tion, caste, tyranny, and slavery of mind and body. His desire to see justice made universal between man and man, to extend the bounds of freedom, to promote the love of his fellows, was with him a fervent passion. His poetry is steeped in these things as a summer garden in sunshine. They are part of the serious body of his poetry, and the world will always be drawn to Shelley for this religious gravity of his teaching. His method was the method of Jesus Christ, reliance on spiritual force only, and was marked out in the strongest way.”

The fortunes of Shelley's poetry have been greatly influenced by the early misconceptions of his life and character. As Browning says: "The disbelief in him as a man even preceded the disbelief in him as a writer; the misconstruction of his moral nature preparing the way for the misappreciation of his intellectual labours." He had incurred the odium theologicum, and no enmity is more unscrupulous, more relentless, or more vindictive. The merely literary abuse to which Keats was subjected seems almost urbane in comparison with the assaults which were made upon Shelley's character and opinions by the organs of British respectability. This, for example, was what The Gentleman's Magazine had to say of him a few months after his death: "Concerning the talents of Mr. Shelley, we know no more than that he published certain convulsive caperings of Pegasus labouring under cholic pains: namely, some purely fantastic verses, in the hubble-bubble, toil,

...

and trouble style; and as to Mr. Shelley's virtues, we ought as justly to regret the decease of the devil (if that were possible) as of one of his coadjutors. Percy Byssche Shelley is a fitter subject for a penitentiary dying speech, than a lauding elegy; for the muse of the rope rather than of the cypress." We now read such a screed as this with sad amusement, knowing how completely the poetry of Shelley, and his character as well, have "outsoared the shadow" of that night of calumny. If there are still a few "Christian apologists" of the sort represented by that English stranger who met Shelley in the post office at Pisa, called him "a damned atheist," and knocked him down, they have no power to obscure the splendour of his fame. That fame has grown brighter and brighter since his death, and Wordsworth now remains the only poet of the earlier nineteenth-century group for whom any considerable number of critics dispute with Shelley the claim to supremacy. It is curiously noticeable that his poems do not lend themselves readily to the purposes of familiar quotation. Tested by Bartlett, Byron has nearly ten times as much of this sort of vogue as Shelley has; but then, for that matter, Young and Cowper and Moore have each given currency to many more phrases than we can set to the credit of Shelley. This fact, however, is of little significance. Lyrics are usually the least quotable of poems, but despite that fact they are our most cherished treasures. Something of what Shelley has come

to mean to the cultivated intelligence is expressed by Mr. Andrew Lang, in his address to the shade of the poet, when, speaking of the gradual extinction of life upon this planet which is prophesied by science, he

says:

"If this nightmare be fulfilled, perhaps the Last Man, in some fetid hut on the ice-bound Equator, will read, by a fading lamp charged with the dregs of the oil in his cruse, the poetry of Shelley. So reading, he, the latest of his race, will not wholly be deprived of those sights which alone (says the nameless Greek) make life worth enduring. In your verse he will have sight of sky, and sea, and cloud, the gold of dawn and the gloom of earthquake and eclipse. He will be face to face, in fancy, with the great powers that are dead, sun, and ocean, and the illimitable azure of the heavens. In Shelley's poetry, while Man endures, all those will survive; for your 'voice is as the voice of winds and tides,' and perhaps more deathless than all of these, and only perishable with the perishing of the human spirit."

What was lost to English poetry, when a sudden summer storm struck that "broad white sail in Spezzia's treacherous bay," and ended the poet's life as perhaps he would have wished it to end, is a matter beyond any human divination. His thirtieth year not quite completed, he was taken "where Orpheus and where Homer are," or rather where are Keats and Eschylus, for they were his companions on that fatal day. His own poetry supplies the only words fit to express what is felt in contemplation of this tragedy. He had become his own Alastor, and we cannot now read the poem of that name without

thinking more of its author than of its subject when

we come to its closing lines:

"Art and eloquence,

And all the shows o' the world, are frail and vain
To weep a loss that turns their light to shade.
It is a woe 'too deep for tears,' when all

Is reft at once, when some surpassing spirit,
Whose light adorned the world around it, leaves
Those who remain behind nor sobs nor groans,
The passionate tumult of a clinging hope;
But pale despair and cold tranquillity,

Nature's vast frame, the web of human things,
Birth and the grave, that are not as they were."

Shelley lies buried by the side of Keats in the Protestant Cemetery at Rome. His ashes were sent there by Trelawny, who in the spring of the year following the poet's death caused two tombs to be prepared, in one of which the remains of Shelley were deposited. Upon the simple stone that covered his ashes, besides the name and the necessary dates, were cut the words "Cor cordium" of Leigh Hunt's choice, and to them Trelawny added the Shakespearean lines:

"Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange."

Violets grow about the stone, and the shape of their leaves is exquisitely symbolical of the inscription. For nearly sixty years nothing was heard by the directors of the Cemetery from the Englishman who had bought the plot. Early in 1881, a letter was

received from Mr. Trelawny saying that, as he was now very old, he wished to prepare for his death, and requesting that the second tomb be made ready for his ashes. In August of that year he died, at the age of eighty-eight. His body was burned, and a friend brought the ashes to the resting-place thus provided for them. The following lines bear witness to the friendship by which the poet and the wanderer remained united in spirit throughout the intervening

years.

"These are two friends whose lives were undivided;

So let their memory be now they have glided
Under the grave; let not their bones be parted,
For their two hearts in life were single-hearted."

This incident is not as irrelevant as it might seem, for it is typical of the feelings with which Shelley was regarded by every one who enjoyed his intimacy. As Symonds reminds us in his biography of the poet: "Shelley in his lifetime bound those who knew him with a chain of loyal affection, impressing observers so essentially different as Hogg, Byron, Peacock, Leigh Hunt, Trelawny, Medwin, Williams, with the conviction that he was the gentlest, purest, bravest, and most spiritual being they had ever met." And the number of those who feel for him as these felt has gone on increasing year by year, until his position as the best beloved of English poets has been placed beyond dispute. The one great poet now living, who is closer to Shelley in spiritual kinship than any between them, has given us an exquisite tribute