this reassured me, in some degree at least. The poem was produced by a series of thoughts which filled my mind with unbounded and sustained enthusiasm. I felt the precariousness of my life, and I resolved in this book to leave some records of myself. Much of what the volume contains was written with the same feeling, as real, though not so prophetic, as the communications of a dying man. I never presumed, indeed, to consider it anything approaching to faultless; but, when I considered contemporary productions of the same apparent pretensions, I will own that I was filled with confidence. I felt that it was in many respects a genuine picture of my own mind. I felt that the sentiments were true, not assumed; and in this have I long believed that my power consists in sympathy, and that part of imagination which relates to sentiment and contemplation. I am formed, if for anything not in common with the herd of mankind, to apprehend minute and remote distinctions of feeling, whether relative to external nature or the living beings which surround us, and to communicate the conceptions which result from considering either the moral or the material universe as a whole. Yet, after all, I cannot but be conscious, in much of what I write, of an absence of that tranquillity which is the attribute and accompaniment of power. This feeling alone would make your most kind and wise admonitions, on the subject of the economy of intellectual force, valuable to me. And, if I live, or if I see any trust in coming years, doubt not but that I shall do something, whatever it may be, which a serious and earnest estimate of my powers will suggest to me, and which will be in every respect accommodated to their utmost limits." It is not difficult to understand why Godwin failed to appreciate the new production of his son-in-law. He had formed his tastes in poetry by a life-long perusal of our old English masters the men of the Shakspearean and Miltonic eras; and it was impossible that he could have gone to a better school. But the poetry of Shelley - excepting in as far as it was inspired, in its metaphysical part, by the genius of ancient Greece was essentially modern in its character. It mingled the impalpable suggestions of mysticism with images of exotic splendor, tropical in the heat and glory of their hues, touched with a light that seemed to dawn from some remote and supernatural future, and often dim with the too great intensity of the writer's emotions and the excessive radiance in which he robed his subtle imaginings. The practical, acute, clear mind of Godwin could not live, with any comfort to itself, in this region of ethereal, though sublime magnificence; neither his temperament nor his intellectual habits fitted him for deriving any high degree of pleasure from a practice so opposed to his own. But Shelley has helped to make the times more poetical; and the flame-like energy and grandeur, the tumultuous passion, and the strange visionary beauty of the Revolt of Islam are now universally acknowledged. In the same year, Shelley also wrote the highly mystical fragments of Prince Athanase-fragments, however, full of beauty and music; a large part of Rosalind and Helen; a few small poems; and a pamphlet advo cating Parliamentary Reform, published under the signature of the "Hermit of Marlow." This political work is remarkable for the statesmanlike calmness of the writer's opinions, and the moderation of his demands. Shelley here proposed that committees should be formed with a view to polling the entire people on the subject which was then, as now, agitating the whole nation. He disavowed any wish to establish universal suffrage at once, or to do away with monarchy and aristocracy, while so large a proportion of the people remained disqualified by ignorance from sharing in the government of the country, though he looked forward to a time when the world would be enabled to "disregard the symbols of its childhood;" and he suggested that the qualification for the suffrage should be the registry of the voter's name as one who paid a certain small sum in direct taxes. Such were the views of a political thinker who was equally removed from being a Tory or a demagogue. At the end of this year (1817), a relapse of the severe attack of ophthalmia, caught from his visits to the poor cottagers in his neighborhood, deprived Shelley of his usual resource of reading. In looking over the journal in which, from day to day, Mrs. Shelley was in the habit of noting their occupations, as well as passing events, one is struck with wonder at the number of books which they read in the course of the year. At home or travelling-before breakfast, or waiting for the mid-day meal - by the side of a stream, or on the ascent of a mountain a book was never absent from the hands of one or the other; and there were never two books; one read while the other listened. The catalogue of works perused, which I subjoin, would seem to require the unremitting attention of unfettered leisure; yet at this time Shelley was greatly occupied with affairs of business, and his mind was much harassed by the Chancery suit with regard to his children. "LIST OF BOOKS READ BY SHELLEY AND MARY IN 1817. CHAPTER VIII. ITALY: 1818. The gen THE year 1818 was memorable in the life of Shelley, on account of his having at that date quitted England, to which he was destined never to return. eral state of his health, together with other motives, induced him to seek a more genial climate in the south of Europe. One of his most powerful reasons was a fear lest the Lord Chancellor might follow out some vague threat which he had uttered in delivering judgment, and deprive him of his infant son by his second wife. No attempt was made to act on this threat; but so much did Shelley fear that the outrage would be committed, that he addressed the child (who afterwards died at Rome) in some beautiful stanzas, signifying his readiness to abandon his country forever, rather than be parted from another of his offspring: "The billows on the beach are leaping around it; The bark is weak and frail; The sea looks black, and the clouds that bound it |