to make him an immediate
allowance of 2000 pounds, if Shelley would but consent to entail the
land on his heirs male. This offer was indignantly refused. Shelley
recognized the truth that property is a trust far more than a
possession, and would do nothing to tie up so much command over labour,
such incalculable potentialities of social good or evil, for an unborn
being of whose opinions he knew nothing. This is only one among many
instances of his readiness to sacrifice ease, comfort, nay, the bare
necessities of life, for principle.

On his return to York, Shelley found a new inmate established in their
lodgings. The incomparable Eliza, who was henceforth doomed to guide his
destinies to an obscure catastrophe, had arrived from London. Harriet
believed her sister to be a paragon of beauty, good sense, and
propriety. She obeyed her elder sister like a mother; never questioned
her wisdom; and foolishly allowed her to interpose between herself and
her husband. Hogg had been told before her first appearance in the
friendly circle that Eliza was "beautiful, exquisitely beautiful; an
elegant figure, full of grace; her face was lovely,--dark, bright eyes;
jet-black hair, glossy; a crop upon which she bestowed the care it
merited,--almost all her time; and she was so sensible, so amiable, so
good!" Now let us listen to the account he has himself transmitted of
this woman, whom certainly he did not love, and to whom poor Shelley had
afterwards but little reason to feel gratitude. "She was older than I
had expected, and she looked much older than she was. The lovely face
was seamed with the smallpox, and of a dead white, as faces so much
marked and scarred commonly are; as white indeed as a mass of boiled
rice, but of a dingy hue, like rice boiled in dirty water. The eyes were
dark, but dull, and without meaning; the hair was black and glossy, but
coarse; and there was the admired crop--a long crop, much like the tail
of a horse--a switch tail. The fine figure was meagre, prim, and
constrained. The beauty, the grace, and the elegance existed, no doubt,
in their utmost perfection, but only in the imagination of her partial
young sister. Her father, as Harriet told me, was familiarly called 'Jew
Westbrook,' and Eliza greatly resembled one of the dark-eyed daughters
of Judah."

This portrait is drawn, no doubt, with an unfriendly hand; and, in
Hogg's biography, each of its sarcastic touches is sustained with
merciless reiteration, whenever the mention of Eliza's name is
necessary. We hear, moreover, how she taught the blooming Harriet to
fancy that she was a victim of her nerves, how she checked her favourite
studies, and how she ruled the household by continual reference to a
Mrs. Grundy of her earlier experience. "What would Miss Warne say?" was
as often on her lips, if we may credit Hogg, as the brush and comb were
in her hands.

The intrusion of Eliza disturbed the harmony of Shelley's circle; but it
is possible that there were deeper reasons for the abrupt departure
which he made from York with his wife and her sister in November, 1811.
One of his biographers asserts with categorical precision that Shelley
had good cause to resent Hogg's undue familiarity with Harriet, and
refers to a curious composition, published by Hogg as a continuation of
Goethe's "Werther", but believed by Mr. McCarthy to have been a letter
from the poet to his friend, in confirmation of his opinion. (McCarthy's
Shelley's Early Life, page 117.) However this may be, the precipitation
with which the Shelleys quitted York, scarcely giving Hogg notice of
their resolution, is insufficiently accounted for in his biography.

The destination of the travellers was Keswick. Here they engaged
lodgings for a time, and then moved into a furnished house. Probably
Shelley was attracted to the lake country as much by the celebrated men
who lived there, as by the beauty of its scenery, and the cheapness of
its accommodation. He had long entertained an admiration for Southey's
poetry, and was now beginning to study Wordsworth and Coleridge. But if
he hoped for much companionship with the literary lions of the lakes, he
was disappointed. Coleridge was absent, and missed making his
acquaintance--a circumstance he afterwards regretted, saying that he
could have been more useful to the young poet and metaphysician than
Southey. De Quincey, though he writes ambiguously upon this point, does
not seem to have met Shelley. Wordsworth paid him no attention; and
though he saw a good deal of Southey, this intimacy changed Shelley's
early liking for the man and poet into absolute contempt. It was not
likely that the cold methodical student, the mechanical versifier, and
the political turncoat, who had outlived all his earlier illusions,
should retain the good-will of such an Ariel as Shelley, in whose brain
"Queen Mab" was already simmering. Life at Keswick began to be
monotonous. It was, however, enlivened by a visit to the Duke of
Norfolk's seat, Greystoke. Shelley spent his last guinea on the trip;
but though the ladies of his family enjoyed the honour of some days
passed in ducal hospitalities, the visit was not fruitful of results.
The Duke at this time kindly did his best, but without success, to bring
about a reconciliation between his old friend, the member for Horsham,
and his rebellious son.

Another important incident of the Keswick residence was Shelley's letter
to William Godwin, whose work on Political Justice he had studied with
unbounded admiration. He never spoke of this book without respect in
after-life, affirming that the perusal of it had turned his attention
from romances to questions of public utility. The earliest letter dated
to Godwin from Keswick, January 3, 1812, is in many respects remarkable,
and not the least so as a specimen of self-delineation. He entreats
Godwin to become his guide, philosopher, and friend, urging that "if
desire for universal happiness has any claim upon your preference," if
persecution and injustice suffered in the cause of philanthropy and
truth may commend a young man to William Godwin's regard, he is not
unworthy of this honour. We who have learned to know the flawless purity
of Shelley's aspirations, can refrain from smiling at the big
generalities of this epistle. Words which to men made callous by long
contact with the world, ring false and wake suspicion, were for Shelley
but the natural expression of his most abiding mood. Yet Godwin may be
pardoned if he wished to know more in detail of the youth, who sought to
cast himself upon his care in all the panoply of phrases about
philanthropy and universal happiness. Shelley's second letter contains
an extraordinary mixture of truth willingly communicated, and of curious
romance, illustrating his tendency to colour facts with the
hallucinations of an ardent fancy. Of his sincerity there is, I think,
no doubt. He really meant what he wrote; and yet we have no reason to
believe the statement that he was twice expelled from Eton for
disseminating the doctrines of "Political Justice", or that his father
wished to drive him by poverty to accept a commission in some distant
regiment, in order that he might prosecute the "Necessity of Atheism" in
his absence, procure a sentence of outlawry, and so convey the family
estates to his younger brother. The embroidery of bare fact with a
tissue of imagination was a peculiarity of Shelley's mind; and this
letter may be used as a key for the explanation of many strange
occurrences in his biography. What he tells Godwin about his want of
love for his father, and his inability to learn from the tutors imposed
upon him at Eton and Oxford, represents the simple truth. Only from
teachers chosen by himself, and recognized as his superiors by his own
deliberate judgment, can he receive instruction. To Godwin he resigns
himself with the implicit confidence of admiration. Godwin was greatly
struck with this letter. Indeed, he must have been "or God or beast,"
like the insensible man in Aristotle's "Ethics", if he could have
resisted the devotion of so splendid and high-spirited a nature, poured
forth in language at once so vehement and so convincingly sincere. He
accepted the responsible post of Shelley's Mentor; and thus began a
connexion which proved not only a source of moral support and
intellectual guidance to the poet, but was also destined to end in a
closer personal tie between the two illustrious men.

In his second letter Shelley told Godwin that he was then engaged in
writing "An inquiry into the causes of the failure of the French
Revolution to benefit mankind," adding, "My plan is that of resolving to
lose no opportunity to disseminate truth and happiness." Godwin sensibly
replied that Shelley was too young to set himself up as a teacher and
apostle: but his pupil did not take the hint. A third letter (January
16, 1812) contains this startling announcement: "In a few days we set
off to Dublin. I do not know exactly where, but a letter addressed to
Keswick will find me. Our journey has been settled some time. We go
principally TO FORWARD AS MUCH AS WE CAN the Catholic Emancipation." In
a fourth letter (January 28, 1812) he informs Godwin that he has already
prepared an address to the Catholics of Ireland, and combats the
dissuasions of his counsellor with ingenious arguments to prove that his
contemplated expedition can do no harm, and may be fruitful of great
good.

It appears that for some time past Shelley had devoted his attention to
Irish politics. The persecution of Mr. Peter Finnerty, an Irish
journalist and editor of "The Press" newspaper, who had been sentenced
to eighteen months' imprisonment in Lincoln jail (between February 7,
1811, and August 7, 1812) for plain speech about Lord Castlereagh,
roused his hottest indignation. He published a poem, as yet unrecovered,
for his benefit; the proceeds of the sale amounting, it is said, to
nearly one hundred pounds. (McCarthy, page 255.) The young enthusiast,
who was attempting a philosophic study of the French Revolution, whose
heart was glowing with universal philanthropy, and who burned to
disseminate truth and happiness, judged that Ireland would be a fitting
field for making a first experiment in practical politics. Armed with
the manuscript of his "Address to the Irish People" (It was published in
Dublin. See reprint in McCarthy, page 179.), he set sail with Harriet
and Eliza on the 3rd of February from Whitehaven. They touched the Isle
of Man; and after a very stormy passage, which drove them to the north
coast of Ireland, and forced them to complete their journey by land, the
party reached Dublin travel-worn, but with unabated spirit, on the 12th.
Harriet shared her husband's philanthropical enthusiasm. "My wife,"
wrote Shelley to Godwin, "is the partner of my thoughts and feelings."
Indeed, there is abundant proof in both his letters and hers, about this
period, that they felt and worked together. Miss Westbrook, meantime,
ruled the household; "Eliza keeps our common stock of money for safety
in some nook or corner of her dress, but we are not dependent on her,
although she gives it out as we want it." This master-touch of
unconscious delineation tells us all we need to know about the domestic
party now established in 7, Lower Sackville Street. Before a week had
passed, the "Address to the Irish People" had been printed. Shelley and
Harriet immediately engaged their whole energies in the task of
distribution. It was advertised for sale; but that alone seemed
insufficient. On the 27th of February Shelley wrote to a friend in
England: "I have already sent 400 of my Irish pamphlets into the world,
and they have excited a sensation of wonder in Dublin. Eleven hundred
yet remain for distribution. Copies have been sent to sixty public
houses.... Expectation is on the tiptoe. I send a man out every day to
distribute copies, with instructions where and how to give them. His
account corresponds with the multitudes of people who possess them. I
stand at the balcony of our window and watch till I see a man WHO LOOKS
LIKELY. I throw a book to him."

A postscript to this letter lets us see the propaganda from Harriet's
point of view. "I am sure you would laugh were you to see us give the
pamphlets. We throw them out of the window, and give them to men that we
pass in the streets. For myself, I am ready to die of laughter when it
is done, and Percy looks so grave. Yesterday he put one into a woman's
hood of a cloak."

The purpose of this address was to rouse the Irish people to a sense of
their real misery, to point out that Catholic Emancipation and a Repeal
of the Union Act were the only radical remedies for their wrongs, and to
teach them the spirit in which they should attempt a revolution. On the
last point Shelley felt intensely. The whole address aims at the
inculcation of a noble moral temper, tolerant, peaceful, resolute,
rational, and self-denying. Considered as a treatise on the principles
which should govern patriots during a great national crisis, the
document is admirable: and if the inhabitants of Dublin had been a
population of Shelleys, its effect might have been permanent and
overwhelming. The mistake lay in supposing that a people whom the poet
himself described as "of scarcely greater elevation in the scale of
intellectual being than the oyster," were qualified to take the remedy
of their grievances into their own hands, or were amenable to such sound
reasoning as he poured forth. He told Godwin that he had "wilfully
vulgarized the language of this pamphlet, in order to reduce the remarks
it contains to the taste and comprehension of the Irish peasantry." A
few extracts will enable the reader to judge how far he had succeeded in
this aim. I select such as seem to me most valuable for the light they
throw upon his own opinions. "All religions are good which make men
good; and the way that a person ought to prove that his method of
worshipping God is best, is for himself to be better than all other
men." "A Protestant is my brother, and a Catholic is my brother." "Do
not inquire if a man be a heretic, if he be a Quaker, a Jew, or a
heathen; but if he be a virtuous man, if he loves liberty and truth, if
he wish the happiness and peace of human kind. If a man be ever so much
a believer and love not these things, he is a heartless hypocrite, a
rascal and a knave." "It is not a merit to tolerate, but it is a crime
to be intolerant." "Anything short of unlimited toleration and complete
charity with all men, on which you will recollect that Jesus Christ
principally insisted, is wrong." "Be calm, mild, deliberate, patient....
Think and talk and discuss.... Be free and be happy, but first be wise
and good." Proceeding to recommend the formation of associations, he
condemns secret and violent societies; "Be fair, open and you will be
terrible to your enemies." "Habits of SOBRIETY, REGULARITY, and THOUGHT
must be entered into and firmly resolved upon." Then follow precepts,
which Shelley no doubt regarded as practical, for the purification of
private morals, and the regulation of public discussion by the masses
whom he elsewhere recognized as "thousands huddled together, one mass of
animated filth."

The foregoing extracts show that Shelley was in no sense an inflammatory
demagogue; however visionary may have been the hopes he indulged, he
based those hopes upon the still more Utopian foundation of a sudden
ethical reform, and preached a revolution without bloodshed. We find in
them, moreover, the germs of "The Revolt of Islam", where the hero plays
the part successfully in fiction, which the poet had attempted without
appreciable result in practice at Dublin. The same principles guided
Shelley at a still later period. When he wrote his "Masque of Anarchy",
he bade the people of England to assemble by thousands, strong in the
truth and justice of their cause, invincible in peaceful opposition to
force.

While he was sowing his Address broadcast in the streets of Dublin,
Shelley was engaged in printing a second pamphlet on the subject of
Catholic Emancipation. It was entitled "Proposals for an Association",
and advocated in serious and temperate phrase the formation of a vast
society, binding all the Catholic patriots of Ireland together, for the
recovery of their rights. In estimating Shelley's political sagacity, it
must be remembered that Catholic emancipation has since his day been
brought about by the very measure he proposed and under the conditions
he foresaw. Speaking of the English Government in his Address, he used
these simple phrases:--"It wants altering and mending. It will be
mended, and a reform of English Government will produce good to the
Irish." These sentences were prophetic; and perhaps they are destined to
be even more so.

With a view to presenting at one glance Shelley's position as a
practical politician, I shall anticipate the course of a few years, and
compare his Irish pamphlets with an essay published in 1817, under the
title of "A Proposal for putting Reform to the Vote throughout the
Kingdom". He saw that the House of Commons did not represent the
country; and acting upon his principle that government is the servant of
the governed, he sought means for ascertaining the real will of the
nation with regard to its Parliament, and for bringing the collective
opinion of the population to bear upon its rulers. The plan proposed was
that a huge network of committees should be formed, and that by their
means every individual man should be canvassed. We find here the same
method of advancing reform by peaceable associations as in Ireland. How
moderated were his own opinions with regard to the franchise, is proved
by the following sentence:--"With respect to Universal Suffrage, I
confess I consider its adoption, in the present unprepared state of
public knowledge and feeling, a measure fraught with peril. I think that
none but those who register their names as paying a certain small sum in
DIRECT TAXES ought at present to send members to Parliament." As in the
case of Ireland, so in that of England, subsequent events have shown
that Shelley's hopes were not exaggerated.

While the Shelleys were in Dublin, a meeting of the Irish Catholics was
announced for the evening of February 28. It was held in Fishamble
Street Theatre; and here Shelley made his debut as an orator. He spoke
for about an hour; and his speech was, on the whole, well received,
though it raised some hisses at the beginning by his remarks upon Roman
Catholicism. There is no proof that Shelley, though eloquent in
conversation, was a powerful public speaker. The somewhat conflicting
accounts we have received of this, his maiden effort, tend to the
impression that he failed to carry his audience with him. The
dissemination of his pamphlets had, however, raised considerable
interest in his favour; and he was welcomed by the press as an
Englishman of birth and fortune, who wished well to the Irish cause. His
youth told somewhat against him. It was difficult to take the strong
words of the beardless boy at their real value; and as though to
aggravate this drawback, his Irish servant, Daniel Hill, an efficient
agent in the dissemination of the Address, affirmed that his master was
fifteen--four years less than his real age.

In Dublin Shelley made acquaintance with Curran, whose jokes and dirty
stories he could not appreciate, and with a Mr. Lawless, who began a
history of the Irish people in concert with the young philosopher. We
also obtain, from one of Harriet's letters, a somewhat humorous peep at
another of their friends, a patriotic Mrs. Nugent, who supported herself
by working in a furrier's shop, and who is described as "sitting in the
room now, and talking to Percy about Virtue." After less than two
months' experience of his Irish propaganda, Shelley came to the
conclusion that he "had done all that he could." The population of
Dublin had not risen to the appeal of their Laon with the rapidity he
hoped for; and accordingly upon the 7th of April he once more embarked
with his family for Holyhead. In after-days he used to hint that the
police had given him warning that it would be well for him to leave
Dublin; but, though the danger of a prosecution was not wholly
visionary, this intimation does not seem to have been made. Before he
quitted Ireland, however, he despatched a box containing the remaining
copies of his "Address" and "Proposals", together with the recently
printed edition of another manifesto, called a "Declaration of Rights",
to a friend in Sussex. This box was delayed at the Holyhead
custom-house, and opened. Its contents gave serious anxiety to the
Surveyor of Customs, who communicated the astonishing discovery through
the proper official channels to the government. After some
correspondence, the authorities decided to take no steps against
Shelley, and the box was forwarded to its destination.

The friend in question was a Miss Eliza Hitchener, of Hurstpierpoint,
who kept a sort of school, and who had attracted Shelley's favourable
notice by her advanced political and religious opinions. He does not
seem to have made her personal acquaintance; but some of his most
interesting letters from Ireland are addressed to her. How recklessly he
entered into serious entanglements with people whom he had not learned
to know, may be gathered from these extracts:--"We will meet you in
Wales, and never part again. It will not do. In compliance with
Harriet's earnest solicitations, I entreated you instantly to come and
join our circle, resign your school, all, everything for us and the
Irish cause." "I ought to count myself a favoured mortal with such a
wife and such a friend." Harriet addressed this lady as "Portia;" and it
is an undoubted fact that soon after their return to England, Miss
Hitchener formed one of their permanent family circle. Her entrance into
it and her exit from it at no very distant period are, however, both
obscure. Before long she acquired another name than Portia in the
Shelley household, and now she is better known as the "Brown Demon."
Eliza Westbrook took a strong dislike to her; Harriet followed suit; and
Shelley himself found that he had liked her better at a distance than in
close companionship. She had at last to be bought off or bribed to
leave.

The scene now shifts with bewildering frequency; nor is it easy to trace
the Shelleys in their rapid flight. About the 21st of April, they
settled for a short time at Nantgwilt, near Rhayader, in North Wales.
Ere long we find them at Lynmouth, on the Somersetshire coast. Here
Shelley continued his political propaganda, by circulating the
"Declaration of Rights", whereof mention has already been made. It was,
as Mr. W.M. Rossetti first pointed out, a manifesto concerning the ends
of government and the rights of man,--framed in imitation of two similar
French Revolutionary documents, issued by the Constituent Assembly in
August, 1789, and by Robespierre in April, 1793. (Reprinted in McCarthy,
page 324.) Shelley used to seal this pamphlet in bottles and set it
afloat upon the sea, hoping perhaps that after this wise it would
traverse St. George's Channel and reach the sacred soil of Erin. He also
employed his servant, Daniel Hill, to distribute it among the
Somersetshire farmers. On the 19th of August this man was arrested in
the streets of Barnstaple, and sentenced to six months' imprisonment for
uttering a seditious pamphlet; and the remaining copies of the
"Declaration of Rights" were destroyed. In strong contrast with the
puerility of these proceedings, is the grave and lofty "Letter to Lord
Ellenborough", composed at Lynmouth, and printed at Barnstaple.
(Reprinted in Lady Shelley's Memorials, page 29.) A printer, named D.J.
Eaton, had recently been sentenced to imprisonment by his Lordship for
publishing the Third Part of Paine's "Age of Reason". Shelley's epistle
is an eloquent argument in favour of toleration and the freedom of the
intellect, carrying the matter beyond the instance of legal tyranny
which occasioned its composition, and treating it with philosophic, if
impassioned seriousness.

An extract from this composition will serve to show his power of
handling weighty English prose, while yet a youth of hardly twenty. I
have chosen a passage bearing on his theological opinions:--

"Moral qualities are such as only a human being can possess. To
attribute them to the Spirit of the Universe, or to suppose that it is
capable of altering them, is to degrade God into man, and to annex to
this incomprehensible Being qualities incompatible with any possible
definition of his nature.

"It may be here objected: Ought not the Creator to possess the
perfections of the creature? No. To attribute to God the moral qualities
of man, is to suppose him susceptible of passions, which, arising out of
corporeal organization, it is plain that a pure spirit cannot
possess.... But even suppose, with the vulgar, that God is a venerable
old man, seated on a throne of clouds, his breast the theatre of various
passions, analogous to those of humanity, his will changeable and
uncertain as that of an earthly king; still, goodness and justice are
qualities seldom nominally denied him, and it will be admitted that he
disapproves of any action incompatible with those qualities. Persecution
for opinion is unjust. With what consistency, then, can the worshippers
of a Deity whose benevolence they boast, embitter the existence of their
fellow-being, because his ideas of that Deity are different from those
which they entertain? Alas! there is no consistency in those persecutors
who worship a benevolent Deity; those who worship a demon would alone
act consonantly to these principles by imprisoning and torturing in
his name."

Shelley had more than once urged Godwin and his family to visit him. The
sage of Skinner Street thought that now was a convenient season.
Accordingly he left London, and travelled by coach to Lynmouth, where he
found that the Shelleys had flitted a few days previously without giving
any notice. This fruitless journey of the poet's Mentor is humorously
described by Hogg, as well as one undertaken by himself in the following
year to Dublin with a similar result. The Shelleys were now established
at Tan-yr-allt, near Tremadoc, in North Wales, on an estate belonging to
Mr. W.A. Madocks, M.P. for Boston. This gentleman had reclaimed a
considerable extent of marshy ground from the sea, and protected it with
an embankment. Shelley, whose interest in the poor people around him was
always keen and practical, lost no time in making their acquaintance at
Tremadoc. The work of utility carried out by his landlord aroused his
enthusiastic admiration; and when the embankment was emperilled by a
heavy sea, he got up a subscription for its preservation. Heading the
list with 500 pounds, how raised, or whether paid, we know not, he
endeavoured to extract similar sums from the neighbouring gentry, and
even ran up with Harriet to London to use his influence for the same
purpose with the Duke of Norfolk. On this occasion he made the personal
acquaintance of the Godwin family.

Life at Tanyrallt was smooth and studious, except for the diversion
caused by the peril to the embankment. We hear of Harriet continuing her
Latin studies, reading Odes of Horace, and projecting an epistle in that
language to Hogg. Shelley, as usual, collected many books around him.
There are letters extant in which he writes to London for Spinoza and
Kant, Plato, and the works of the chief Greek historians. It appears
that at this period, under the influence of Godwin, he attempted to
conquer a strong natural dislike of history. "I am determined to apply
myself to a study which is hateful and disgusting to my very soul, but
which is above all studies necessary for him who would be listened to as
a mender of antiquated abuses,--I mean, that record of crimes and
miseries--history." Although he may have made an effort to apply himself
to historical reading, he was not successful. His true bias inclined him
to metaphysics coloured by a glowing fancy, and to poetry penetrated
with speculative enthusiasm. In the historic sense he was deficient; and
when he made a serious effort at a later period to compose a tragedy
upon the death of Charles I, this work was taken up with reluctance,
continued with effort, and finally abandoned.

In the same letters he speaks about a collection of short poems on which
he was engaged, and makes frequent allusions to "Queen Mab". It appears,
from his own assertion, and from Medwin's biography, that a poem on
Queen Mab had been projected and partially written by him at the early
age of eighteen. But it was not taken seriously in hand until the spring
of 1812; nor was it finished and printed before 1813. The first
impression was a private issue of 250 copies, on fine paper, which
Shelley distributed to people whom he wished to influence. It was
pirated soon after its appearance, and again in 1821 it was given to the
public by a bookseller named Clarke. Against the latter republication
Shelley energetically protested, disclaiming in a letter addressed to
"The Examiner", from Pisa, June 22, 1821, any interest in a production
which he had not even seen for several years. "I doubt not but that it
is perfectly worthless in point of literary composition; and that in all
that concerns moral and political speculation, as well as in the subtler
discriminations of metaphysical and religious doctrine, it is still more
crude and immature. I am a devoted enemy to religious, political and
domestic oppression; and I regret this publication, not so much from
literary vanity as because I fear it is better fitted to injure than to
serve the sacred cause of freedom." This judgment is undoubtedly severe;
but, though exaggerated in its condemnation, it, like all Shelley's
criticisms on his own works, expresses the truth. We cannot include
"Queen Mab", in spite of its sonorous rhetoric and fervid declamation,
in the canon of his masterpieces. It had a succes de scandale on its
first appearance, and fatally injured Shelley's reputation. As a work of
art it lacks maturity and permanent vitality.

The Shelleys were suddenly driven away from Tanyrallt by a mysterious
occurrence, of which no satisfactory explanation has yet been given.
According to letters written by himself and Harriet soon after the
event, and confirmed by the testimony of Eliza, Shelley was twice
attacked upon the night of February 24 by an armed ruffian, with whom he
struggled in hand-to-hand combat. Pistols were fired and windows broken,
and Shelley's nightgown was shot through: but the assassin made his
escape from the house without being recognized. His motive and his
personality still remain matters of conjecture. Whether the whole affair
was a figment of Shelley's brain, rendered more than usually susceptible
by laudanum taken to assuage intense physical pain; whether it was a
perilous hoax played upon him by the Irish servant, Daniel Hill; or
whether, as he himself surmised, the crime was instigated by an
unfriendly neighbour, it is impossible to say. Strange adventures of
this kind, blending fact and fancy in a now inextricable tangle, are of
no unfrequent occurrence in Shelley's biography. In estimating the
relative proportions of the two factors in this case, it must be borne
in mind, on the one hand, that no one but Shelley, who was alone in the
parlour, and who for some unexplained reason had loaded his pistols on
the evening before the alleged assault, professed to have seen the
villain; and, on the other, that the details furnished by Harriet, and
confirmed at a subsequent period by so hostile a witness as Eliza, are
too circumstantial to be lightly set aside.

On the whole it appears most probable that Shelley on this night was the
subject of a powerful hallucination. The theory of his enemies at
Tanyrallt, that the story had been invented to facilitate his escape
from the neighbourhood without paying his bills, may be dismissed. But
no investigation on the spot could throw any clear light on the
circumstance, and Shelley's friends, Hogg, Peacock, and Mr. Madocks,
concurred in regarding the affair as a delusion.

There was no money in the common purse of the Shelleys at this moment.
In their distress they applied to Mr. T. Hookham, a London publisher,
who sent them enough to carry them across the Irish channel. After a
short residence in 35, Cuffe Street, Dublin, and a flying visit to
Killarney, they returned to London. Eliza, for some reason as
unexplained as the whole episode of this second visit to Ireland, was
left behind for a short season. The flight from Tanyrallt closes the
first important period of Shelley's life; and his settlement in London
marks the beginning of another, fruitful of the gravest consequences and
decisive of his future.



CHAPTER 4.

SECOND RESIDENCE IN LONDON, AND SEPARATION FROM HARRIET.

Early in May the Shelleys arrived in London, where they were soon joined
by Eliza, from whose increasingly irksome companionship the poet had
recently enjoyed a few weeks' respite. After living for a short while in
hotels, they took lodgings in Half Moon Street. The house had a
projecting window, where the poet loved to sit with book in hand, and
catch, according to his custom, the maximum of sunlight granted by a
chary English summer. "He wanted," said one of his female admirers,
"only a pan of clear water and a fresh turf to look like some young
lady's lark, hanging outside for air and song." According to Hogg, this
period of London life was a pleasant and tranquil episode in Shelley's
troubled career. His room was full of books, among which works of German
metaphysics occupied a prominent place, though they were not deeply
studied. He was now learning Italian, and made his first acquaintance
with Tasso, Ariosto, and Petrarch.

The habits of the household were, to say the least, irregular; for
Shelley took no thought of sublunary matters, and Harriet was an
indifferent housekeeper. Dinner seems to have come to them less by
forethought than by the operation of divine chance; and when there was
no meat provided for the entertainment of casual guests, the table was
supplied with buns, procured by Shelley from the nearest pastry-cook. He
had already abjured animal food and alcohol; and his favourite diet
consisted of pulse or bread, which he ate dry with water, or made into
panada. Hogg relates how, when he was walking in the streets and felt
hungry, he would dive into a baker's shop and emerge with a loaf tucked
under his arm. $This he consumed as he went along, very often reading at
the same time, and dodging the foot-passengers with the rapidity of
movement which distinguished him. He could not comprehend how any man
should want more than bread. "I have dropped a word, a hint," says Hogg,
"about a pudding; a pudding, Bysshe said dogmatically, is a prejudice."
This indifference to diet was highly characteristic of Shelley. During
the last years of his life, even when he was suffering from the frequent
attacks of a painful disorder, he took no heed of food; and his friend,
Trelawny, attributes the derangement of his health, in a great measure,
to this carelessness. Mrs. Shelley used to send him something to eat
into the room where he habitually studied; but the plate frequently
remained untouched for hours upon a bookshelf, and at the end of the day
he might be heard asking, "Mary, have I dined?" His dress was no less
simple than his diet. Hogg says that he never saw him in a great coat,
and that his collar was unbuttoned to let the air play freely on his
throat. "In the street or road he reluctantly wore a hat; but in fields
and gardens, his little round head had no other covering than his long,
wild, ragged locks." Shelley's head, as is well known, was remarkably
small and round; he used to plunge it several times a day in cold water,
and expose it recklessly to the intensest heat of fire or sun. Mrs.
Shelley relates that a great part of the "Cenci" was written on their
house-roof near Leghorn, where Shelley lay exposed to the unmitigated
ardour of Italian summer heat; and Hogg describes him reading Homer by a
blazing fire-light, or roasting his skull upon the hearth-rug by the
hour.

These personal details cannot be omitted by the biographer of such a man
as Shelley. He was an elemental and primeval creature, as little subject
to the laws of custom in his habits as in his modes of thought, living
literally as the spirit moved him, with a natural nonchalance that has
perhaps been never surpassed. To time and place he was equally
indifferent, and could not be got to remember his engagements. "He took
strange caprices, unfounded frights and dislikes, vain apprehensions and
panic terrors, and therefore he absented himself from formal and sacred
engagements. He was unconscious and oblivious of times, places, persons
and seasons; and falling into some poetic vision, some day-dream, he
quickly and completely forgot all that he had repeatedly and solemnly
promised; or he ran away after some object of imaginary urgency and
importance, which suddenly came into his head, setting off in vain
pursuit of it, he knew not whither. When he was caught, brought up in
custody, and turned over to the ladies, with, Behold, your King! to be
caressed, courted, admired, and flattered, the king of beauty and fancy
would too commonly bolt; slip away, steal out, creep off; unobserved and
almost magically he vanished; thus mysteriously depriving his fair
subjects of his much-coveted, long looked-for company." If he had been
fairly caged and found himself in congenial company, he let time pass
unheeded, sitting up all night to talk, and chaining his audience by the
spell of his unrivalled eloquence; for wonderful as was his poetry,
those who enjoyed the privilege of converse with him, judged it even
more attractive. "He was commonly most communicative, unreserved, and
eloquent, and enthusiastic, when those around him were inclining to
yield to the influence of sleep, or rather at the hour when they would
have been disposed to seek their chambers, but for the bewitching charms
of his discourse."

From Half Moon Street the Shelleys moved into a house in Pimlico; and it
was here, according to Hogg, or at Cooke's Hotel in Dover Street
according to other accounts, that Shelley's first child, Ianthe Eliza,
was born about the end of June, 1813. Harriet did not take much to her
little girl, and gave her over to a wet-nurse, for whom Shelley
conceived a great dislike. That a mother should not nurse her own baby
was no doubt contrary to his principles; and the double presence of the
servant and Eliza, whom he now most cordially detested, made his home
uncomfortable. We have it on excellent authority, that of Mr. Peacock,
that he "was extremely fond of it (the child), and would walk up and
down a room with it in his arms for a long time together, singing to it
a song of his own making, which ran on the repetition of a word of his
own coining. His song was Yáhmani, Yáhmani, Yáhmani, Yáhmani." To the
want of sympathy between the father and the mother in this matter of
Ianthe, Mr. Peacock is inclined to attribute the beginning of troubles
in the Shelley household. There is, indeed, no doubt that the revelation
of Harriet's maternal coldness must have been extremely painful to her
husband; and how far she carried her insensibility, may be gathered from
a story told by Hogg about her conduct during an operation performed
upon the child.

During this period of his sojourn in London, Shelley was again in some
pecuniary difficulties. Yet he indulged Harriet's vanity by setting up a
carriage, in which they afterwards took a hurried journey to Edinburgh
and back. He narrowly escaped a debtor's prison through this act of
extravagance, and by a somewhat ludicrous mistake Hogg was arrested for
the debt due to the coach-maker. His acquaintances were few and
scattered, and he saw nothing of his family. Gradually, however, he
seems to have become a kind of prophet in a coterie of learned ladies.
The views he had propounded in "Queen Mab", his passionate belief in the
perfectibility of man, his vegetarian doctrines, and his readiness to
adopt any new nostrum for the amelioration of his race, endeared him to
all manners of strange people; nor was he deterred by aristocratic
prejudices from frequenting society which proved extremely uncongenial
to Hogg, and of which we have accordingly some caustic sketches from his
pen. His chief friends were a Mrs. Boinville, for whom he conceived an
enthusiastic admiration, and her daughter Cornelia, married to a
vegetarian, Mr. Newton. In order to be near them he had moved to
Pimlico; and his next move, from London to a cottage named High Elms, at
Bracknell, in Berkshire, had the same object. With Godwin and his family
he was also on terms of familiar intercourse. Under the philosopher's
roof in Skinner Street there was now gathered a group of miscellaneous
inmates--Fanny Imlay, the daughter of his first wife, Mary
Wollstonecraft; Mary, his own daughter by the same marriage; his second
wife, and her two children, Claire and Charles Clairmont, the offspring
of a previous union. From this connexion with the Godwin household
events of the gravest importance in the future were destined to arise,
and already it appears that Fanny Imlay had begun to look with perilous
approval on the fascinating poet. Hogg and Mr. Peacock, the well-known
novelist, described by Mrs. Newton as "a cold scholar, who, I think, has
neither taste nor feeling," were his only intimates.

Mrs. Newton's unfair judgment of Mr. Peacock marks a discord between the
two chief elements of Shelley's present society; and indeed it will
appear to a careful student of his biography that Hogg, Peacock, and
Harriet, now stood somewhat by themselves and aloof from the inner
circle of his associates. If we regard the Shelleys as the centre of an
extended line, we shall find the Westbrook family at one end, the
Boinville family at the other, with Hogg and Peacock somewhere in the
middle. Harriet was naturally drawn to the Westbrook extremity, and
Shelley to the Boinville. Peacock had no affinity for either, but a
sincere regard for Harriet as well as for her husband; while Hogg was in
much the same position, except that he had made friends with Mrs.
Newton. The Godwins, of great importance to Shelley himself, exercised
their influence at a distance from the rest. Frequent change from
Bracknell to London and back again, varied by the flying journey to
Edinburgh, and a last visit paid in strictest secrecy to his mother and
sisters, at Field Place, of which a very interesting record is left in
the narrative of Mr. Kennedy, occupied the interval between July, 1813,
and March, 1814. The period was not productive of literary masterpieces.
We only hear of a "Refutation of Deism", a dialogue between Eusebes and
Theosophus, which attacked all forms of Theistic belief.

Since we are now approaching the gravest crisis in Shelley's life, it
behoves us to be more than usually careful in considering his
circumstances at this epoch. His home had become cold and dull. Harriet
did not love her child, and spent her time in a great measure with her
Mount Street relations. Eliza was a source of continual irritation, and
the Westbrook family did its best, by interference and suggestion, to
refrigerate the poet's feelings for his wife. On the other hand he found
among the Boinville set exactly that high-flown, enthusiastic,
sentimental atmosphere which suited his idealizing temper. Two extracts
from a letter written to Hogg upon the 16th of March, 1814, speak more
eloquently than any analysis, and will place before the reader the
antagonism which had sprung up in Shelley's mind between his own home
and the circle of his new friends:--"I have been staying with Mrs. B--
for the last month; I have escaped, in the society of all that
philosophy and friendship combine, from the dismaying solitude of
myself. They have revived in my heart the expiring flame of life. I have
felt myself translated to a paradise, which has nothing of mortality but
its transitoriness; my heart sickens at the view of that necessity,
which will quickly divide me from the delightful tranquillity of this
happy home,--for it has become my home. The trees, the bridge, the
minutest objects, have already a place in my affections."

"Eliza is still with us--not here!--but will be with me when the
infinite malice of destiny forces me to depart. I am now but little
inclined to contest this point. I certainly hate her with all my heart
and soul. It is a sight which awakens an inexpressible sensation of
disgust and horror, to see her caress my poor little Ianthe, in whom I
may hereafter find the consolation of sympathy. I sometimes feel faint
with the fatigue of checking the overflowings of my unbounded abhorrence
for this miserable wretch. But she is no more than a blind and loathsome
worm, that cannot see to sting."

While divided in this way between a home which had become distasteful to
him, and a house where he found scope for his most romantic outpourings
of sensibility, Shelley fell suddenly and passionately in love with
Godwin's daughter, Mary. Peacock, who lived in close intimacy with him
at this period, must deliver his testimony as to the overwhelming nature
of the new attachment:--"Nothing that I ever read in tale or history
could present a more striking image of a sudden, violent, irresistible,
uncontrollable passion, than that under which I found him labouring
when, at his request, I went up from the country to call on him in
London. Between his old feelings towards Harriet, FROM WHOM HE WAS NOT
THEN SEPARATED, and his new passion for Mary, he showed in his looks, in
his gestures, in his speech, the state of a mind 'suffering, like a
little kingdom, the nature of an insurrection.' His eyes were bloodshot,
his hair and dress disordered. He caught up a bottle of laudanum, and
said, 'I never part from this.'"

We may therefore affirm, I think, with confidence that in the winter and
spring of 1814, Shelley had been becoming gradually more and more
estranged from Harriet, whose commonplace nature was no mate for his,
and whom he had never loved with all the depth of his affection; that
his intimacy with the Boinville family had brought into painful
prominence whatever was jarring and repugnant to him in his home; and
that in this crisis of his fate he had fallen in love for the first time
seriously with Mary Godwin. (The date at which he first made Mary's
acquaintance is uncertain. Peacock says that it was between April 18 and
June 8.) She was then a girl of sixteen, "fair and fair-haired, pale
indeed, and with a piercing look," to quote Hogg's description of her,
as she first appeared before him on the 8th or 9th of June, 1814. With
her freedom from prejudice, her tense and high-wrought sensibility, her
acute intellect, enthusiasm for ideas, and vivid imagination, Mary
Godwin was naturally a fitter companion for Shelley than the good
Harriet, however beautiful.

That Shelley early in 1814 had no intention of leaving his wife, is
probable; for he was re-married to her on the 24th of March, eight days
after his impassioned letter to Hogg, in St. George's, Hanover Square.
Harriet was pregnant, and this ratification of the Scotch marriage was
no doubt intended to place the legitimacy of a possible heir beyond all
question. Yet it seems, if we may found conjecture on "Stanzas, April,
1814," that in the very month after this new ceremony Shelley found the
difficulties of his wedded life insuperable, and that he was already
making up his mind to part from Harriet. About the middle of June the
separation actually occurred--not by mutual consent, so far as any
published documents throw light on the matter, but rather by Shelley's
sudden abandonment of his wife and child. (Leigh Hunt, Autobiography
page 236, and Medwin, however, both assert that it was by mutual
consent. The whole question must be studied in Peacock and in Garnett,
Relics of Shelly, page 147.) For a short while Harriet was left in
ignorance of his abode, and with a very insufficient sum of money at her
disposal. She placed herself under the protection of her father, retired
to Bath, and about the beginning of July received a letter from Shelley,
who was thenceforth solicitous for her welfare, keeping up a
correspondence with her, supplying her with funds, and by no means
shrinking from personal communications.

That Shelley must bear the responsibility of this separation seems to me
quite clear. His justification is to be found in his avowed opinions on
the subject of love and marriage--opinions which Harriet knew well and
professed to share, and of which he had recently made ample confession
in the notes to "Queen Mab". The world will still agree with Lord Eldon
in regarding those opinions as dangerous to society, and a blot upon the
poet's character; but it would be unfair, while condemning them as
frankly as he professed them, to blame him also because he did not
conform to the opposite code of morals, for which he frequently
expressed extreme abhorrence, and which he stigmatized, however wrongly,
as the source of the worst social vices. It must be added that the
Shelley family in their memorials of the poet, and through their friend,
Mr. Richard Garnett, inform us, without casting any slur on Harriet,
that documents are extant which will completely vindicate the poet's
conduct in this matter. It is therefore but just to await their
publication before pronouncing a decided judgment. Meanwhile there
remains no doubt about the fact that forty days after leaving Harriet,
Shelley departed from London with Mary Godwin, who had consented to
share his fortunes. How he plighted his new troth, and won the hand of
her who was destined to be his companion for life, may best be told in
Lady Shelley's words:--

"His anguish, his isolation, his difference from other men, his gifts of
genius and eloquent enthusiasm, made a deep impression on Godwin's
daughter Mary, now a girl of sixteen, who had been accustomed to hear
Shelley spoken of as something rare and strange. To her, as they met one
eventful day in St. Pancras Churchyard, by her mother's grave, Bysshe,
in burning words, poured forth the tale of his wild past--how he had
suffered, how he had been misled, and how, if supported by her love, he
hoped in future years to enrol his name with the wise and good who had
done battle for the fellow-men, and been true through all adverse storms
to the cause of humanity. Unhesitatingly, she placed her hand in his,
and linked her fortune with his own; and most truthfully, as the
remaining portions of these Memorials will prove, was the pledge of both
redeemed. The theories in which the daughter of the authors of
"Political Justice", and of the "Rights of Woman", had been educated,
spared her from any conflict between her duty and her affection. For she
was the child of parents whose writings had had for their object to
prove that marriage was one among the many institutions which a new era
in the history of mankind was about to sweep away. By her father, whom
she loved--by the writings of her mother, whom she had been taught to
venerate--these doctrines had been rendered familiar to her mind. It was
therefore natural that she should listen to the dictates of her own
heart, and willingly unite her fate with one who was so worthy of her
love."

Soon after her withdrawal to Bath, Harriet gave birth to Shelley's
second child, Charles Bysshe, who died in 1826. She subsequently formed
another connexion which proved unhappy; and on the 10th of November,
1816, she committed suicide by drowning herself in the Serpentine. The
distance of time between June, 1814, and November, 1816, and the new
ties formed by Harriet in this interval, prove that there was no
immediate connexion between Shelley's abandonment of his wife and her
suicide. She had always entertained the thought of self-destruction, as
Hogg, who is no adverse witness in her case, has amply recorded; and it
may be permitted us to suppose that, finding herself for the second time
unhappy in her love, she reverted to a long-since cherished scheme, and
cut the knot of life and all its troubles.

So far as this is possible, I have attempted to narrate the most painful
period in Shelley's life as it occurred, without extenuation and without
condemnation. Until the papers, mentioned with such insistence by Lady
Shelley and Mr. Garnett, are given to the world, it is impossible that
the poet should not bear the reproach of heartlessness and inconstancy
in this the gravest of all human relations. Such, however, is my belief
in the essential goodness of his character, after allowing, as we must
do, for the operation of his peculiar principles upon his conduct, that
I for my own part am willing to suspend my judgment till the time
arrives for his vindication. The language used by Lady Shelley and Mr.
Garnett justify us in expecting that that vindication will be as
startling as complete. If it is not, they, as pleading for him, will
have overshot the mark of prudence.

On the 28th of July Shelley left London with Mary Godwin, who up to this
date had remained beneath her father's roof. There was some secrecy in
their departure, because they were accompanied by Miss Clairmont, whose
mother disapproved of her forming a third in the party. Having made
their way to Dover, they crossed the Channel in an open boat, and went
at once to Paris. Here they hired a donkey for their luggage, intending
to perform the journey across France on foot. Shelley, however, sprained
his ancle, and a mule-carriage was provided for the party. In this
conveyance they reached the Jura, and entered Switzerland at Neufchatel.
Brunnen, on the Lake of Lucerne, was chosen for their residence; and
here Shelley began his romantic tale of "The Assassins", a portion of
which is printed in his prose works. Want of money compelled them soon
to think of turning their steps homeward; and the back journey was
performed upon the Reuss and Rhine. They reached Gravesend, after a bad
passage, on the 13th of September. Mrs. Shelley's "History of a Six
Week's Tour" relates the details of this trip, which was of great
importance in forming Shelley's taste, and in supplying him with the
scenery of river, rock, and mountain, so splendidly utilized in
"Alastor".

The autumn was a period of more than usual money difficulty; but on the
6th of January, 1815, Sir Bysshe died, Percy became the next heir to the
baronetcy and the family estates, and an arrangement was made with his
father by right of which he received an allowance of 1000 pounds a year.
A portion of his income was immediately set apart for Harriet. The
winter was passed in London, where Shelley walked a hospital, in order,
it is said, to acquire some medical knowledge that might be of service
to the poor he visited. His own health at this period was very bad. A
physician whom he consulted pronounced that he was rapidly sinking under
pulmonary disease, and he suffered frequent attacks of acute pain. The
consumptive symptoms seem to have been so marked that for the next three
years he had no doubt that he was destined to an early death. In 1818,
however, all danger of phthisis passed away; and during the rest of his
short life he only suffered from spasms and violent pains in the side,
which baffled the physicians, but, though they caused him extreme
anguish, did not menace any vital organ. To the subject of his health it
will be necessary to return at a later period of this biography. For the
present it is enough to remember that his physical condition was such as
to justify his own expectation of death at no distant time. (See Letter
to Godwin in Shelley's Memorials, page 78.)

Fond as ever of wandering, Shelley set out in the early summer for a
tour with Mary. They visited Devonshire and Clifton, and then settled in
a house on Bishopsgate Heath, near Windsor Forest. The summer was
further broken by a water excursion up the Thames to its source, in the
company of Mr. Peacock and Charles Clairmont. Peacock traces the poet's
taste for boating, which afterwards became a passion with him, to this
excursion. About this there is, however, some doubt. Medwin tells us
that Shelley while a boy delighted in being on the water, and that he
enjoyed the pastime at Eton. On the other hand, Mr. W.S. Halliday, a far
better authority than Medwin, asserts positively that he never saw
Shelley on the river at Eton, and Hogg relates nothing to prove that he
practised rowing at Oxford. It is certain that, though inordinately fond
of boats and every kind of water--river, sea, lake, or canal--he never
learned to swim. Peacock also notices his habit of floating paper boats,
and gives an amusing description of the boredom suffered by Hogg on
occasions when Shelley would stop by the side of a pond or mere to float
a mimic navy. The not altogether apocryphal story of his having once
constructed a boat out of a bank-post-bill, and launched it on the lake
in Kensington Gardens, deserves to be alluded to in this connexion.

On their return from this river journey, Shelley began the poem of
"Alastor", haunting the woodland glades and oak groves of Windsor
Forest, and drawing from that noble scenery his inspiration. It was
printed with a few other poems in one volume the next year. Not only was
"Alastor" the first serious poem published by Shelley; but it was also
the first of his compositions which revealed the greatness of his
genius. Rarely has blank verse been written with more majesty and music;
and while the influence of Milton and Wordsworth may be traced in
certain passages, the versification, tremulous with lyrical vibrations,
is such as only Shelley could have produced.

"Alastor" is the Greek name for a vengeful daemon, driving its victim
into desert places; and Shelley, prompted by Peacock, chose it for the
title of a poem which describes the Nemesis of solitary souls. Apart
from its intrinsic merit as a work of art, "Alastor" has great
autobiographical value. Mrs. Shelley affirms that it was written under
the expectation of speedy death, and under the sense of disappointment,
consequent upon the misfortunes of his early life. This accounts for the
somewhat unhealthy vein of sentiment which threads the wilderness of its
sublime descriptions. All that Shelley had observed of natural
beauty--in Wales, at Lynton, in Switzerland, upon the eddies of the
Reuss, beneath the oak shades of the forest--is presented to us in a
series of pictures penetrated with profound emotion. But the deeper
meaning of "Alastor" is to be found, not in the thought of death nor in
the poet's recent communings with nature, but in the motto from St.
Augustine placed upon its title page, and in the "Hymn to Intellectual
Beauty", composed about a year later. Enamoured of ideal loveliness, the
poet pursues his vision through the universe, vainly hoping to assuage
the thirst which has been stimulated in his spirit, and vainly longing
for some mortal realization of his love. "Alastor", like
"Epipsychidion," reveals the mistake which Shelley made in thinking that
the idea of beauty could become incarnate for him in any earthly form:
while the "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" recognizes the truth that such
realization of the ideal is impossible. The very last letter written by
Shelley sets the misconception in its proper light: "I think one is
always in love with something or other; the error, and I confess it is
not easy for spirits cased in flesh and blood to avoid it, consists in
seeking in a mortal image the likeness of what is, perhaps, eternal."
But this Shelley discovered only with "the years that bring the
philosophic mind," and when he was upon the very verge of his untimely
death.

The following quotation is a fair specimen of the blank verse of
"Alastor". It expresses that longing for perfect sympathy in an ideal
love, which the sense of divine beauty had stirred in the poet's
heart:--

    At length upon the lone Chorasmian shore
    He paused, a wide and melancholy waste
    Of putrid marshes. A strong impulse urged
    His steps to the sea-shore. A swan was there,
    Beside a sluggish stream among the reeds.
    It rose as he approached, and, with strong wings
    Scaling the upward sky, bent its bright course
    High over the immeasurable main.
    His eyes pursued its flight:--"Thou hast a home,
    Beautiful bird! thou voyagest to thine home,
    Where thy sweet mate will twine her downy neck
    With thine, and welcome thy return with eyes
    Bright in the lustre of their own fond joy.
    And what am I that I should linger here,
    With voice far sweeter than thy dying notes,
    Spirit more vast than thine, frame more attuned
    To beauty, wasting these surpassing powers
    In the deaf air, to the blind earth, and heaven
    That echoes not my thoughts?" A gloomy smile
    Of desperate hope wrinkled his quivering lips.
    For Sleep, he knew, kept most relentlessly
    Its precious charge, and silent Death exposed,
    Faithless perhaps as Sleep, a shadowy lure,
    With doubtful smile mocking its own strange charms.

William, the eldest son of Shelley and Mary Godwin, was born on the 24th
of January, 1816. In the spring of that year they went together,
accompanied by Miss Clairmont, for a second time to Switzerland. They
reached Geneva on the 17th of May and were soon after joined by Lord
Byron and his travelling physician, Dr. Polidori. Shelley had not yet
made Byron's acquaintance, though he had sent him a copy of "Queen Mab",
with a letter, which miscarried in the post. They were now thrown into
daily intercourse, occupying the villas Diodati and Mount Alegre, at no
great distance from each other, passing their days upon the lake in a
boat which they purchased, and spending the nights in conversation. Miss
Clairmont had known Byron in London, and their acquaintance now ripened
into an intimacy, the fruit of which was the child Allegra. This fact
has to be mentioned by Shelley's biographer, because Allegra afterwards
became an inmate of his home; and though he and Mary were ignorant of
what was passing at Geneva, they did not withdraw their sympathy from
the mother of Lord Byron's daughter. The lives of Byron and Shelley
during the next six years were destined to be curiously blent. Both were
to seek in Italy an exile-home; while their friendship was to become one
of the most interesting facts of English literary history. The influence
of Byron upon Shelley, as he more than once acknowledged, and as his
wife plainly perceived, was, to a great extent, depressing. For Byron's
genius and its fruits in poetry he entertained the highest possible
opinion. He could not help comparing his own achievement and his fame
with Byron's; and the result was that in the presence of one whom he
erroneously believed to be the greater poet, he became inactive.
Shelley, on the contrary, stimulated Byron's productive faculty to
nobler efforts, raised his moral tone, and infused into his less subtle
intellect something of his own philosophical depth and earnestness. Much
as he enjoyed Byron's society and admired his writing, Shelley was not
blind to the imperfections of his nature. The sketch which he has left
us of Count Maddalo, the letters written to his wife from Venice and
Ravenna, and his correspondence on the subject of Leigh Hunt's visit to
Italy, supply the most discriminating criticism which has yet been
passed upon his brother poet's character. It is clear that he never
found in Byron a perfect friend, and that he had not accepted him as one
with whom he sympathized upon the deeper questions of feeling and
conduct. Byron, for his part, recognized in Shelley the purest nature he
had ever known. "He was the most gentle, the most amiable, and least
worldly-minded person I ever met; full of delicacy, disinterested beyond
all other men, and possessing a degree of genius joined to simplicity as
rare as it is admirable. He had formed to himself a beau ideal of all
that is fine, high-minded, and noble, and he acted up to this ideal even
to the very letter."

Toward the end of June the two poets made the tour of Lake Geneva in
their boat, and were very nearly wrecked off the rocks of Meillerie. On
this occasion Shelley was in imminent danger of death from drowning. His
one anxiety, however, as he wrote to Peacock, was lest Byron should
attempt to save him at the risk of his own life. Byron described him as
"bold as a lion;" and indeed it may here be said, once and for all, that
Shelley's physical courage was only equalled by his moral fearlessness.
He carried both without bravado to the verge of temerity, and may justly
be said to have never known what terror was. Another summer excursion
was a visit to Chamouni, of which he has left memorable descriptions in
his letters to Peacock, and in the somewhat Coleridgian verses on Mont
Blanc. The preface to "Laon and Cythna" shows what a powerful impression
had been made upon him by the glaciers, and how he delighted in the
element of peril. There is a tone of exultation in the words which
record the experiences of his two journeys in Switzerland and
France:--"I have been familiar from boyhood with mountains and lakes and
the sea, and the solitude of forests. Danger, which sports upon the
brink of precipices, has been my playmate. I have trodden the glaciers
of the Alps, and lived under the eye of Mont Blanc. I have been a
wanderer among distant fields. I have sailed down mighty rivers, and
seen the sun rise and set, and the stars come forth, whilst I have
sailed night and day down a rapid stream among mountains. I have seen
populous cities, and have watched the passions which rise and spread,
and sink and change amongst assembled multitudes of men. I have seen the
theatre of the more visible ravages of tyranny and war, cities and
villages reduced to scattered groups of black and roofless houses, and
the naked inhabitants sitting famished upon their desolated thresholds."

On their return to the lake, the Shelleys found M.G. Lewis established
with Byron. This addition to the circle introduced much conversation
about apparitions, and each member of the party undertook to produce a
ghost story. Polidori's "Vampyre" and Mrs. Shelley's "Frankenstein" were
the only durable results of their determination. But an incident
occurred which is of some importance in the history of Shelley's
psychological condition. Toward midnight on the 18th of July, Byron
recited the lines in "Christabel" about the lady's breast; when Shelley
suddenly started up, shrieked, and fled from the room. He had seen a
vision of a woman with eyes instead of nipples. At this time he was
writing notes upon the phenomena of sleep to be inserted in his
"Speculations on Metaphysics", and Mrs. Shelley informs us that the mere
effort to remember dreams of thrilling or mysterious import so disturbed
his nervous system that he had to relinquish the task. At no period of
his life was he wholly free from visions which had the reality of facts.
Sometimes they occurred in sleep, and were prolonged with painful
vividness into his waking moments. Sometimes they seemed to grow out of
his intense meditation, or to present themselves before his eyes as the
projection of a powerful inner impression. All his sensations were
abnormally acute, and his ever-active imagination confused the
border-lands of the actual and the visionary. Such a nature as
Shelley's, through its far greater susceptibility than is common even
when with artistic temperaments, was debarred in moments of high-strung
emotion from observing the ordinary distinctions of subject and object;
and this peculiar quality must never be forgotten when we seek to
estimate the proper proportions of Dichtung and Wahreit in certain
episodes of his biography. The strange story, for example, told by
Peacock about a supposed warning he had received in the spring of this
year from Mr. Williams of Tremadoc, may possibly be explained on the
hypothesis that his brooding thoughts had taken form before him, both
ear and eye having been unconsciously pressed into the service of a
subjective energy. (Fraser's Magazine, January, 1860, page 98.)

On their return to England in September, Shelley took a cottage at Great
Marlow on the Thames, in order to be near his friend Peacock. While it
was being prepared for the reception of his family, he stayed at Bath,
and there heard of Harriet's suicide. The life that once was dearest to
him, had ended thus in misery, desertion, want. The mother of his two
children, abandoned by both her husband and her lover, and driven from
her father's home, had drowned herself after a brief struggle with
circumstance. However Shelley may have felt that his conscience was free
from blame, however small an element of self-reproach may have mingled
with his grief and horror, there is no doubt that he suffered most
acutely. His deepest ground for remorse seems to have been the
conviction that he had drawn Harriet into a sphere of thought and
feeling for which she was not qualified, and that had it not been for
him and his opinions, she might have lived a happy woman in some common
walk of life. One of his biographers asserts that "he continued to be
haunted by certain recollections, partly real and partly imaginative,
which pursued him like an Orestes," and even Trelawny, who knew him only
in the last months of his life, said that the impression of that
dreadful moment was still vivid. We may trace the echo of his feelings
in some painfully pathetic verses written in 1817 (Forman, 3 148.); and
though he did not often speak of Harriet, Peacock has recorded one
memorable occasion on which he disclosed the anguish of his spirit to a
friend. (Fraser, January, 1860, page 102.)

Shelley hurried at once to London, and found some consolation in the
society of Leigh Hunt. The friendship extended to him by that excellent
man at this season of his trouble may perhaps count for something with
those who are inclined to judge him harshly. Two important events
followed immediately upon the tragedy. The first was Shelley's marriage
with Mary Godwin on the 30th of December, 1816. Whether Shelley would
have taken this step except under strong pressure from without, appears
to me very doubtful. Of all men who ever lived, he was the most
resolutely bent on confirming his theories by his practice; and in this
instance there was no valid reason why he should not act up to
principles professed in common by himself and the partner of his
fortunes, no less than by her father and mother. It is, therefore,
reasonable to suppose that he yielded to arguments; and these arguments
must have been urged by Godwin, who had never treated him with
cordiality since he left England in 1816. Godwin, though overrated in
his generation, and almost ludicrously idealized by Shelley, was a man
whose talents verged on genius. But he was by no means consistent. His
conduct in money-matters shows that he could not live the life of a
self-sufficing philosopher; while the irritation he expressed when
Shelley omitted to address him as Esquire, stood in comic contradiction
with his published doctrines. We are therefore perhaps justified in
concluding that he worried Shelley, the one enthusiastic and
thorough-going follower he had, into marrying his daughter in spite of
his disciple's protestations; nor shall we be far wrong if we surmise
that Godwin congratulated himself on Mary's having won the right to bear
the name of a future baronet.

The second event was the refusal of Mr. Westbrook to deliver up the
custody of his grandchildren. A chancery suit was instituted; at the
conclusion of which, in August, 1817, Lord Eldon deprived Shelley of his
son and daughter on the double ground of his opinions expressed in
"Queen Mab", and of his conduct toward his first wife. The children were
placed in the hands of a clergyman, to be educated in accordance with
principles diametrically opposed to their parent's, while Shelley's
income was mulcted in a sum of 200 pounds for their maintenance. Thus
sternly did the father learn the value of that ancient Aeschylean maxim,
to drasanti pathein, the doer of the deed must suffer. His own
impulsiveness, his reckless assumption of the heaviest responsibilities,
his overweening confidence in his own strength to move the weight of the
world's opinions, had brought him to this tragic pass--to the suicide of
the woman who had loved him, and to the sequestration of the offspring
whom he loved.

Shelley is too great to serve as text for any sermon; and yet we may
learn from him as from a hero of Hebrew or Hellenic story. His life was
a tragedy; and like some protagonist of Greek drama, he was capable of
erring and of suffering greatly. He had kicked against the altar of
justice as established in the daily sanctities of human life; and now he
had to bear the penalty. The conventions he despised and treated like
the dust beneath his feet, were found in this most cruel crisis to be a
rock on which his very heart was broken. From this rude trial of his
moral nature he arose a stronger being; and if longer life had been
granted him, he would undoubtedly have presented the ennobling spectacle
of one who had been lessoned by his own audacity, and by its bitter
fruits, into harmony with the immutable laws which he was ever seeking
to obey. It is just this conflict between the innate rectitude of
Shelley's over-daring nature and the circumstances of ordinary
existence, which makes his history so tragic; and we may justly wonder
whether, when he read the Sophoclean tragedies of Oedipus, he did not
apply their doctrine of self-will and Nemesis to his own fortunes.



CHAPTER 5.

LIFE AT MARLOW, AND JOURNEY TO ITALY.

Amid the torturing distractions of the Chancery suit about his children,
and the still more poignant anguish of his own heart, and with the cloud
of what he thought swift-coming death above his head, Shelley worked
steadily, during the summer of 1817, upon his poem of "Laon and Cythna".
Six months were spent in this task. "The poem," to borrow Mrs. Shelley's
words, "was written in his boat, as it floated under the beech-groves of
Bisham, or during wanderings in the neighbouring country, which is
distinguished for peculiar beauty." Whenever Shelley could, he composed
in the open air. The terraces of the Villa Cappuccini at Este and the
Baths of Caracalla were the birthplace of "Prometheus". "The Cenci" was
written on the roof of the Villa Valsovano at Leghorn. The Cascine of
Florence, the pine-woods near Pisa, the lawns above San Guiliano, and
the summits of the Euganean Hills, witnessed the creation of his
loveliest lyrics; and his last great poem, the "Triumph of Life", was
transferred to paper in his boat upon the Bay of Spezia.

If "Alastor" had expressed one side of Shelley's nature, his devotion to
Ideal Beauty, "Laon and Cythna" was in a far profounder sense
representative of its author. All his previous experiences and all his
aspirations--his passionate belief in friendship, his principle of the
equality of women with men, his demand for bloodless revolution, his
confidence in eloquence and reason to move nations, his doctrine of free
love, his vegetarianism, his hatred of religious intolerance and
tyranny--are blent together and concentrated in the glowing cantos of
this wonderful romance. The hero, Laon, is himself idealized, the self
which he imagined when he undertook his Irish campaign. The heroine,
Cythna, is the helpmate he had always dreamed, the woman exquisitely
feminine, yet capable of being fired with male enthusiasms, and of
grappling the real problems of our nature with a man's firm grasp. In
the first edition of the poem he made Laon and Cythna brother and
sister, not because he believed in the desirability of incest, but
because he wished to throw a glove down to society, and to attack the
intolerance of custom in its stronghold. In the preface, he tells us
that it was his purpose to kindle in the bosoms of his readers "a
virtuous enthusiasm for those doctrines of liberty and justice, that
faith and hope in something good, which neither violence nor
misrepresentation, nor prejudice, can ever wholly extinguish among
mankind;" to illustrate "the growth and progress of individual mind
aspiring after excellence, and devoted to the love of mankind;" and to
celebrate Love "as the sole law which should govern the moral world."
The wild romantic treatment of this didactic motive makes the poem
highly characteristic of its author. It is written in Spenserian
stanzas, with a rapidity of movement and a dazzling brilliance that are
Shelley's own. The story relates the kindling of a nation to freedom at
the cry of a young poet-prophet, the temporary triumph of the good
cause, the final victory of despotic force, and the martyrdom of the
hero, together with whom the heroine falls a willing victim. It is full
of thrilling incidents and lovely pictures; yet the tale is the least
part of the poem; and few readers have probably been able either to
sympathize with its visionary characters, or to follow the narrative
without weariness. As in the case of other poems by Shelley--especially
those in which he attempted to tell a story, for which kind of art his
genius was not well suited--the central motive of "Laon and Cythna" is
surrounded by so radiant a photosphere of imagery and eloquence that it
is difficult to fix our gaze upon it, blinded as we are by the excess of
splendour. Yet no one now can read the terrible tenth canto, or the
lovely fifth, without feeling that a young eagle of poetry had here
tried the full strength of his pinions in their flight. This truth was
by no means recognized when "Laon and Cythna" first appeared before the
public. Hooted down, derided, stigmatized, and howled at, it only served
to intensify the prejudice with which the author of "Queen Mab" had come
to be regarded.

I have spoken of this poem under its first name of "Laon and Cythna". A
certain number of copies were issued with this title (How many copies
were put in circulation is not known. There must certainly have been
many more than the traditional three; for when I was a boy at Harrow, I
picked up two uncut copies in boards at a Bristol bookshop, for the
price of 2 shillings and 6 pence a piece.); but the publisher, Ollier,
not without reason dreaded the effect the book would make; he therefore
induced Shelley to alter the relationship between the hero and his
bride, and issued the old sheets with certain cancelled pages under the
title of "Revolt of Islam". It was published in January, 1818. While
still resident at Marlow, Shelley began two autobiographical poems--the
one "Prince Athanase," which he abandoned as too introspective and
morbidly self-analytical, the other, "Rosalind and Helen", which he
finished afterwards in Italy. Of the second of these compositions he
entertained a poor opinion; nor will it bear comparison with his best
work. To his biographer its chief interest consists in the character of
Lionel, drawn less perhaps exactly from himself than as an ideal of the
man he would have wished to be. The poet in "Alastor", Laon in the
"Revolt of Islam", Lionel in "Rosalind and Helen", and Prince Athanase,
are in fact a remarkable row of self-portraits, varying in the tone and
scale of idealistic treatment bestowed upon them. Later on in life,
Shelley outgrew this preoccupation with his idealized self, and directed
his genius to more objective themes. Yet the autobiographic tendency, as
befitted a poet of the highest lyric type, remained to the end a
powerful characteristic.

Before quitting the first period of Shelley's development, it may be
well to set before the reader a specimen of that self-delineative poetry
which characterized it; and since it is difficult to detach a single
passage from the continuous stanzas of "Laon and Cythna", I have chosen
the lines in "Rosalind and Helen" which describe young Lionel:

    To Lionel,
    Though of great wealth and lineage high,
    Yet through those dungeon walls there came
    Thy thrilling light, O Liberty!
    And as the meteor's midnight flame
    Startles the dreamer, sun-like truth
    Flashed on his visionary youth,
    And filled him, not with love, but faith.
    And hope, and courage mute in death;
    For love and life in him were twins,
    Born at one birth: in every other
    First life, then love its course begins,
    Though they be children of one mother;
    And so through this dark world they fleet
    Divided, till in death they meet:
    But he loved all things ever. Then
    He past amid the strife of men,
    And stood at the throne of armed power
    Pleading for a world of woe:
    Secure as one on a rock-built tower
    O'er the wrecks which the surge trails to and fro,
    'Mid the passions wild of human kind
    He stood, like a spirit calming them;
    For, it was said, his words could find
    Like music the lulled crowd, and stem
    That torrent of unquiet dream,
    Which mortals truth and reason deem,
    But IS revenge and fear and pride.
    Joyous he was; and hope and peace
    On all who heard him did abide,
    Raining like dew from his sweet talk,
    As where the evening star may walk
    Along the brink of the gloomy seas,
    Liquid mists of splendour quiver.
    His very gestures touch'd to tears
    The unpersuaded tyrant, never
    So moved before: his presence stung
    The torturers with their victim's pain,
    And none knew how; and through their ears,
    The subtle witchcraft of his tongue
    Unlocked the hearts of those who keep
    Gold, the world's bond of slavery.
    Men wondered, and some sneer'd to see
    One sow what he could never reap:
    For he is rich, they said, and young,
    And might drink from the depths of luxury.
    If he seeks Fame, Fame never crown'd
    The champion of a trampled creed:
    If he seeks Power, Power is enthroned
    'Mid ancient rights and wrongs, to feed
    Which hungry wolves with praise and spoil,
    Those who would sit near Power must toil;
    And such, there sitting, all may see.

During the year he spent at Marlow, Shelley was a frequent visitor at
Leigh Hunt's Hampstead house, where he made acquaintance with Keats, and
the brothers Smith, authors of "Rejected Addresses". Hunt's
recollections supply some interesting details, which, since Hogg and
Peacock fail us at this period, may be profitably used. Describing the
manner of his life at Marlow, Hunt writes as follows: "He rose early in
the morning, walked and read before breakfast, took that meal sparingly,
wrote and studied the greater part of the morning, walked and read
again, dined on vegetables (for he took neither meat nor wine),
conversed with his friends (to whom his house was ever open) again
walked out, and usually finished with reading to his wife till ten
o'clock, when he went to bed. This was his daily existence. His book was
generally Plato, or Homer, or one of the Greek tragedians, or the Bible,
in which last he took a great, though peculiar, and often admiring
interest. One of his favourite parts was the book of Job." Mrs. Shelley,
in her note on the "Revolt of Islam", confirms this account of his Bible
studies; and indeed the influence of the Old Testament upon his style
may be traced in several of his poems. In the same paragraph from which
I have just quoted, Leigh Hunt gives a just notion of his relation to
Christianity, pointing out that he drew a distinction between the
Pauline presentation of the Christian creeds, and the spirit of the
Gospels. "His want of faith in the letter, and his exceeding faith in
the spirit of Christianity, formed a comment, the one on the other, very
formidable to those who chose to forget what Scripture itself observes
on that point." We have only to read Shelley's "Essay on Christianity",
in order to perceive what reverent admiration he felt for Jesus, and how
profoundly he understood the true character of his teaching. That work,
brief as it is, forms one of the most valuable extant contributions to a
sound theology, and is morally far in advance of the opinions expressed
by many who regard themselves as specially qualified to speak on the
subject. It is certain that, as Christianity passes beyond its mediaeval
phase, and casts aside the husk of outworn dogmas, it will more and more
approximate to Shelley's exposition. Here and here only is a vital
faith, adapted to the conditions of modern thought, indestructible
because essential, and fitted to unite instead of separating minds of
divers quality. It may sound paradoxical to claim for Shelley of all men
a clear insight into the enduring element of the Christian creed; but it
was precisely his detachment from all its accidents which enabled him to
discern its spiritual purity, and placed him in a true relation to its
Founder. For those who would neither on the one hand relinquish what is
permanent in religion, nor yet on the other deny the inevitable
conclusions of modern thought, his teaching is indubitably valuable. His
fierce tirades against historic Christianity must be taken as directed
against an ecclesiastical system of spiritual tyranny, hypocrisy, and
superstition, which in his opinion had retarded the growth of free
institutions, and fettered the human intellect. Like Campanella, he
distinguished between Christ, who sealed the gospel of charity with his
blood, and those Christians, who would be the first to crucify their
Lord if he returned to earth.

That Shelley lived up to his religious creed is amply proved. To help
the needy and to relieve the sick, seemed to him a simple duty, which he
cheerfully discharged. "His charity, though liberal, was not weak. He
inquired personally into the circumstances of his petitioners, visited
the sick in their beds,....and kept a regular list of industrious poor,
whom he assisted with small sums to make up their accounts." At Marlow,
the miserable condition of the lace-makers called forth all his
energies; and Mrs. Shelley tells us that an acute ophthalmia, from which
he twice suffered, was contracted in a visit to their cottages. A story
told by Leigh Hunt about his finding a woman ill on Hampstead Heath, and
carrying her from door to door in the vain hopes of meeting with a man
as charitable as himself, until he had to house the poor creature with
his friends the Hunts, reads like a practical illustration of Christ's
parable about the Good Samaritan. Nor was it merely to the so-called
poor that Shelley showed his generosity. His purse was always open to
his friends. Peacock received from him an annual allowance of 100
pounds. He gave Leigh Hunt, on one occasion, 1400 pounds; and he
discharged debts of Godwin, amounting, it is said, to about 6000 pounds.
In his pamphlet on "Putting Reform to the Vote", he offered to subscribe
100 pounds for the purpose of founding an association; and we have
already seen that he headed the Tremadoc subscription with a sum of 500
pounds. These instances of his generosity might be easily multiplied;
and when we remember that his present income was 1000 pounds, out of
which 200 pounds went to the support of his children, it will be
understood not only that he could not live luxuriously, but also that he
was in frequent money difficulties through the necessity of raising
funds upon his expectations. His self-denial in all minor matters of
expenditure was conspicuous. Without a murmur, without ostentation, this
heir of the richest baronet in Sussex illustrated by his own conduct
those principles of democratic simplicity and of fraternal charity which
formed his political and social creed.

A glimpse into the cottage at Great Marlow is afforded by a careless
sentence of Leigh Hunt's. "He used to sit in a study adorned with casts,
as large as life, of the Vatican Apollo and the celestial Venus." Fancy
Shelley with his bright eyes and elf-locks in a tiny, low-roofed room,
correcting proofs of "Laon and Cythna", between the Apollo of the
Belvedere and Venus de' Medici, life-sized, and as crude as casts by
Shout could make them! In this house, Miss Clairmont, with her brother
and Allegra, lived as Shelley's guests; and here Clara Shelley was born
on the 3rd of September, 1817. In the same autumn, Shelley suffered from
a severe pulmonary attack. The critical state of his health, and the
apprehension, vouched for by Mrs. Shelley, that the Chancellor might lay
his vulture's talons on the children of his second marriage, were the
motives which induced him to leave England for Italy in the spring of
1818. (See Note on Poems of 1819, and compare the lyric "The billows on
the beach.") He never returned. Four years only of life were left to
him--years filled with music that will sound as long as English lasts.

It was on the 11th of March that the Shelleys took their departure with
Miss Clairmont and the child Allegra. They went straight to Milan, and
after visiting the Lake of Como, Pisa, the Bagni di Lucca, Venice and
Rome, they settled early in the following December at Naples. Shelley's
letters to Peacock form the invaluable record of this period of his
existence. Taken altogether, they are the most perfect specimens of
descriptive prose in the English language; never over-charged with
colour, vibrating with emotions excited by the stimulating scenes of
Italy, frank in their criticism, and exquisitely delicate in
observation. Their transparent sincerity and unpremeditated grace,
combined with natural finish of expression, make them masterpieces of a
style at once familiar and elevated. That Shelley's sensibility to art
was not so highly cultivated as his feeling for nature, is clear enough
in many passages: but there is no trace of admiring to order in his
comments upon pictures or statues. Familiarity with the great works of
antique and Italian art would doubtless have altered some of the
opinions he at first expressed; just as longer residence among the
people made him modify his views about their character. Meanwhile, the
spirit of modest and unprejudiced attention in which he began his
studies of sculpture and painting, might well be imitated in the present
day by travellers who think that to pin their faith to some famous
critic's verdict is the acme of good taste. If there were space for a
long quotation from these letters, I should choose the description of
Pompeii (January 26, 1819), or that of the Baths of Caracalla (March 23,
1819). As it is, I must content myself with a short but eminently
characteristic passage, written from Ferrarra, November 7, 1818:--

"The handwriting of Ariosto is a small, firm, and pointed character,
expressing, as I should say, a strong and keen, but circumscribed energy
of mind; that of Tasso is large, free, and flowing, except that there is
a checked expression in the midst of its flow, which brings the letters
into a smaller compass than one expected from the beginning of the word.
It is the symbol of an intense and earnest mind, exceeding at times its
own depth, and admonished to return by the chillness of the waters of
oblivion striking upon its adventurous feet. You know I always seek in
what I see the manifestation of something beyond the present and
tangible object; and as we do not agree in physiognomy, so we may not
agree now. But my business is to relate my own sensations, and not to
attempt to inspire others with them."

In the middle of August, Shelley left his wife at the Bagni di Lucca,
and paid a visit to Lord Byron at Venice. He arrived at midnight in a
thunderstorm. "Julian and Maddalo" was the literary fruit of this
excursion--a poem which has rightly been characterized by Mr. Rossetti
as the most perfect specimen in our language of the "poetical treatment
of ordinary things." The description of a Venetian sunset, touched to
sadness amid all its splendour by the gloomy presence of the madhouse,
ranks among Shelley's finest word-paintings; while the glimpse of
Byron's life is interesting on a lower level. Here is the picture of the
sunset and the island of San Lazzaro:--

    Oh!
    How beautiful is sunset, when the glow
    Of heaven descends upon a land like thee,
    Thou paradise of exiles, Italy,
    Thy mountains, seas, and vineyards, and the towers
    Of cities they encircle!--it was ours
    To stand on thee, beholding it: and then,
    Just where we had dismounted, the Count's men
    Were waiting for us with the gondola.
    As those who pause on some delightful way,
    Though bent on pleasant pilgrimage, we stood
    Looking upon the evening, and the flood
    Which lay between the city and the shore,
    Paved with the image of the sky. The hoar
    And airy Alps, towards the north, appeared,
    Thro' mist, a heaven-sustaining bulwark, reared
    Between the east and west; and half the sky
    Was roofed with clouds of rich emblazonry,
    Dark purple at the zenith, which still grew
    Down the steep west into a wondrous hue
    Brighter than burning gold, even to the rent
    Where the swift sun yet paused in his descent
    Among the many-folded hills. They were
    Those famous Euganean hills, which bear,
    As seem from Lido through the harbour piles,
    The likeness of a clump of peaked isles--
    And then, as if the earth and sea had been
    Dissolved into one lake of fire, were seen
    Those mountains towering, as from waves of flame,
    Around the vaporous sun, from which there came
    The inmost purple spirit of light, and made
    Their very peaks transparent. "Ere it fade,"
    Said my companion, "I will show you soon
    A better station." So o'er the lagune
    We glided; and from that funereal bark
    I leaned, and saw the city, and could mark
    How from their many isles, in evening's gleam,
    Its temples and its palaces did seem
    Like fabrics of enchantment piled to heaven.
    I was about to speak, when--"We are even
    Now at the point I meant," said Maddalo,
    And bade the gondolieri cease to row.
    "Look, Julian, on the west, and listen well
    If you hear not a deep and heavy bell."
    I looked, and saw between us and the sun
    A building on an island, such a one
    As age to age might add, for uses vile,--
    A windowless, deformed, and dreary pile;
    And on the top an open tower, where hung
    A bell, which in the radiance swayed and swung,--
    We could just hear its coarse and iron tongue:
    The broad sun sank behind it, and it tolled
    In strong and black relief--"What we behold
    Shall be the madhouse and its belfry tower,"--
    Said Maddalo; "and ever at this hour,
    Those who may cross the water hear that bell,
    Which calls the maniacs, each one from his cell,
    To vespers."

It may be parenthetically observed that one of the few familiar
quotations from Shelley's poems occurs in "Julian and Maddalo":--

    Most wretched men
    Are cradled into poetry by wrong:
    They learn in suffering what they teach in song.

Byron lent the Shelleys his villa of the Cappuccini near Este, where
they spent some weeks in the autumn. Here "Prometheus Unbound" was
begun, and the "Lines written among the Euganean Hills" were composed;
and here Clara became so ill that her parents thought it necessary to
rush for medical assistance to Venice. They had forgotten their
passport; but Shelley's irresistible energy overcame all difficulties,
and they entered Venice--only in time, however, for the child to die.

Nearly the whole of the winter was spent in Naples, where Shelley
suffered from depression of more than ordinary depth. Mrs. Shelley
attributed this gloom to the state of his health, but Medwin tells a
strange story, which, if it is not wholly a romance, may better account
for the poet's melancholy. He says that so far back as the year 1816, on
the night before his departure from London, "a married lady, young,
handsome, and of noble connexions," came to him, avowed the passionate
love she had conceived for him, and proposed that they should fly
together. (Medwin's Life of Shelley, volume 1 324. His date, 1814,
appears from the context to be a misprint.) He explained to her that his
hand and heart had both been given irrevocably to another, and, after
the expression of the most exalted sentiments on both sides, they
parted. She followed him, however, from place to place; and without
intruding herself upon his notice, found some consolation in remaining
near him. Now she arrived at Naples; and at Naples she died. The web of
Shelley's life was a wide one, and included more destinies than his own.
Godwin, as we have reason to believe, attributed the suicide of Fanny
Imlay to her hopeless love for Shelley; and the tale of Harriet has
already been told. Therefore there is nothing absolutely improbable in
Medwin's story, especially when we remember what Hogg half-humorously
tells us about Shelley's attraction for women in London. At any rate,
the excessive wretchedness of the lyrics written at Naples can hardly be
accounted for by the "constant and poignant physical sufferings" of which
Mrs. Shelley speaks, since these were habitual with him. She was
herself, moreover under the impression that he was concealing something
from her, and we know from her own words in another place that his "fear
to wound the feelings of others" often impelled him to keep his deepest
sorrows to himself. (Note on the Revolt of Islam.)

All this while his health was steadily improving. The menace of
consumption was removed; and though he suffered from severe attacks of
pain in the side, the cause of this persistent malady does not seem to
have been ascertained. At Naples he was under treatment for disease of
the liver. Afterwards, his symptoms were ascribed to nephritis, and it
is certain that his greater or less freedom from uneasiness varied with
the quality of the water he drank. He was, for instance, forced to
eschew the drinking water of Ravenna, because it aggravated his
symptoms; while Florence, for a similar reason, proved an unsuitable
residence. The final settlement of the Shelleys at Pisa seems to have
been determined by the fact that the water of that place agreed with
him. That the spasms which from time to time attacked him were extremely
serious, is abundantly proved by the testimony of those who lived with
him at this period, and by his own letters. Some relief was obtained by
mesmerism, a remedy suggested by Medwin; but the obstinacy of the
torment preyed upon his spirits to such an extent, that even during the
last months of his life we find him begging Trelawny to procure him
prussic acid as a final and effectual remedy for all the ills that flesh
is heir to. It may be added that mental application increased the
mischief, for he told Leigh Hunt that the composition of "The Cenci" had
cost him a fresh seizure. Yet though his sufferings were indubitably
real, the eminent physician, Vacca, could discover no organic disease;
and possibly Trelawny came near the truth when he attributed Shelley's
spasms to insufficient and irregular diet, and to a continual
over-taxing of his nervous system.

Mrs. Shelley states that the change from England to Italy was in all
respects beneficial to her husband. She was inclined to refer the
depression from which he occasionally suffered, to his solitary habits;
and there are several passages in his own letters which connect his
melancholy with solitude. It is obvious that when he found himself in
the congenial company of Trelawny, Williams, Medwin, or the Gisbornes,
he was simply happy; and nothing could be further from the truth than to
paint him as habitually sunk in gloom. On the contrary, we hear quite as
much about his high spirits, his "Homeric laughter," his playfulness
with children, his readiness to join in the amusements of his chosen
circle, and his incomparable conversation, as we do about his solitary
broodings, and the seasons when pain or bitter memories over-cast his
heaven. Byron, who had some right to express a judgment in such a
matter, described him as the most companionable man under the age of
thirty he had ever met with. Shelley rode and practised pistol-shooting
with his brother bard, sat up late to talk with him, enjoyed his jokes,
and even betted with him on one occasion marked by questionable taste.
All this is quite incompatible with that martyrdom to persecution,
remorse, or physical suffering, with which it has pleased some romantic
persons to invest the poet. Society of the ordinary kind he hated. The
voice of a stranger, or a ring at the house-bell, heard from afar with
Shelley's almost inconceivable quickness of perception, was enough to
make him leave the house; and one of his prettiest poems is written on
his mistaking his wife's mention of the Aziola, a little owl common
enough in Tuscany, for an allusion to a tiresome visitor. This dislike
for intercourse with commonplace people was a source of some
disagreement between him and Mrs. Shelley, and kept him further apart
from Byron than he might otherwise have been. In a valuable letter
recently published by Mr. Garnett, he writes:--"I detest all
society--almost all, at least--and Lord Byron is the nucleus of all that
is hateful and tiresome in it." And again, speaking about his wife to
Trelawny, he said:--"She can't bear solitude, nor I society--the quick
coupled with the dead."

In the year 1818-19 the Shelleys had no friends at all in Italy, except
Lord Byron at Venice, and Mr. and Mrs. John Gisborne at Leghorn. Mrs.
Gisborne had been a friend of Mary Wollstonecraft and Godwin. She was a
woman of much cultivation, devoid of prejudice, and, though less
enthusiastic than Shelley liked, quite capable of appreciating the
inestimable privilege of his acquaintance. Her husband, to use a now
almost obsolete phrase, was a scholar and a gentleman. He shared his
wife's enlightened opinions, and remained staunch through good and ill
report to his new friends. At Rome and Naples they knew absolutely no
one. Shelley's time was therefore passed in study and composition. In
the previous summer he had translated the "Symposium" of Plato, and
begun an essay on the Ethics of the Greeks, which remains unluckily a
fragment. Together with Mary he read much Italian literature, and his
observations on the chief Italian poets form a valuable contribution to
their criticism. While he admired the splendour and invention of
Ariosto, he could not tolerate his moral tone. Tasso struck him as cold
and artificial, in spite of his "delicate moral sensibility." Boccaccio
he preferred to both; and his remarks on this prose-poet are extremely
characteristic. "How much do I admire Boccaccio! What descriptions of
nature are those in his little introductions to every new day! It is the
morning of life stripped of that mist of familiarity which makes it
obscure to us. Boccaccio seems to me to have possessed a deep sense of
the fair ideal of human life, considered in its social relations. His
more serious theories of love agree especially with mine. He often
expresses things lightly too, which have serious meanings of a very
beautiful kind. He is a moral casuist, the opposite of the Christian,
stoical, ready-made, and worldly system of morals. Do you remember one
little remark, or rather maxim of his, which might do some good to the
common, narrow-minded conceptions of love,--'Bocca baciata non perde
ventura; anzi rinnouva, come fa la luna'?" Dante and Petrarch remained
the objects of his lasting admiration, though the cruel Christianity of
the "Inferno" seemed to him an ineradicable blot upon the greatest of
Italian poems. Of Petrarch's "tender and solemn enthusiasm," he speaks
with the sympathy of one who understood the inner mysteries of
idealizing love.

It will be gathered from the foregoing quotations that Shelley,
notwithstanding is profound study of style and his exquisite perception
of beauty in form and rhythm, required more than merely artistic
excellences in poetry. He judged poems by their content and spirit; and
while he plainly expressed his abhorrence of the didactic manner, he
held that art must be moralized in order to be truly great. The
distinction he drew between Theocritus and the earlier Greek singers in
the "Defence of Poetry", his severe strictures on "The Two Noble
Kinsmen" in a letter to Mary (August 20, 1818) and his phrase about
Ariosto, "who is entertaining and graceful, and SOMETIMES a poet,"
illustrate the application of critical canons wholly at variance with
the "art for art" doctrine.

While studying Italian, he continued faithful to Greek. Plato was often
in his hands, and the dramatists formed his almost inseparable
companions. How deeply he felt the art of the Homeric poems, may be
gathered from the following extract:--"I congratulate you on your
conquest of the Iliad. You must have been astonished at the perpetually
increasing magnificence of the last seven books. Homer there truly
begins to be himself. The battle of the Scamander, the funeral of
Patroclus, and the high and solemn close of the whole bloody tale in
tenderness and inexpiable sorrow, are wrought in a manner incomparable
with anything of the same kind. The Odyssey is sweet, but there is
nothing like this." About this time, prompted by Mrs. Gisborne, he began
the study of Spanish, and conceived an ardent admiration for Calderon,
whose splendid and supernatural fancy tallied with his own. "I am
bathing myself in the light and odour of the star

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