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ordered English society, which, like Byron, he seemed bound to set at defiance.

In character Shelley was a noble, pure man. The conduct for which he was blamed sprang from his own highest ideal of right. His mind had early formed radically different theories from those of most men of his class. Born of the aristocracy, he was an extreme democrat; in religious and social ideas, he was a free-thinker. Apart from his opinions he was a shy, scholarly man, inclined to immerse himself in books, unselfish, full of humanity, and as keenly sensitive as his own Sensitive Plant, to all the abuses and distresses in the world, eager to make the world better at any cost. Byron said of him after his death: "He was without exception the best and least selfish man I ever knew."

He began to write very early. When he was fifteen he had completed two novels. In college he began his poem of Queen Mab, which was condemned as an atheistic production, and after leaving college, his works followed each other rapidly. Although he died at thirty, he had written a good deal of prose, and tried his hand at all forms of poetic composition-dramas, lyrics, blank verse, narrative poems, and several poems in the Spenserian stanza, which seems to have been a favorite form with him.

In 1817 he went to Italy and never returned to England. He had written Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude, and The Revolt of Islam, before his departure; his other works, except a few shorter poems, belong to the five years in which he lived in Italy.

Among his dramas, Prometheus Unbound-a tragedy following the Greek models and with a Greek subject-was one of the first things written in Italy, during a residence at Rome. Afterwards he went to live near Lord Byron, at Pisa, and here his mind and sympathies were so taken hold of by the sad story of Beatrice Cenci, that he wrote on it his tragedy, The Cenci. It is the most painful and powerful drama since the days of John Webster and Philip Mas

In his poetry, Byron warmly took the cause of Greece, which was then making an effort to free herself from the Turks. In Childe Harold, and in other poems, some grand passages are addressed to struggling Greece. The year before his death he entered into the plans of the Greek leaders in a war for their country's independence, and went to live at Missolonghi, where he mustered a band of soldiers in his own pay. Overwork, and the bad climate, threw him into a fever, and he was urged to leave the air of Missolonghi, which was malarious, and go elsewhere to recover. He refused, saying he would remain till Greece was either free or hopelessly subdued. He died soon after, at his post there, in the prime of life and genius. He used to say he had up to that time written only for women; in the last of his life he would write for men. Would he had been spared to do

even greater things than Childe Harold.

TALK LV.

ON PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY.

BETWEEN Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, who were personal friends, there is a kind of resemblance Born 1792. in their lives, although they were men very unlike Died 1822. in character. They were both of noble birth, both held opinions very different from most young men in their position, and they won a similar reputation in their social circle, where their characters and their poetry were looked on by the conservative portion as dangerous and grossly immoral.

Shelley had first drawn blame on himself in college, when he was barely twenty, by some publication which was condemned as atheistic; and he was expelled, finally, from Oxford. Much that he did later, confirmed the bad character this gave him in the eyes of respectable and well

"All the earth and air

With thy voice is loud

As, when night is bare,

From one lonely cloud,

The moon rains out her beams, and heaven is overflowed."

And see how without changing, the measure takes on deeper meaning:

"Waking or asleep,

Thou of death must deem

Things more true and deep

Than we mortals dream;

Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream?

"We look before and after,

And pine for what is not;

Our sincerest laughter

With some pain is fraught;

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought."

The Cloud is another lyric, less subtle in thought than The Skylark, but showing the wonderful music Shelley could make by the interlinking of words.

Among his poems of a fit length to quote, I have chosen the Sensitive Plant, because it seems to me a most characteristic poem: in its melody, in its imaginative quality, and in its very subject a poem in harmony with Shelley's own

nature:

THE SENSITIVE PLANT.
PART I.

"A sensitive plant in a garden grew,

And the young winds fed it with silver dew;
And it opened its fan-like leaves to the light,
And closed them beneath the kisses of night.

"And the spring arose on the garden fair,
Like the spirit of love felt everywhere,

And each flower and herb on Earth's dark breast,
Rose from the dreams of its wintry rest.

"But none ever trembled and panted with bliss,
In the garden, the field or the wilderness,

Like a doe in the noontide with love's sweet want,
As the companionless sensitive plant.

"The snow-drop and the violet

Arose from the ground with warm rain wet,

And their breath was mixed with fresh odor, sent
From the turf, like the voice and the instrument.

"Then the pied wind-flowers and the tulip tall,
And narcissi, the fairest among them all,
Who gaze in their eyes in the stream's recess,
'Till they die of their own dear loveliness;

"And the naiad-like lily of the vale,

Whom youth makes so fair, and passion so pale,
That the light of its tremulous bells is seen
Through their pavilions of tender green;

"And the hyacinth, purple, and white, and blue,
Which flings from its bells a sweet peal anew
Of music so delicate, soft and intense,

It was felt like an odor within the sense;

"And the rose, like a nymph to the bath addrest,
Who unveiled the depth of her glowing breast,
'Till fold after fold, to the fainting air,
The soul of her beauty and love lay bare;

"And the wand-like lily, which lifted up
As a Mænad its moonlight colored cup,
Till the fiery star which is in its eye,
Gazed through clear dew on tender sky;

"And the jessamine faint, and the sweet tube-rose,
The sweetest flower for scent that blows,
And all rare blossoms from every clime,

Grew in that garden in perfect prime.

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"And from this undefiled Paradise,

The flowers (as infants' awakening eyes
Smile on its mother, whose singing sweet
Can first lull, and at last must awaken it).

"When Heaven's blithe winds had unfolded them,
As mine-lamps enkindle a hidden gem,
Shone smiling to Heaven, and every one
Shared joy in the light of the gentle sun;

"For each one was interpenetrated

With the light and odor its neighbor shed:

Like young lovers, whom youth and love make dear,

Wrapped and filled by their mutual atmosphere.

"All the earth and air

With thy voice is loud

As, when night is bare,

From one lonely cloud,

The moon rains out her beams, and heaven is overflowed."

And see how without changing, the measure takes on deeper meaning:

"Waking or asleep,

Thou of death must deem

Things more true and deep

Than we mortals dream;

Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream?

"We look before and after,

And pine for what is not;

Our sincerest laughter

With some pain is fraught;

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.”

The Cloud is another lyric, less subtle in thought than The Skylark, but showing the wonderful music Shelley could make by the interlinking of words.

Among his poems of a fit length to quote, I have chosen the Sensitive Plant, because it seems to me a most characteristic poem: in its melody, in its imaginative quality, and in its very subject a poem in harmony with Shelley's own

nature:

THE SENSITIVE PLANT.
PART I.

"A sensitive plant in a garden grew,

And the young winds fed it with silver dew;
And it opened its fan-like leaves to the light,
And closed them beneath the kisses of night.

"And the spring arose on the garden fair,
Like the spirit of love felt everywhere,

And each flower and herb on Earth's dark breast,
Rose from the dreams of its wintry rest.

"But none ever trembled and panted with bliss,
In the garden, the field or the wilderness,

Like a doe in the noontide with love's sweet want,
As the companionless sensitive plant.

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