"WITH DEATHLESS MINDS, WHICH LEAVE WHERE THEY HAVE PASSED A PATH OF LIGHT, MY SOUL COMMUNION KNEW."-Shelley.

"TO BE GOOD, JOYOUS, BEAUTIFUL, and free,—(SHELLEY)

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY.

389

Percy Bysshe Shelley.

66

[PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY was the son and heir of Sir Timothy Shelley, Bart., of Castle Goring, in Sussex, and was born at Field Place, in that county, on the 4th of August 1792. He was educated at Eton, and afterwards at Oxford, where his enthusiastic genius early displayed itself in a contempt of traditional forms and conventionalities, and a resistance to all arbitrary authority. He became not only a Republican but an Atheist, and avowed his opinions with all the energy and fervour of his excitable nature. Harshly treated by the college authorities, and expelled from Oxford, he was nevertheless ready to sacrifice station, and fortune, and his dearest affections, at what he conceived to be the shrine of truth. At the age of eighteen he produced a wild irregular poem, Queen Mab," many of whose sentiments he lived to disavow; married a Miss Harriet Westbrook, a beauty, but nothing more; travelled in England, Ireland, and Wales; studied medicine; and wrote poetry. His wife left him; but he found a more congenial spirit in Mary Wollstonecraft, the daughter of Godwin the novelist, and whom he afterwards married (in 1816). Settling at Marlow, on the bank of the Thames, he composed his "Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude," in which the beauties of Nature are described with earnest feeling, rich fancy, and great picturesqueness of language. He also wrote in this sylvan retreat his "Revolt of Islam," a gorgeous vision of a regenerated world. In 1818 he quitted England, and took up his residence in Italy, where he successively produced his classical, mystical, and metaphysical drama of "Prometheus Unbound;" his noble tragedy of "The Cenci," which most critics will consider the poet's masterpiece; "Hellas;" "The Witch of Atlas;" "Rosalind and Helen;" "Julian and Maddalo;" and 'Adonais," an elegy to the memory of Keats. His favourite amusement was boating; and while on his homeward voyage from Leghorn, on the 8th of July 1822, his yacht was overtaken by a squall in the Bay of Spezzia, and all on board perished. His body was washed ashore, reduced to ashes by fire, and interred in the Protestant burial-ground at Rome.

Such was the brief and eventful career of Percy Bysshe Shelley, a poet whose powers only needed years and experience to have ripened into a splendid maturity. He possessed imagination, fancy, an exquisite sense of melody, a high and spiritual feeling; but he lacked judgment, unity, and depth of thought, and the power of realizing his abstract conceptions. In reading his poetry we are constantly coming upon some gorgeously radiant idea; but when we investigate it, we are disappointed, like Ixion: the supposed goddess melts into a luminous mist. "He seems to have written under the notion," says Sir Henry Taylor, "that no phenomena can be perfectly poetical, until they shall have been so decomposed from their natural order and coherency as to be brought before the reader in the likeness of a phantasma or a vision. A poet is, in his estimation, purely and pre-eminently a visionary. Much beauty, exceeding splendour of diction and imagery, cannot but be perceived in his poetry, as well as exquisite

THIS IS ALONE LIFE, JOY, AND VICTORY!"-P. B. SHELLEY.

"THE VERY WORM THAT CRAWLS BENEATH THE SOD, IN LOVE AND WORSHIP LIFTS ITSELF TO GOD."-PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY.

"WE MIGHT BE OTHERWISE-WE MIGHT be all we DREAM OF, HAPPY, HIGH, MAJESTICAL."-SHELLEY.

I heard, as all have heard, life s VARIOUS STORY,-(shelley)

charms of versification; and a reader of an apprehensive fancy will doubt-
less be entranced while he reads: but when he shall have closed the
volume, and considered within himself what it has added to his stock of
permanent impressions, of recurring thoughts, of pregnant recollections,
he will probably find his stores in this kind no more enriched by having read
Shelley's poems, than by having gazed on so many gorgeously coloured
clouds in an evening sky. Surpassingly beautiful they were whilst before his
eyes; but forasmuch as they had no relevancy to his life, past or future,
the impression upon the memory barely survived that upon the senses."
Let it be owned, however, that Shelley was great as a lyrist. Many of
his songs and lyrics, once read, become a part of the reader's very soul;
like those sweet strains of music which, once admitted within the haunted
halls of Memory, assume a sort of spiritual existence, and never die.

"In spite of all his faults," says Mr. Kingsley, "in spite of bombast,
horrors, maundering, sheer stuff, and nonsense of all kinds, there is a plain-
tive natural melody about this man, such as no other English poet has ever
uttered, except Shakespeare, in some few immortal songs. Like the Ameri-
can mocking-bird, he is harsh only when aping other men's tunes-his true
power lies in his own native wood-notes wild.'"]

Higher still and higher,

From the earth thou springest,

Like a cloud of fire!

The blue deep thou wingest,

And singing still dost soar; and soaring, ever singest.

In the golden lightning

Of the sunken sun,

O'er which clouds are bright'ning,

Thou dost float and run;

Like an unbodied joy, whose race has just begun.

AND IN NO CARELESS HEART TRANSCRIBED THE TALE."-SHELLEY.

"WHERE IS THE BEAUTY, LOVE, AND TRUTH WE SEEK, BUT IN OUR MINDS?"-PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY.

"TWO POWERS O'ER MORTAL THINGS DOMINION HOLD,

TO A SKYLARK

The pale purple even

Melts around thy
flight;

Like a star of heaven

In the broad day-
light

Thou art unseen, but yet
I hear thy shrill delight.

"THERE IS ONE ROAD TO PEACE, AND THAT IS TRUTH, WHICH FOLLOW YE."-PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY.

391

"MAN IS OF SOUL AND BODY FORMED FOR DEEDS OF HIGH RESOLVE."-PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY.

With thy voice is

laud,

["Higher still and higher, from the earth
thou springest."]

As, when night is bare,

From one lonely cloud

The moon rains out her beams, and heaven is over

flowed.

What thou art we know not,

What is most like thee?

From rainbow clouds there flow not

Drops so bright to see,

As from thy presence showers a rain of melody.

RULING THE WORLD WITH A DIVIDED LOT."-SHELLEY.

"MOST WRETCHED MEN ARE CRADLED INTO POETRY BY WRONG:-(SHELLEY)

"

392

ALAS, THAT LOVE SHOULD BE A BLIGHT AND SNARE (SHELLEY)

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY.

Like a poet hidden

In the light of thought,
Singing hymns unbidden,

Till the world is wrought

To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not.

"THEY LEARN IN SUFFERING WHAT THEY TEACH IN SONG."-PERCY B. SHELLEY.

With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower.

Like a glow-worm golden

In a dell of dew,
Scattering unbeholden.

TO THOSE WHO SEEK ALL SYMPATHIES IN ONE!"-P. B. SHELLEY.

"THOUGHTS OF GREAT DEEDS WERE MINE, DEAR FRiend, when first

Among the flowers and grass, which screen it from the view.

Like a rose embowered

In its own green leaves,
By warm winds deflowered,
Till the scent it gives

Makes faint with too much sweet these heavy-winged thieves.

"TO LOVE, AND BEAR; TO HOPE TILL HOPE CREATES FROM ITS OWN WRECK THE THING IT CONTEMPLATES."-SHELLEY.

Sound of vernal showers
On the trickling grass,

Rain-awakened flowers,

All that ever was

Joyous, and clear, and fresh, thy music doth surpass.

Teach me, sprite or bird,

What sweet thoughts are thine :

I have never heard

Praise of love or wine

That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine.

Chorus hymeneal,

Or triumphal chant,

Matched with thine would be all

But an empty vaunt

A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want.

What objects are the fountains

Of thy happy strain?

What fields, or waves, or mountains?

What shapes of sky or plain?

What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of pain?

THE CLOUDS WHICH WRAP THIS WORLD FROM YOUTH DID PASS."

-SHELLEY.

"WAR IS THE STATESMAN'S GAME, THE priest's deLIGHT, THE LAWYER'S JEST, THE HIRED ASSASSIN'S TRADE."-SHELLEY.