PERCY BYSSHE SHELLE Y. THE life of SHELLEY is familiar to most readers of modern literature. It involves questions too grave and extensive to be even glanced at in these pages, and I shall attempt to give but little more than its chronology. PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, the eldest son of Sir TIMOTHY SHELLEY, was born at Field Place, in the county of Suffolk, on the fourth of August, 1792. When thirteen years of age, he was sent to Eton, whence at an earlier period than usual he was transferred to Oxford. While in the university he was reserved and melancholy, but studious. His thirst for knowledge was insatiable, and he directed his inquiries into every department of science and opinion. He became interested in the speculations of the French philosophers, and a convert to their fallacies. He avowed his new principles, and boldly challenged his teachers to the discussion of the truth of the Christian religion. His expulsion from the university followed, and the event exasperated and embittered his mind to the verge of madness. He was confirmed in his belief, and driven yet further from the truth, by what he deemed oppression and despotism. In the excitement of this period he wrote Queen Mab, the most wonderful work ever produced by one so young. It was unpublished several years, and it finally appeared without his consent. It is an earnest expression of the feelings born at Oxford; of unbelief, of protestation, and defiance. His family were offended by his course at the university, and more so, soon after, by his marriage. The union was on every account unfortunate. Both were very young; and SHELLEY soon found that he could have little sympathy of taste or feeling with his wife. After the birth of two children they separated, by mutual consent, and she subsequently committed suicide, though not until he had united himself to a daughter of GODWIN and MARY WOLSTONECRAFT. This was the great error of his life; he should not have married again while Mrs. SHELLEY lived; but an intimate knowledge of the circumstances and of his principles would have made less harsh the condemnation which the act occasioned. In 1814 SHELLEY went abroad, visited the more magnificent scenes of Switzerland, and returned to England by the Reuss and the Rhine. In the following summer he wrote Alastor or the Spirit of Solitude. Alastor is a young enthusiast who has vainly sought, in the works of the philosophers and in travel, the impersonation of a beau įdeal which has no existence; and he dies in despair, on finding that he has spent his years in a dream. It is a noble poem, beautiful, tranquil, and solemn. The melodious versification is in keeping with the exalted melancholy of the thought. It was the ideal of SHELLEY'S emotions, in the hues inspired by his brilliant imagination, softened by the recent anticipation of death. The year 1816 was spent chiefly on the shores of the lake of Geneva. It was during a voyage round this lake with Lord BYRON, with whom he had recently become acquainted, that he wrote the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, and Mont Blanc was inspired soon after by a view of that mountain while on his way through the valley of Chamouni. In 1817 SHELLEY wrote The Revolt of Islam, and several shorter pieces and fragments. The beautiful dedication of the Revolt of Islam to his wife I have copied into this volume. Of the poem itself I shall attempt no minute description. It was his design, when commencing it, to entitle it Laon and Cythna or the Revolution of the Golden City, and to make it a story of passion; but as he advanced his plan was changed. At the end of six months, devoted to the task with unremitted ardour and enthusiasm, he finished the work, which, with all its beauty and magnificence, with all the truth that glows in the darkness of its error, it had been better for the world if he had left unwritten. An act more infamous than any of which SHELLEY was ever even accused, was that of the Court of Chancery, under the presidency of Lord ELDON, by which he was deprived of the guardianship of his children, on the ground that his antisocial and irreligious principles | unfitted him to be their educator. This atrocious violation of the law of nature drove him from England for ever. While crossing the sea, under the impression that expatriation was necessary to preserve his child, he gave utterance to his uncontrollable emotions in some lines, addressed to his youngest son: The billows are leaping around it, The sea looks black, and the clouds that bound it, Come with me, thou delightful child, The rocking of the boat thou fearest, We soon shall dwell by the azure sea Or Greece, the Mother of the free. And I will teach thine infant tongue In their own language, and will mould Of Grecian lore; that by such name When afterwards this child died at Rome, he wrote of the English burying-ground in that city, "This spot is the repository of a sacred loss, of which the yearnings of a parent's heart are now prophetic; he is rendered immortal by love, as his memory is by death. My beloved child is buried here. I envy death the body far less than the oppressors the minds of those whom they have torn from me. The one can only kill the body, the other crushes the affections." Rosalind and Helen, which had been begun in England, was finished at the baths of Lucca, in the summer of 1818. From Lucca SHELLEY Went to Venice, near which city he commenced his greatest work, Prometheus Unbound. In the winter he removed to Naples. He suffered much from ill health; and in the spring of 1819 went to Villa Valsovana, in the vicinity of Leghorn, where he wrote the Masque of Anarchy, from which Liberty, in this volume, is extracted, and the Tragedy of the Cenci. The close of the year 1919 was spent in Florence, and the ensuing summer at the baths of San Giuliano, near Pisa. In 1820 he wrote The Sensitive Plant, Julian and Maddalo, The Witch of Atlas, and many smaller pieces. In 1821 he was still at Pisa. His principal writings this year were Epipsychidion and Adonais. In the spring of 1822 he hired a villa near Lerici, on the bay of Spezia. On the first of July he left home, in a small vessel which had been built for him, to meet his friend LEIGH HUNT, who had just arrived at Pisa. Two weeks after, he was lost in a storm at sea. In Adonais he had almost anticipated his destiny. When the mind figures his boat veiled from sight by the clouds, as it was last seen upon the ocean, and then the waves, when the storm had passed, without a sign of where it had been, it may well regard as prophecy the last stanza of the hymn to the memory of his brother bard: The breath, whose might I have invoked in song, I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar; Whilst burning through the inmost veil of heaven, Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are. SHELLEY'S predominant faculty was his imagination. Fantasy prevails to such an extent in his long poems, that they are too abstract for the "daily food" of any but ideal minds. No modern poet has created such an amount of mere imagery. There is a want of simplicity and human interest about his productions which render them "caviare to the general." He has been well designated as the poet for poets. Two or three of his short pieces are models of lyric beauty. His classic dramas abound in rich metaphors. The Cenci is unquestionably the most remarkable of modern plays. Greek literature modified his taste, and a life of singular vicissitude disturbed the healthful current of a soul cast in a gentle but heroic mould. His aspirations were exalted, and his genius of the first order. Notwithstanding all the injustice done him by men prejudiced by his irreligious opinions, it is my belief, from a careful study of his life, that the world has scarcely furnished a more noble nature. He might have been a Christian had he suffered less from man's inhumanity. The weakness and wickedness which made him an exile from his home and country, hardened his heart and petrified his feelings against an influence which is rarely powerful save when it comes in the guise of love. The last edition of SHELLEY's writings, published by Mr. Moxon, was edited by his widow, the author of Frankenstein, a woman worthy to be the wife of such a man. Its notes, with the text, constitute the best biography of the poet. In our own country more justice has been done to SHELLEY's genius, motives, and actions than they have received at home. I refer with pleasure for a more elaborate discussion THE SENSITIVE PLANT. PART I. A SENSITIVE Plant in a garden grew, And each flower and herb on earth's dark breast Broad water-lilies lay tremulously, And starry river-buds glimmer'd by, of his claims than I can here present, to Rambles and Reveries, by my friend H. T. TUCKERMAN; a volume which contains a series of essays on the modern English poets, by one of the most elegant and discriminating critics of the day. SHELLEY left but one child, a son, PERCY FLORENCE SHELLEY, who, by the death of the poet's father in the summer of 1844, has become a baronet and succeeded to the family estates. Sir PERCY SHELLEY is now about twenty-five years of age. And around them the soft stream did glide and dance The flowers (as an infant's awakening eyes With the light and the odour its neighbour shed, It loves, even like love, its deep heart is full, THERE was a Power in this sweet place, But her tremulous breath and her flushing face In a basket, of grasses and wild flowers full, And many an antenatal tomb, Where butterflies dream of the life to come, This fairest creature from earliest spring PART III. THREE days the flowers of the garden fair, Like stars when the moon is awaken'd, were, Or the waves of Baiæ, ere luminous She floats up through the smoke of Vesuvius. And on the fourth, the Sensitive Plant Felt the sound of the funeral chant, And the steps of the bearers, heavy and slow, And the sobs of the mourners deep and low; The weary sound and the heavy breath, And the silent motions of passing death, And the smell, cold, oppressive, and dank, Sent through the pores of the coffin plank; The dark grass, and the flowers among the grass, Were bright with tears as the crowd did pass; From their sighs the wind caught a mournful tone, And sate in the pines and gave groan for groan. The garden, once fair, became cold and foul, Like the corpse of her who had been its soul; Which at first was lovely as if in sleep, Then slowly changed, till it grew a heap To make men tremble who never weep. Swift summer into the autumn flow'd, And frost in the mist of the morning rode, Though the noonday sun look'd clear and bright, Mocking the spoil of the secret night. The rose leaves, like flakes of crimson snow, Paved the turf and the moss below. The lilies were drooping, and white, and wan, Like the head and the skin of a dying man; And Indian plants, of scent and hue The sweetest that ever were fed on dew, Leaf after leaf, day by day, Were mass'd into the common clay. And the leaves, brown, yellow, and gray, and red, Mass'd into ruin, and all sweet flowers. Whose coarse leaves were splash'd with many a speck, Like the water-snake's belly and the toad's back. And agarics and fungi, with mildew and mould, Dammed it up with roots knotted like watersnakes. And hour by hour, when the air was still, The vapours arose which have strength to kill: But the mandrakes, and toadstools, and docks, and darnels, Rose like the dead from their ruined charnels. CONCLUSION. WHETHER the Sensitive Plant, or that Which within its boughs like a spirit sat Ere its outward form had known decay, Now felt this change, I cannot say. Whether that lady's gentle mind, No longer with the form combined Which scattered love, as stars do light, Found sadness, where it left delight, I dare not guess; but in this life Of error, ignorance, and strife, Where nothing is, but all things seem, And we the shadows of the dream, It is a modest creed, and yet Pleasant, if one considers it, To own that death itself must be, Like all the rest, a mockery. That garden sweet, that lady fair, And all sweet shapes and odours there, In truth have never pass'd away: "Tis we, 'tis ours, are changed; not they. For love, and beauty, and delight, There is no death nor change: their might Exceeds our organs, which endure No light, being themselves obscure. LOVE. THOU art the wine whose drunkenness is all THE UNATTAINED. [weak To thirst and find no fill-to wail and wander With short unsteady steps-to pause and ponderTo feel the blood run through the veins and tingle Where busy thought and blind sensation mingle; To nurse the image of unfelt caresses Till dim imagination just possesses The half-created shadow. |