CONCLUSION. "The good die first, And they whose hearts are dry as summer dust THE flames that lighted up Shelley's funeral pyre were not fairly extinguished when the tardy world already began to acknowledge the genius that had departed. The poet had scarcely anticipated, even in his lifetime, any other than posthumous fame. Living in a strange land, surrounded by a few friends. who loved and appreciated him, and whose applause alone he sought, he had been, like his own skylark: "A poet hidden In the light of thought, Singing hymns unbidden, Till the world was-wrought To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not;" and the beauty of his inspirations was left for more impartial readers to discover, than they who sat in judgment on him while he lived. "There is another man gone," said Byron, alluding to Shelley's death, "about whom the world was ill-naturedly, and ignorantly, and brutally mistaken. It will, perhaps, do him justice now, when he can be no better for it." It is not a little singular, however, that Byron's own biographer should be among the first to justify the bitterness of this reflection. I have already shewn how Moore endeavoured to disturb the harmony in which Byron and Shelley lived; but though, during Shelley's lifetime, he could. speak of him in the most intolerant language, we find him writing, after the poet's death, in the following manner : "The melancholy death of poor Shelley seems to have affected Lord Byron's mind less with grief for the actual loss of his friend, than with bitter indignation against those who had through life so grossly misrepresented him; and never certainly was there an instance where the supposed absence of all religion in an individual, was assumed so eagerly as an excuse for the absence of all charity in judging him. Though never personally acquainted with Mr. Shelley, I can join freely with those who most loved him, in admiring the various excellences of his heart and genius, and lamenting the too early doom that robbed us of the mature fruits of both. "His short life had been like his poetry, a sort of bright, erroneous dream-false in the general principles on which it proceeded, though beautiful and attaching in most of the details; had full time been allowed for the 'overlight' of his imagination to have been tempered down by the judgment, which in him was still in reserve, the world at large would have been taught to pay that high homage to his genius, which those only who saw what he was capable of, can now be expected to accord to it." Had the poet lived it is impossible to say what the extraordinary efforts of his genius might not have produced, combined with maturer judgment, and that calm serenity which generally descends on middle life. It is highly probable, however that he would have realised the best wishes of his friends, and have left something still more worthy of him than any thing we now possess. But if Shelley's life was a bright, erroneous dream, it was in many respects far better than the reality of less gifted mortals; and, as regards the principles which governed his actions, it may be said that the spirit of Christianity, in the higher application of the term, entered largely into them, if his belief in its divine origin differed from generally received opinions. But Shelley's religious sentiments have been very much misunderstood, or unfairly represented. The works of creation were his constant study, and nothing delighted him more than the contemplation of the Deity. It has been objected to him that he was fond of dealing in abstractions; but many passages of his works will illustrate the sublime conception he entertained of the Divine Nature. Moreover, he was a true Platonist, and was profoundly attached to the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. The materialism that at one time attracted him was early effaced from his mind. "I was discontented," he says, "with such a view of things as it afforded; man is a being of high aspirations, looking both before and after,' whose thoughts wander through eternity,' disclaiming alliance with transience and decay; incapable of imaging to himself annihilation; existing but in the future and in the past; being, not what he is, but what he has been, and shall be. Whatever may be his final destination, there is a spirit within him at enmity with nothingness and dissolution." A strange air of mysticism always pervaded these speculations; and it is difficult to fathom Shelley's ideas of a future existence from them; but there is something exceedingly attractive in his manner of expressing himself. After a danger incurred at sea, from which he and his wife narrowly escaped, he wrote in a journal : "I had time in that moment to reflect, and even to reason on death; it was rather a thing of discomfort and disappointment than terror to me. We should never be separated; but in death we might not know and feel our union as |