and the allusions in it to his school life, reawakened my sympathies, and revived all my dormant affections. But if I yearned to see him again, and anticipated the period of our meeting once more with delight, I was astonished at the greatness of his genius, and made the volume the companion of my journey, delighting to trace in it the elements of his young mind down to their complete development, as in a chart we love to follow the course of some river whose source we have visited. On my return he was the first person I wrote to, and found that he had not forgotten the companion of his boyhood. His letters breathed the same warmth of regard which he had ever entertained for me, and they contained an invitation to visit him at Florence, where I at first addressed him, he having quitted England little more than a year before I landed at Liverpool. How much do I regret the loss of these letters! I will beg the reader to excuse this extraneous matter, and take up the thread of Shelley's wanderings-returning to Florence, where he passed the autumn and part of the winter of 1819. Florence the magnificent, with its fortressed palaces-its Piazza Vecchia, crowded with statues, its Santa Croce, and Cascine and Gardens, and splendid galleries, realized all Shelley's dreams; and here probably he would have taken up his permanent residence, but for the climate, which he considered highly detrimental to his health. Those who know that city, will have experienced the keen, dry, piercing winds, that sweep down from the Apennines, interpenetrate, and pierce like a sword through the system, tearing every house to tatters. They acted on Shelley's sensitive frame most prejudicially. On the 25th of January, having completed a third act to his Prometheus, and written his Ode to the West Wind, and the sublime stanzas on the Medusa shield, he embarked for Pisa, -a most original way of making the journey, which by the tortuous Arno must have been very slow and tedious. His love of boating, however, prevailed over considerations of comfort in travelling, and he thought that, suffering as he was from his complaint, he could better bear the motion of a boat, than of a carriage, and he anticipated, even at that season, "the delights of the sky, the river, and the mountains." His first impression of Pisa, as appears by one of his letters, was not very favourable, but it being in a hollow, and sheltered from the Tramontana, he found so great a relief, that he decided to make it hereafter his winter place of abode. Another inducement was the water-the best in Italy, which is brought from the mountains by an aqueduct, whose long line of arches reminded him of the Campagna. In the spring he stopped a week or two near Leghorn, with his friends the Gisbornes, and it was on a beautiful evening, while wandering among the lanes, where myrtle hedges were the bowers of the fire-flies, that he heard the carolling of the skylark, which inspired one of his most beautiful poems. They spent the summer at the baths of St. Julien, four miles from Pisa, at the foot of the mountains, which Dante says "I Pisan veder Lucca non ponno.' I shall now bring myself in near contact with him, hoping to be excused any autobiographical matter that may creep into my narrative. END OF VOL |