main lines of his Italian flittings are as follows: 1818, Milan, Leghorn, the Bagni di Lucca, Venice and its neighbourhood, Rome, Naples; 1819, Rome again, the neighbourhood of Leghorn, Florence; 1820, Pisa, the Bagni di Pisa (or di San Giuliano), Leghorn; 1821, Pisa, and a visit to Byron at Ravenna; 1822, Pisa and Lerici.

The perturbed section of Shelley's life—a life marked by more than common peculiarity of adventure for a modern poet, and for one whose experiences were crowded into so few years-has now closed: henceforth what we most have to look to is the period of his great poetic productiveness. In 1818 he finished Rosalind and Helen, a poem begun in England; in many respects graceful and moving, but on the whole the least substantial of his mature compositions. The same year produced Julian and Maddalo; an admirable masterpiece, and the first longish work (if with some reluctance we exclude Alastor from such a category) in which we perceive Shelley to be a richly endowed artist, not only capable of consummate performance, but actually performing consummately. This splendid poem was sent to London for publication, but never appeared until after the author's death; a fate which it shared with Peter Bell the Third and The Witch of Atlas, not to speak of numerous briefer writings. Prometheus Unbound, the greatest of all his works to my thinking, followed close upon Julian and Maddalo; being begun about September 1818, and finished in December 1819. To have written Prometheus Unbound is to be one of the world's immortals; to have written The Cenci is to rank among the Englishmen least distant from Shakspeare. This was the product of the summer months of 1819. Shelley undertook the work under a strong impulsion, yet without any confidence or experience of his capacity as a dramatist. Having completed it, he was much bent on procuring its representation on the stage; and he offered the tragedy, through his friend Thomas Love Peacock, to the management of Covent Garden, hoping more especially to secure Miss O'Neill for the heroine, but the unnatural horror of the subject precluded even the suggestion of the part to that distinguished actress, and the whole project fell through. Peter Bell the Third belongs to the autumn of the same prolific year, 1819; a piece of supernal grotesque far too little remarked by ordinary Shelleyan readers-as airy, ringing, and catching, as if we heard Momus laughing behind the low horizonclouds. The Witch of Atlas, unsurpassed even by Shelley him lf as a piece of imaginative fancy and of execution, was the work of three days of August 1820, succeeding an

ascent of Monte San Pellegrino near the Bagni di Pisa. In the same month he began Swellfoot the Tyrant, moved thereto by the grunting of pigs at a fair which accompanied in unelucidative chorus the reading aloud of one of his loftiest poems. It was published in due course, but forthwith extinguished by a threat from the Society for the Suppression of Vice. The remaining three works, Epipsychidion, Adonais, and Hellas, bring us into closer contact with the incidents or associations of Shelley's own life. Epipsychidion is the result of the poet's introduction to the Contessina Emilia Viviani, a beautiful and impassioned young lady who had been shut up for some years in the Convent of St. Anne in Pisa, pending her father's selection of an appropriate husband for her. Shelley sympathized with and indeed loved her intensely, though not in such a sense as to cause or justify any scandal. At last this beautiful young creature was married to an elderly man, whom, after a few years, she left with the approbation of her father; and, not very long after Shelley's death, she also died of a consumptive malady. Adonais is the record of the generous admiration of Shelley for his illustrious brother poet Keats, who had died in Rome on the 23d of February 1821; the record also, it must be said, of a very baseless supposition, or. the part of Shelley himself and of others at the time-that the author of Endymion had been brought to his grave by a severe criticism of that poem published in the Quarterly Review. Hellas, written in the autumn of 1821, shows the enthusiasm with which the poet watched the progress of the revolution then raging with various successes in Greece. Prince Alexander Mavrocordato, to whom the drama is dedicated, was one of his intimates in Pisa.

In this city the Shelleys (Miss Clairmont remained behind in Florence) saw, for the first time in Italy, a good deal of society. Byron settled in Pisa at the close of 1821, being now domesticated with the Countess Guiccioli, and thus bringing Shelley into the circle of her relatives the Counts Gamba; his second cousin and eventual biographer Medwin was there from time to time, and introduced him to Lieutenant and Mrs. Williams, a young couple from India, whom Shelley grew extremely fond of saying indeed that Jane (Mrs. Williams) was the realization of his idea of the Lady in the Sensitive Plant. Towards the beginning of 1822 the Williamses brought Shelley acquainted with Captain Trelawny, the hero of a most adventurous life already, and of remarkable experiences afterwards.

Byron, whom Shelley had visited at Ravenna in the summer of 1821, proposed that a quarterly magazine should be

started in which himself, Shelley, and Leigh Hunt, should publish all their ensuing original works, and share the profits. Shelley, who more especially championed the interests of Hunt in this matter, was resolved to have as little as possible to do with the project individually, not wishing either to compromise others or to hamper himself. Hunt eventually acceded to the scheme, and, after many delays, was on his way to Italy.

On the 26th of April 1822 the Shelleys and Williamses left Pisa to spend the summer on the Genoese coast, between the villages of Lerici and Sant' Arenzo: they had taken a house close to the seashore, named the Casa Magni, and lived there together. It was a singularly sultry summer, and a very wild secluded neighbourhood. Shelley, always passionately fond of boating, and Williams, who shared the same taste, had agreed to be joint owners of a small schooner for which Williams supplied a somewhat hazardous model: she was built at Genoa, and named the Don Juan, and reached the Casa Magni on_the_12th of May. Shelley was now engaged in composing his Triumph of Life-too soon to be triumphed over by death-which he had taken up after hammering away for awhile upon the drama of Charles the First.

Leigh Hunt reached Genoa in June, and went on to Leghorn. Shelley and Williams followed him thither in the Don Juan, and saw him housed in Pisa. Circumstances were now urging Byron to quit this part of Italy, and Shelley found much cause for anxiety in the uncertain prospects thus threatened to Hunt. Further dejected by a despond ing letter which he received from his wife, now in a delicate state of health, he set sail on the afternoon of the 8th of July, to return from Leghorn to Lerici. It was a day of dull and menacing heat. About half-past six a squall burst, and the Don Juan sank in from ten to fifteen fathom water. Probably, in the turmoil of the storm, she was run down by a felucca from behind. Shelley could never be taught to swim: he thrust aside into his breast-pocket the last volume of Keats which he was reading, and went down. Williams made an attempt to swim but he also, along with the only other soul on board, a sailor-boy named Charles Vivian, perished. After days of harrowing suspense the corpses were all traced out by Trelawny, and those of Williams and Shelley were burned on the seashore, after the ancient fashion, on the 15th and 16th of August. The ashes of the glorious poet were afterwards deposited in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome.

Shelley was nearly 5 feet 11 in height, strong, slim, with

something of a stoop. His hair was abundant and wavy, dark brown which began carly to grizzle; his eyes deep blue; his countenance uncommonly juvenile,-full of spirituality, and of the beauty which goes along with that, though he was not of the type of a regularly "handsome man.' ." He was generosity, unworldliness, and disinterestedness, personified; of the most sensitive emotions and affections; and inspired by a boundless love of humankind. Physical and moral courage were equally his, along with an innate impulse to resist all dictatorial authority in social, political, and more especially speculative matters. No man was more singleminded, none a more ardent lover of abstract truth and ideal virtue. His career corresponded with great exactitude to his principles; and, though there are some passages in it to be deplored even from his own point of view, and to be condemned from others, few men could challenge a clearer verdict for an exalted, pure, and transcendent nature.

A great deal has been said about Shelley's atheism and materialism by people who had neither his power or elevation of mind for approaching these abstruse subjects, nor his spirit of ardent investigation for exploring them, nor his courage and openness for declaring the results, as he apprehended them, of the exploration. Far be it from me to truckle to any clamour on such a theme, or to intrude any irrelevances of opinion, my own or others': the only opinion here to be ascertained, be it right or wrong, is Shelley's. The fact, then, seems to be that, in his early youth, he was a sceptic on all sorts of religious subjects; next, a materialist and atheist, in the mode of French philosophy; afterwards, in his maturer years, or from about 1815–16, mainly a Berkeleyan or Immaterialist, and, along with this, something of a pantheist rather than atheist. But he did not affect certainty where he found mystery; and to the end of his life it would seemingly have been difficult to him to define what precise sort of pantheism or theism he contemplated as consistent with the facts of nature—or what degree of hold over his belief the ordinary or more esoteric doctrines of the immortality of the soul had acquired. In politics he was genuinely a republican; but not a courtier of the mob, nor at all disposed to ignore the practical difficulties which would beset a transfer of power from the few to the many, prior to full preparation of the many to use it with justice and understanding.

The poetry of Shelley is in domain supreme, and in beauty supreme. Its paramount quality is the ideal: through the husks of all things he penetrated into their soul, and saw

this soul in the garb of beauty. It might have been said of Shelley as of his own skylark,

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

The poetic ecstasy took him constantly upwards; and, the higher he got, the more thoroughly did his thoughts and words become one exquisite and intense unit. With elevation of meaning, and splendour and beauty of perception, he combined the most searching, the most inimitable loveliness of verse-music; and he stands at this day, and perhaps will always remain, the poet who, by instinct of verbal selection and charm of sound, comes nearest to expressing the half-inexpressible—the secret things of beauty, the intolerable light of the arcane.

Besides this unparagoned merit, Shelley is admirably great in the poetic-familiar, as in Julian and Maddalo; the tragic, as in The Cenci; the fantastic-grotesque, as in Peter Bell the Third; and in poetic translation generally. He is therefore very far indeed from being (as the popular notion tends too much to supposing) a mere vague idealist who is pretty nearly at the end of his tether when he has no metaphysical abstractions to talk about, no anti-actual impersonations to present, and no indeterminate magnitudes of the natural world to spatiate in. Not the less true is it that Shelley is often too shadowy in thought and phrase, and hence indifferently qualified for narrative work, and too ready to lose himself in the fascinations rather than to follow out the structural contours of his subjects. He is also, from first to last, a somewhat loose and haphazard writer, considered strictly as such, apart from the impulses of poetic genius. He comes right continually through instinct and power: if he does not thus come right, neither does he keep himself right through heedfulness, or the resolute will for artistic perfection.

To sum up, there is no poet-and no man either-in whose behalf it is more befitting for all natures, and for some natures more inevitable, to feel the privileges and the delights of enthusiasm. The very soul rushes out towards Shelley as an unapproached poet, and embraces him as a dearest friend.

W. M. ROSSETTI.