SHELLEY.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, the son of a wealthy, commonplace Sussex baronet, was born in 1792. His hatred of tyranny made Eton anything but a bed of roses for him. The same Oxford that still maintains in a place of honor1 a statue to James II.—this Oxford expelled Shelley for the utterance of religious opinions which, however mistaken, were inspired by a youthful and generous enthusiasm for truth. This same noble enthusiasm partly redeems the follies and eccentricities of the next five years; in Alastor (1816) dawned upon the world another poet in this age of poets. Impartial judgment cannot acquit Shelley of all responsibility for his first wife's suicide, nor can it fail to approve the legal decree that deprived him of the guardianship of her children; Shelley had to learn by this bitter experience that mere iconoclasm saveth the soul neither of society nor of the individual. Laon and Cynthia (1818) shows Shelley in all his glory and all his weakness: his vehement passion, his splendor of imagery, his idealizing spirituality, his monotony in character-delineation, his inability to gain any 'wide and luminous view' of life.—The same year (1818) he left England for the third time- never to return. The next four years he spent chiefly in Italy; the impressions of that residence, recorded in the prose of his Letters, Matthew Arnold prefers to his poetry. His intimacy with Byron gave us Julian and Maddalo; 2 a profound and admiring study of the Greek tragedians gave us the Prometheus Unbound (1821), ‘a genuine liking [for which],' Mr. Symonds declares, 'may be reckoned the touch-stone of a man's capacity for understanding lyric poetry.' Of all his works, Adonais (1821) is the most artistic in form. Years were bringing to Shelley the philosophic mind; had he lived he would undoubtedly have produced something great. But this was not to be: he was drowned while sailing on the Gulf of Spezzia, July 8, 1822.

Keats, Napoleon, Shelley, Byron-all died between 1820 and 1824. Was there ever, within so short a time, such an in-gathering of mighty spirits to the abodes of dusty death!

1 Over the entrance to the main quadrangle of University College — Shelley's College!

2 See Bibliography on Byron.

30 Cruel Test! Must all lack the lyric sense who cannot 'like' a 'Lyrical Drama,' a production whose very title is a contradiction in terms? — The Lyrics in the Prometheus Unbound are undoubtedly beautiful, though at times danger. ously near to 'words, detached from meaning' (Symonds, p. 124). But how about the Drama' part of this play, -a 'Drama' where the characters are abstractions, where the action obeys no law but that of unreason, and where the fundamental philosophy (if anything) is mere Rousseauism?

BIBLIOGRAPHY.

LIFE AND TIMES. All that is worth knowing about Shelley (and a good deal that is not) is collected in Dowden's Life of Shelley. This is a special plea, the general plan of which is drawn with great literary skill, while many of the details are filled in with fervid and unnecessary rhetoric à la Swinburne. Shelley (E. M. L.), by the lamented John Addington Symonds, gives us the life and the poetry with less attempt to gloss over the faults; Sharp's Shelley (Gt. Wr.) gives a favorable coloring to the main facts of Shelley's life, with little comment on the poetry. Prefixed to Woodberry's Text of Shelley (the most recent) is a brief Memoir.

CRITICISM. De Quincey: Notes on Gilfillan's Literary Portraits; Percy Bysshe Shelley. Though written when material for Shelley's biography was comparatively scanty, this essay gauges the character of 'the eternal child' with a fine discrimination that Shelleyites would do well to study. Attempts no estimate of Shelley's poetry.

Bagehot: Literary Studies, Vol. i.; Percy Bysshe Shelley. A subtle study (1) of some of the characters of Shelley's poems as reflecting the impulses of the poet; (2) of Shelley's religious (?) philosophy; (3) of the Classical quality of his Imagination as distinguished from the Romantic Fancy of Keats.

Shairp: Aspects of Poetry; Shelley as a Lyric Poet. Follows the line of thought suggested under (1) and (2) of Bagehot's Essay. Concludes with an examination of the most famous lyrics; even these the author does not rank high, finding them limited in range and unsound in substance.

Swinburne: Essays and Studies; Notes on the Text of Shelley. As to the Notes, I confess my judgment jumps with Mr. Arnold's when he writes: Shelley is not a classic, whose various readings are to be noted with earnest attention.'-For pure, unconscious humor there is hardly a critic to equal Mr. Swinburne since the death of the lamented Hosea Biglow. He tells us that Byron was a singer who could not sing;' that Shelley' was alone the perfect singing-god,' the man of flawless work and perfect service, [who] holds the same rank in lyric as Shakespeare in dramatic poetry — supreme, and without a second of his race.' (!)

Matthew Arnold: Essays in Criticism, Second Series; Shelley. A review of Dowden's Shelley, marking 'firmly what is ridiculous and odious in the Shelley brought to our knowledge,' and showing that the 'former beautiful and lovable Shelley nevertheless survives.' Points out Shelley's self-deception and want of humor. (How persistently and naturally these defects re-appear in Shelley's

followers!) Courthope: The Liberal Movement in English Literature; Essay iv. Attributes Shelley's failure in Epic and Drama to his ' imperfect perception of the limits of art.'

See also Bibliography on Byron and on Keats.

LINES WRITTEN AMONG THE EUGANEAN HILLS.

This poem was written in the autumn of 1818 when the Shelleys were living near Venice. Their home is thus described by Mrs. Shelley in her Note on the

Poems of 1818: 'I Capuccini was a villa built on the site of a Capuchin convent, demolished when the French suppressed religious houses; it was situated on the very over-hanging brow of a low hill at the foot of a range of higher ones. The house was cheerful and pleasant; a vine-trellised walk, a Pergola, as it is called in Italian, led from the hall door to a summer-house at the end of the garden, which Shelley made his study, and in which he began the Prometheus; and here also, as he mentions in a letter, he wrote Julian and Maddalo; a slight ravine, with a road in its depth, divided the garden from the hill, on which stood the ruins of the ancient castle of Este, whose dark massive wall gave forth an echo, and from whose ruined crevices, owls and bats flitted forth at night, as the crescent moon sunk behind the black and heavy battlements. We looked from the garden over the wide plain of Lombardy, bounded to the west by the far Apennines, while to the east, the horizon was lost in misty distance. After the picturesque but limited view of mountain, ravine, and chestnut wood at the Baths of Lucca, there was something infinitely gratifying to the eye in the wide range of prospect commanded by our new abode.'

I-44. Notice the hurrying force of the imagery; there is neither pause nor let until the figure is worked out (line 26). For weltering (18) compare Lycidas, 13. Are (43) ungrammatical. 45-65. If there is any specific reference intended in these lines, I confess I am unable to trace it. Perhaps they merely continue the imagery of 1-26. The syntax of 64-65 is hardly flawless work,' nor should great poets hold themselves to be above the rules of grammar.

66-114. In these lines the general features of the landscape, as described by Mrs. Shelley, are easily recognizable; but how beautifully idealized! grain (So). See note on Il Penseroso, 33. Amphitrite (97); a sea-nymph, daughter of Nereus. Cl. Myths, § 52. 115-141. And thou soon must be his prey. Referring to the belief that the tides were encroaching on the foundations of Venice. Engineering Science has made it improbable that Venice will ever suffer seriously from this danger. thy conquest-branded brow.

In 1818 Venice was under Austrian rule; see note on the Austrian,' Childe Harold, Canto iv. Stanza 12, line 55.

Thou

142-166. Celtic Anarch. Celtic is here vaguely and incorrectly used for Austrian.' 6 In the Prometheus Unbound, ii. 4, 94, with like inaccuracy, Shelley uses Celt' for 'European.' and all thy sister band. Like the cities of the Lombard League. See notes on Childe Harold, Canto iv. Stanzas xi. and xii. 167-205. a tempest-cleaving Swan: Byron. See the Julian and Maddalo.

thunder-fit. See note on this word in The Ancient Mariner, 69. Scamander: a river of the Troad. See Iliad, xxi. Petrarch, died at Arguà in the Euganean Hills, in 1374. In common with Shelley, his mind seems haunted with the vision of Ideal

Loveliness; on this subject these poets can sing interminably with a sublimity that sometimes verges perilously on the ridiculous. 206-235. the brutal Celt. See note on Celtic Anarch, line 152. the sickle to the sword Lies unchanged. The imagery of lines 225230 seems to be suggested by Joel iii. 10-13. Hebrew poetry was a favorite study with Shelley. foison abundance; a fine old word, seldom used now except in poetry. Fusion' is a doublet of foison, and both are from the Latin 'fundere,' to pour. 236-284.

Ezzelin.

'Ezzelino, a small, pale, wiry man, with terror in his face and enthusiasm for evil in his heart, lived a foe to luxury, cold to the pathos of children, dead to the enchantment of women. His one passion was the greed for power, heightened by the lust for blood. Originally a noble of the Veronese Marches, he founded his illegal authority upon the Captaincy of the Imperial party delegated to him by Frederick. Verona, Vicenza, Padua, Feltre and Belluno made him captain in the Ghibelline interest, conferring on him judicial as well as military supremacy. How he fearfully abused his power, how a crusade was preached against him, and how he died in silence, like a boar at bay, rending from his wounds the dressings that his foes had placed to keep him alive, are notorious matters of history by his absolute contempt of law, his inordinate cruelty, his prolonged massacres and his infliction of plagues upon whole peoples, Ezzelino established the ideal in Italy of a tyrant marching to his end by any means whatever.'-Symonds: Renaissance in Italy; i. 107-108. Padua. The University of Padua was a famous institution of learning as early as the thirteenth century. Galileo was Professor of Mathematics there from 1592– 1610.

285-319. an air-dissolvéd star, that mingles fragrance (with light) is certainly a false image; or is this one of those 'impressionist' lines that we are to-day so loudly called upon to admire? Lines 315-319 seem to express about as definite a religious belief as Shelley ever attained to.

320-334. that silent isle, must be the hopeful mood that came to the poet, this beautiful autumn morning among the hills. The remembered agonies of Shelley's life were neither few nor far between, but their causes lay chiefly in his own ill-regulated impulses.

335-374. This is certainly a lovely picture of the Ideal Life for humanity, but if we try to apply this Ideal to life on Earth we find at once it is applicable only to life in Cloud-Land. Matthew Arnold has summed up this failing of Shelley's in one telling sentence: 'The Shelley of actual life is a vision of beauty and radiance, indeed, but availing nothing, effecting nothing.'

the heavens

6-10. The punctuation in our text follows that of the fist of soa Like a cloud of fire, then, refers to the ascending motion of the dial and not to its appearance. E. as some editors propose, we sprote the semi-colon from the end of the eighth line to the end of the seventh, we get a meaning at variance with that of the third line

11-60. In these lines we see illustrated Courthope's remark t greatness in poetry consisted in a succession of daling images and a rapid flow of splendid verse, Shelley would be entitled to almost the first place in English literature. When we read the Prometheus Unbound, we see the other side of the shield and under stand what the critic means when he adds: But in all the higher qualities of epic and dramatic construction, his work is detective 61-90. Sprite (61), an archaism for 'spirit; 'so used also in 1 inex Written among the Euganean Hills, 371. knew (So), ungram matical.

91-105. This passage Bagehot' compares with the fifth and sixth stanzas of Keats' Ode to a Nightingale, to illustrate the difference between the Classical Imagination and the Romantic Fancy. When

1 See Shelley Bibliography, p. 110.