baronet been in the way of a lettre de cachet, like Mirabeau's father, he would certainly have had Percy put into Newgate and kept there. The malediction of the old man seems to have clung to Shelley's mind to the end, and made him rebellious against everything bearing the paternal name. He assailed the Father of the Hebrew theocracy with amazing bitterness, and joined Prometheus in cursing and dethroning Zeus, the Olympian usurper. With him, tyrant and father were synonymous, and he has drawn the old Cenci, in the play of that name, with the same fierce, unfilial pencil, dipped in blood and wormwood. Shelley was by nature, self-instruction, and inexperience of life, impatient and full of impulse; and the sharp and violent measures by which they attempted to reclaim him only exasperated him the more against everything respected by his opponents and persecutors. Genius is by nature aggressive or retaliatory; and the young poet, writhing and laughing hysterically, like Demogorgon, returned the scorn of society with a scorn, the deeper and loftier in the end, that it grew calm and became the abiding principle of a philosophic life. It was the act of his father which drove Shelley into such open rebellion against gods and men. Very probably, though he might have lived an infidel in religious matters, like tens of thousands of his fellows, he would not have written, or, at least, published, such shocking things, if his father had been more patient with a youth so organized. But parents have a right to show a terrible anger when thwarted by their children, and in this case the father too much resembled the son in wilful impetuosity of temper. Turned out of his first home, Shelley went wandering forth by land and sea, a reed shaken by the wind, a restless outcast yearning for repose and human sympathy, and in this way encountering the questionable accidents of his troubled, unguarded life, and gathering all the feverish inspiration of his melancholy and unfamiliar poetry. With a sense of physical infirmity or defect which shaped the sequestered philosophy of the Cowpers, the Bérangers, and others, the manlier minds of literature, including Byron himself, in some measure, Shelley felt he was not fit for the shock and hum of men and the greater or lesser legerdemain of life, and so turned shyly away to live and follow his plans and reveries apart, after the law of his being, violating in this way what may be called the common law of society, and meeting the fate of all nonconformists. He was slighted and ridiculed, and even suspected; for people in general, when they see a man go aside from the highway, maundering and talking to himself, think there must be a reason for it; they suppose him insane, or scornful, or meditating a murder, in any case, one to be visited with hard thoughts; and thus baffled curiosity will grow uneasily into disgust, and into calumny, if not into some species of outrage,— and very naturally, after all; for man is, on the whole, made for society, and society has a sovereign right to take cognizance of him, his ways and his movements, as a matter of necessary surveillance. The world will class men "in its coarse blacks and whites." Some mark Shelley with charcoal, others with chalk,—the former considering him a reprobate, the latter admiring him as a high-souled lover of human happiness and human liberty. But he was something of both together, — and would have been nothing without that worst part of him. He ran perversely counter to the lessons of his teachers, and acted in defiance of the regular opinions and habits of the world. He was too outspoken, like all genius; whereas the world inculcates the high practical wisdom of a shut mouth and a secretive mind. Fontenelle, speaking according to the philosophy of the crowd, says, "A wise man, with his fist full of truths, would open only his little finger." Shelley opened his whole hand, in a fearless, unhappy manner; and was accordingly punished for ideas which multitudes entertain in a quiet way, saying nothing, and living in the odor of respectable opinion. With a mind that re coiled from anything like falsehood and injustice, he wanted prudence. And as, in the belief of the matter-of-fact Romans, no divinity is absent, if Prudentia be present, so it still seems that everything is wanting to a man, if he wants that. Shelley denied the commonly received Divinity, as all the world knows, an Atheist of the most unpardonable stamp, and has suffered in consequence; his life being considered a life of folly and vagary, and his punishment still enduring, as we may perceive from the tone and philosophy of his biographers, or rather his critics, who, not being able to comprehend such a simple savage, present his character as an oddity and a wonder,— an extravaganza that cannot be understood without some wall of the world's pattern and plastering to show it up against. It is, to be sure, much easier and safer to regard Shelley's career in this way than to justify it, since the customs and opinions of the great majority must, after all, be the law and rule of the world. Shelley's apologist would be a bold man. Whether he shall ever have one is a question. At all events, he has not had a biographer as yet. His widow shrank from the task. Of those familiar friends of his, we can say that "no man's thought keeps the roadway better than theirs," and all to show how futile is the attempt to measure such a man with the footrule of the conventions. Shelley was a mutineer on board ship, and a deserter from the ranks; and he must, therefore, wait for a biographer, as other denounced and daring geniuses have waited for their audience or their epitaph. CLARIAN'S PICTURE. A LEGEND OF NASSAU HALL. "Turbine raptus ingenii."- SCALIGER. [Concluded.] THE next morning there was queer some assignation, I suspect," remarked talk about Clarian. Mac and I stared at each other when we heard it at breakfast, but still kept our own counsel in silence. Some late walkers had met him in the moonlight, crossing the campus at full speed, hatless, dripping wet, and flying like a ghost. "I tell you," said our informant, a good enough fellow, and one not prone to be violently startled, "he scared me, as he flitted past. His eyes were like saucers, his hair wet and streaming behind him, his face white as a chalk-mark on Professor Cosine's blackboard. Depend on it, that boy's either going mad or has got into some desperate scrape." "Pshaw!" growled Mac, "you were drunk,- couldn't see straight." "Mr. Innocence was returning from Zoile. "If he had been, you'd have encountered him, Mr. Zoile," said Mac, curtly. But I noticed my chum did not like this new feature in the case. After this, until the time of my receiving the lad's invitation, I neither saw nor had communication with Clarian, nor did any others of us. If he left his room, it was solely at night; he had his meals sent to him, under pretence of illness, and admitted no one, except his own servant. This fellow, Dennis, spoke of him as looking exceedingly feeble and ill; and also remarked that he had apparently not been to bed for some days, but was mixing colors, or painting, the whole time. I went to his door several times, but was invariably refused admittance, and told, kindly, but firmly, that he would not be interrupted. Mac also tried to see him, but in vain. "I caught a glimpse of that boy's face at his window just now," said he, one day, coming in after recitation. "You may depend upon it, there's something terribly wrong. My God, I was horrified, Ned! Did you ever see any one drown? No? Well, I did once, a woman. She fell overboard from a Chesapeake steamboat in which I was coming up the Bay, and sank just before they reached her. I shall never forget her looks as she came up the last time, turned her white, despairing, death-stricken face towards us, screamed a wild nightmare scream, and went down. Clarian's face was just like hers. Depend upon it, there's something wrong. What can we do ?" Nothing, indeed, save what we did, wait, until that pleasant morning came round and brought me Clarian's note. I could scarcely brook the slow laziness with which the day dragged by, as if it knew its own beauty, and lingered to enjoy it. At last, however, the night came, the hour also, and punctually with it came Dr. Thorne, a kindly young physician, and a man of much promise, wellread, prompt, clear-headed, resourceful, and enthusiastically attached to his profession. Mac tucked a volume of Shakspeare under his arm, and we made our way to Clarian's room forthwith. Here we found about a dozen students, all known to us intimately. They were seated close to one another, conversing in low tones, and betraying upon their faces quite an anxiety of expectation. The door of the bedroom was closed, the curtain was lowered, and the only light in the room came from a shaded lamp, which was placed upon a small table in the recess to the right of the picture. "What is this for?" inquired Dr. Thorne, pointing to a sort of salver resting upon a low tripod directly in front of the picture. "Where is Clarian?" asked I. “He looks awful," some one began in a whisper, when the lad's feeble voice called out from the bedroom, "Is it Ned and Mac?" The door was pulled open, and Clarian came towards us. "I am glad to see you, my friends. Dr. Thorne, you are truly welcome. Pray, be seated. Mac, here is your place, you and your Shakspeare," said he, indicating the chair and table in the recess. I had held out my hand to the lad, but he turned away without taking it, and began to adjust the cords that moved the curtain. "The tripod, Dr. Thorne," said he, with a sickly smile, "is a-a mere fancy of mine,-childish, but in the salver I shall burn some pyrotechnic preparations, while the picture is being exhibited, by way of substitute for daylight. Excuse me a moment," added he, as he went into the bedroom again. Then, as Clarian came out, and stood in the bedroom doorway, quite near me, I remarked the terrible change since I had last seen him. He leaned against the door-frame, as if too weak to support himself erect; and I saw that his knees shook, his hands jerked, and his mouth twitched in a continual nervous unrest. He had on a handsome robe de chambre of maroon velvet, which he seldom wore about college, though it was very becoming to him, its long skirts falling nearly to his feet, while its ample folds were gathered about his waist, and secured with cord and tassel. His feet were thrust into neat slippers, and his collar rolled over a flowing black cravat à la Corsaire. His long hair, which was just now longer than usual, was evenly parted in the middle, like a girl's, and, combed out straight, fell down to his shoulders on either side. All this care and neatness of dress made the contrast of his face stand out the more strikingly. Its pallor was ghastly: no other word conveys the idea of it. His lips kept asunder, as we see them sometimes in persons prostrated by long illness, and the nether one quivered incessantly, as did the smaller facial muscles near the mouth. His eyes were sunken and surrounded by livid circles, but they themselves seemed consuming with the dry and thirsty fire of fever: hot, red, staring, they glided ever to and fro with a snake-like motion, as uncertain, wild, and painful, in their unresting search, as those of a wounded and captive hawk. The same restlessness, approaching in violence the ceaseless spasmodic habit of a confirmed Chorea, betrayed itself in all his movements, particularly in a way he had of glancing over his shoulder with a stealthy look of apprehension, and the frequent starts and shivers that interrupted him when talking. His voice also was changed, and in every way he gave evidence not only of disease of mind and body, but of a nervous system shattered almost beyond hope of reaction and recovery. Trembling for him, I rose and attempted to speak with him aside, but he waived me off, saying, with that sickly smile which I had never before seen him wear, We sat there in the dim light, breathless, awed,- for all of us saw the boy's agony, and were the more shocked that we were unable to understand it, — until, at last, in a voice made more impressive by its tremor, Mac began to read the terrible text, to read as I had never heard him read before, until a fair chill entered our veins and ran back to our shuddering hearts from sympathy. Then, as he read on and painted the king and murderer together, while his voice waxed stronger and fuller, we saw Clarian step forward to the salver and busy with its lambent flame, till it blazed up with a broad, red light, that, shedding a weird splendor upon all around, and lending a supernatural effect to the room's deep shadows, the picture's funereal aspect, and the unearthly pallor of the boy's countenance, startled our eyes like the painful glare of midnight lightning. "Thou canst not say, I did it! Never shake Thy gory locks at me!" As the reader thrust the terror of these words upon us, all started back, for the curtain was plucked suddenly away, and there before us, not in Clarian's picture, it seemed, but in very truth, stood Mac beth, conscious of the murdered presence. Even the reader, absorbed as he was in his text, paused short, amazed; and I forgot that I had seen this picture, only knew that it was a living scene of terror. Doubt less much of this startling effect was the result of association, the agitation of anxiety, the influence of the impressive text, the suddenness of the apparition, the unusual light; but in the figure of Macbeth, at which alone we gazed, there was a life, a terrible significance, that outran all these causes. It was not in the posture, grand as that was,- not in the sinstamped brow, rough with wrinkles like å storm-chafed sea, not in the wiry hair, gray and half rising in haggard locks, like adders that in vain try to escape the foot that treads them down, — nor in the mouth, for that was hid behind the impotent guard of the upraised arm and clenched fist, but in those painted eyes, into which, all-fascinated, we ever gazed, reading in them all that crouching terror, all the punishment of that spectral presence, all the poignant consciousness of his fate to whom such things could happen, to whom already his victims rise again, "With twenty mortal murders on their crowns, And push us from our stools!" While I yet gazed, a sickening terror pervading me in the presence of these ghastly eyes, there came a voice, as if from afar," Read on!"-so consonant with the tone of my emotions, that I looked to see the figure itself take speech, until Mac, with a gasp, resumed. Still, as he read, the nightmare-spell possessed me, till a convulsive clutch upon my arm roused me, and instinctively, with the returning sense, I turned to Clarian. Not too soon,- for then, in his own person, and in that strange glare, he was interpreting the picture to us. He stood, not thrown back like Macbeth, but drawn forward, on tiptoe, with neck reached out, form erect, but lax, one arm extended, and one long diaphonous finger pointing over our heads at something he saw be hind us, but towards which, in the extremity of our terror, we dared not turn our eyes. He saw it, more than saw it, we knew, as we noted the scream swelling in his throat, yet dying away into an inarticulate breath ere it passed the blue and shaken lips,- he saw it, and those eyes of his, large enough in their wont, waxed larger still, wilder, madder with desperate affright, till every one of us, save the absorbed reader, recognized in them the nightmare horror of the picture,- knew that in Macbeth Clarian had drawn his own portrait! There he stood, drawn on, staring, pointing "Stop!" shouted Dr. Thorne, his voice hoarse and strident with emotion; but Mac, absorbed in his text, still read, flinging a fine and subtile emotion of scorn into the words,— "Prithee, see there! behold! it comes! it comes!" Now he beckoned in the air, and called with a shuddering, smothered shriek, "Come! I did it! come! Ha!" yelled he, plucking the spell from his limbs like a garment, and springing madly forward towards the door," Ha! touch me not! Off, I say, off!" He paused, gazed wildly round, flung his hand to his brow, and, while his eyes rolled till nothing but their whites were seen, while the purple veins swelled like mole-tracks in |