fectly performed; for the character of | Forman has, however, placed it among Shelley is a psychological phenomenon, the "Juvenilia" at the end of his edition, presenting the most unwonted discrepan- and in Shelley's history it cannot be omitcies and contrasts. He had all the sen- ted; but it is no real service to the memsitiveness and excitability, but not the ory of a great man to reproduce and perirritability, of genius; impetuous and fiery petuate the feeble and foolish productions at the sight of wrong and the tyranny of of his earliest years. Nor, indeed, do we what he deemed to be injustice or error, think it just or desirable to collect all the he was in all the relations of life the gen- crumbs and fragments of incomplete tlest and most unselfish of human beings. works, struck off in the heat of composiIn his early childhood his father's house tion, but afterwards rejected by the author at Field Place rang with his gaiety and himself. Every one who writes, and eshis pleasantries; he was adored by his pecially who writes poetry as Shelley did, sisters, one of whom, Elizabeth, did not in woods and waters and a thousand wild long survive the dreadful catastrophe of moods of inspiration, leaves a great deal his fate; but this house of gaiety and behind him which he would never have genius was overshadowed by the gloom given to the world, and which had better and precision of his parents, utterly un- be forgotten. conscious of the extraordinary gifts of the race to which they had given birth. School life, as it existed in the Eton of those days, was repugnant to Shelley: he cared not for its sports; he detested its constituted or assumed authority. The spirit of rebellion and defiance was strong within him, and made him live the life of a solitary and an outlaw. At college this spirit broke forth with wilder intensity, not in the pranks or escapades common to youth, but in a frenzy of thought which gave birth to "Queen Mab" and the atheistical paper that caused his expulsion from the university. That paper, which Mr. Forman has reprinted, is, barring its offensive title, no more than the agnostics of the present day assert in every page of their works, namely, that the existence of the divine being cannot be mathematically demonstrated by proofs drawn from the senses and the understanding. Shelley was deluded by the fallacy that because a truth cannot be mathematically demonstrated by the understanding it is no truth at all, and that the reverse of it becomes the more probable alternative. In justice to Shelley it should be remembered that in his later years he disclaimed all recollection of "Queen Mab" and its outrageous notes; that he said he supposed it was villanous trash, like the fantastic romances of his boyhood; and that it was republished without his consent and against his will. He was, in fact, anxious to suppress it. Mr. Buxton It is impossible to trace the source of the anti-religious opihions that Shelley adopted with so much vehemence, but they were undoubtedly inflamed by his aversion to the tenets of the Calvinistic creed, which he held to be absolutely inconsistent with the justice and benevolence of God, and by his abhorrence of the crimes of bigotry, intolerance, and persecution committed for ages in the name of a pure and holy faith. He hated priestcraft; he hated oppression; and he repelled religious oppression more than any other form of tyranny. Yet his life was spent in speculations of a highly religious character. His philosophy was intensely spiritual. He utterly rejected the materialism of the French school: For birth and life and death, and that strange state Before the naked soul has found its home, life, Bicker and burn to reach their destined goal. These are the ideas of Plato, which he incorporated with his own, and of a greater than Plato. Shelley's "Essay on Christianity," though written from his own point of view, contains passages which might be delivered from a Christian pulpit; for no man ever recognized more fully the divine truths that humility, selfsacrifice for the good of others, obedience to the laws of justice and humanity, and a clear, calm vision of the mystery of birth | gusted him. He detested obscenity as to his companion, "What a divine religion that would be which should be founded not on faith, but on charity !”* That was the form religion assumed in the mind of Shelley. St. Paul had said before him, "The greatest of these is charity." As Shelley had repudiated much of the faith, so too he, in some important passages of his life, acted in violation of the established morality of his time and his country, not, however, as men violate moral laws, whose rectitude and authority they acknowledge, but because he had imbibed and adopted a different theory of moral obligation to which he adhered. Mrs. Shelley was guilty of no exaggeration when she said, in her note to "Alastor," that "in all he did, he, at the time of doing it, believed himself justified to his own conscience." When he erred it was by a distortion not of moral purpose, but of moral judgment; not by passion, but by conviction. Conscience itself is no infallible guide to those who erect their own standard of right and wrong. This conception of morality was the fatal mistake of his life. It led to the most tremendous consequences to the breach of sacred ties to the defiance of social order to illicit intercourse to more than one suicide to several distracted crimes. When Harriet Westbrook, a girl at school, flung herself or was flung by others into his arms, with very little love or reason on either side, he immediately married her, though he was but a boy himself, because he knew that any other course would be fatal to her reputation, from such actions than the man. How unhappily that marriage turned out is well known, though the circumstances which led to its fatal dissolution have been less. clearly recorded. But no sooner was Shelley free to contract other ties than he married Mary Godwin, and the eight years of his life which followed were spent in the closest and most complete union of two minds and hearts joined in perfect sympathy and constant devotion. The correspondence which took place in 1820 between Shelley and Southey bas recently been published as an appendix to the letters that passed between the Laureate and Miss Caroline Bowles. Southey intended this publication; he expressly says so (p. 76); and he gave Miss Bowles leave to copy the letters for this purpose. We are sorry for it. Whatever may be thought of Shelley's conduct in life, there is a respectful ingenuousness in his address to Southey which might have disarmed a less rancorous partisan; but Southey's answers are remarkable for that arrogant ferocity with which he too often spoke of poets who were more than his equals or his rivals. Where are the works of Southey, and where are the works of Shelley now in the estimation of the world? On some matters of fact Southey was lives, until death after death closed the misinformed; on others he has spoken tragedy. Yet even this was not lawless-out more plainly than any one else. It is ness or libertinism, but the result of a untrue that Shelley "attempted to make misguided philosophy and a mistaken rule of life. Shelley was no libertine. The profligacy of another great poet, which he witnessed at Venice, shocked and dis Leigh Hunt, in his autobiography, says that he made this remark to Shelley, not Shelley to him. But we have reason to think that his memory deceived him, and that the words and the sentiment were Shelley's. proselytes to his atheistical opinions in a girls' boarding school," and that "one of the girls was expelled for the zeal with which she entered into his views." Harriet Westbrook was not expelled at all, nor had she then any peculiar views on such subjects. But Southey said what was true when he stated that "Shelley's first speculative and literary associate | rich enough to do all things, which I shall (Hogg) did attempt to seduce this poor never be. Pity me for my absence from all girl on their way back from Scotland." those social enjoyments which England might It is also true that "Harriet's melancholy afford me, and which I know so well how to end was the result not of sensibility on appreciate. Still, I shall return some fine the score of her husband's desertion, but morning out of pure weakness of heart. of shame resulting from her own subse- And in another touching letter: quent conduct." So far Shelley is indebted to Southey for a species of vindication; but nothing can justify the bitter intolerance of Southey's invective. He holds the language of a Spanish in quisitor to a heretic. Shelley replied in more Christian terms, "Judge not, that ye be not judged." pre I most devoutly wish I were living near London. My inclinations point to Hampstead; but I do not know whether I should not make up my mind to something more completely suburban. What are mountains, trees, heaths, or even the glorious and ever beautiful sky, with such sunsets as I have seen at Hampstead, to friends? Social enjoyment, in some Mr. Browning, in the introduction form or other, is the alpha and the omega fixed by him several years ago to certain of existence. All that I see in Italy - and alleged letters by Shelley, which were cent peaks of the Apennine half enclosing the from my tower window I now see the magnifiafterwards found to be forgeries and with-plain-is nothing: it dwindles into smoke in drawn from circulation, expressed, in language not less true than eloquent, his sense of Shelley's youthful deviations from the high road of duty, common sense, and propriety, which all occurred before he was two-and-twenty, and we must be allowed to borrow from him two very just and striking sentences: In this respect was the experience of Shelley peculiarly unfortunate that the disbelief in him as a man even preceded the disbelief in him as a writer; the misconstruction of his moral nature preparing the way for the misap preciation of his intellectual labors. And again : the mind when I think of some familiar forms of scenery, little perhaps in themselves, over which old remembrances have thrown a delightful color. How we prize what we despised when present! So the ghosts of our dead associations rise and haunt us, in revenge for our having let them starve and abandoned them to perish. Shelley was naturally a social being. Nothing could be more unlike and remote from his disposition than the fierce egotism of Byron, who quarrelled with the world and fled from it, to indulge in solitary life all the baser passions of his nature. Shelley, on the contrary, lived in Italy with his wife the life of an anchorite, abstemious, self-denying, generous to a fault, consumed with the desire, sometimes injudiciously directed, to do good to his fellow-creatures, and aiding to the fullest extent of his power all within his reach. He never lived alone; he could not live alone; and his social disposition made him indulgent and serviceable to persons with whom he contracted an intimacy, although (with the exception of Shelley himself regarded with pain, Mary Shelley) they were immeasurably though without bitterness, for of that he inferior to himself, not only in genius but was incapable, the harsh construction in heart. It has been supposed that Shelwhich had been put upon his youthful writ-ley was a highly imaginative visionary, ings, and the calumnies which had been who passed his life in a poetical dreamland and in philosophical speculations, which brought him to the verge of insan It would be hard indeed upon this young Titan of genius, murmuring, in divine music, his human ignorances, through his very thirst of knowledge, and his rebellions in mere aspiration to law, if the melody itself substantiated the error, and the tragic cutting short of life perpetuated into sins such faults as, under happier circumstances, would have been left behind by the consent of the most arrogant moralist, forgotten on the lowest steps of youth. circulated as to his mode of life. In a letter to his friend Peacock (published by Mrs. Shelley) he says, in 1819: I am regarded by all who know or hear of me, except, I think, on the whole, five individuals, as a rare prodigy of crime and pollution, whose look even might infect. This is a large computation, and I don't think I could mention more than three. Such is the spirit of the English abroad as well as at home. Few compensate, indeed, for all the rest, and if I were alone I should laugh; or if I were ity and unfitted him for society and for the ordinary duties of life. Nothing can be more untrue. Like all men of genius he he rebelled against many of the convenwas eccentric, and the more eccentric as tional observances of society. Perhaps the greatest, if not the happiest, hours of his life were those he spent in his boat or in the woods, where for the most part he conceived and roughly executed the It was characteristic of Shelley, though this he shared with Coleridge, that he combined the finest imaginative power and sensibility with a strong logical faculty and a love of close philosophical reasoning. His prose essays on philosophical subjects, though for the most part fragmentary, are as consummate examples of style and thought as his lyrics works which make his name imperisha- | cocity and its prodigious range, Shelley's ble. But the moment there was anything literary life only extended from his eighto be done, especially if it was an act of teenth to his thirtieth year. We know kindness or public utility, he applied him- but one other instance of a poet of simiself to it with all the precison of a man of lar acquirements; he is happily still business. A man of the world, as it is amongst us; but his years more than outcalled, he never was, and his judgment of number fourfold the years of Shelley's the motives and conduct of other men was literary activity. unformed and often erroneous. But his advice to the young engineer whom he helped with funds to construct a steam boat, his letters to Godwin, and the course he recommended to others in difficult circumstances were eminently practical and useful. His health, which was never good, disqualified him for active life, though he thought he might have succeeded in it. He never looked to poetry or to literary fame as a sufficient and all-absorbing object. There are not unfrequent traces in his correspondence that he thought man had other work to perform on earth than writing verses, even of the noblest strain. Once he suggested to Peacock that it might be possible for him to obtain employment in India. Unlike most of the poets who live upon the creation of their own brain and the exercise of their art, Shelley was an indefatigable worker, and he devoted far more of his life and time to the works of others than to his own. Like his own Prince Athanase, He had a gentle yet aspiring mind, Just, innocent, with varied learning fed, And such a glorious consolation find nothing in them is redundant, nothing obscure. And when the hour of inspiration failed, he translated he translated Plato in language that Plato would not have disowned. Take, for example, the conclusion of the speech of Agathon in the translation of the "Symposium." There is nothing in the English language of a more buoyant eloquence. Compared with the translation of the same passage by Mr. Jowett, it is as diamond to paste. Shelley would fain have turned the same power of reasoning and eloquence from metaphysics and criticism to politics; for the most earnest of all his desires was to protest against the evil which, as he thought, overruled the governments of the world and to advance the reign of justice and liberty among men. But here his inexperience of the world,. In others' joy, when all their own is dead! the times in which he lived, and the influAn insatiable thirst for knowledge and a ences under which he fell, betrayed him passionate love of all the highest forms into all the errors which could perplex an of thought, literature, and even science, enthusiast. To be born in 1792 and to even more than for pure art, filled his ex- enter upon life in 1810 was to be a witness. istence. He had made himself master of of the wildest revolution, of the most six languages, besides his. own to which desolating wars, and ultimately of the he possessed the mistress-key, and with most oppressive reaction which had ever the whole range of literature he was fa- afflicted Europe. No wonder that Shelley miliar, from Eschylus to Calderon, from imbibed that revolutionary miasma which Thucydides and Tacitus to Gibbon and had intoxicated Southey and Wordsworth. Sismondi, but more with the ancient than On such a mind and at such a time the with modern writers. Here and there he writings of Rousseau had an influence notes with regret some field of enquiry which it is scarcely possible for our own (as, for instance, that of English history) generation to conceive. The regeneration comparatively unexplored. His days were of the world was at hand. There were to spent in reading, and when evening came be a new heaven and a new earth. These he still read on - but then he read aloud bewildering lights were reflected on the to his wife, who shared his enthusiasm boyish mind of Shelley by the writings of and his studies. The record of the books Mary Wollstonecraft and the pedantic they read together in each year is amaz- rigorism of Godwin, who, without a spark ing. In the first five months of their con- of poetry in his own nature, was doomed nection, Shelley at twenty-two and Mary to overshadow the existence of a great at seventeen, they mastered no less than | poet. sixty volumes. Yet, in spite of his pre- As Shelley approached manhood, and in the remainder of his short space of life, | But the life of Shelley might be quoted in England lay bound under the darkest support of it. Entirely devoid of affectaspells of Tory government and religious tion, with no vanity, and no desire to intolerance. There was enough, and more parade his works before the world, he than enough, in those years to provoke does not conceal his disappointment at the fiercest remonstrances and the gloom- the singular absence of success which atiest forebodings. No doubt much of the tended his efforts. The limited notoriety language of the advanced Liberals of that he had acquired was due to his follies and day was extravagant, and their theories his misfortunes, for his works all fell stillwere wild; it was not given to them to born from the press; and there is abunforesee that the cause of moderate reform dant evidence that he had himself formed and gradual progress would triumph in no conception of their incomparable exthe end over the evils they denounced. cellence and future fame. Byron, Moore, But sixty years ago a Radical was a Southey, and Scott were the poets of the traitor, an apostate, and an outlaw. In day, whose name was on every lip and some respects these men lived before who were scudding before the breeze of their time; in other respects they mistook popularity and success. When the "Proits course. metheus and "The Cenci" could with difficulty find a publisher, and their circulation was limited to a few copies struck off in Italy or in Paris, Shelley simply observes that Byron and Moore are much better poets than himself, although in "The Cenci" he had endeavored to write in a more simple and popular form; but he did not "think much of it." That was his own verdict on the most powerful tragedy that had been written in the English language since the days of Elizabeth. It is true that when Byron read the "Doge of Venice" to him at Ravenna, he remarked, in a letter to Leigh Hunt, that if the "Foscari " was a tragedy, his own work was not one. The changes which the world has witnessed in the last half-century are at least as great as any they anticipated. They have been brought about not by revolution or by force (which indeed Shelley abhorred), but by peace, by the spread of knowledge, by the reform of the law, by enlarged tolerance of opinion, and by the marvellous material applications of science. But these large steps of progress towards a better future of the world, which Shelley saw as in a dream, and which he exaggerated because they appeared to him arrayed in visionary radiance, had their prophets and their martyrs, who were in some degree the precursors of another age. Some such intuition burst on Shelley when he exclaimed to the west wind rushing in a tempest over the Arno: Be thou, spirit fierce, Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth, But such expressions of a belief in the The only poem of his own of which he ever spoke in terms of confidence is the "Adonais." The praise of that immortal work was welcome to him, for he thought it was deserved, and he was curious to learn what was said of it. To Mr. Ollier, his publisher, he wrote: "The Adonais, in spite of its mysticism, is the least imperfect of my compositions, and, as the image of my regret and compassion for poor Keats, I wish it to be so." And again: "I am especially curious to hear the fate of Adonais. I confess I should be surprised if that poem were born to immortality of oblivion." He also thought well of the "Prometheus Unbound," though he did not expect it would find more than twenty readers. Yet even at that time he wrote to the Gisbornes: "The decision of the cause, whether or not I am a poet, is removed from the present time to the hour when our posterity shall assemble; but the court is a very severe one, and I fear that the verdict will be It has been said by Mr. Carlyle that unconsciousness is one of the character-Guilty — death."" istics of transcendent genius, and if this paradox were true, Carlyle's own exorbitant opinion of himself condemns him. The extreme modesty of Shelley was perfectly genuine. He condescended without the least pretension to men im |