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Of all the misfortunes that ever befell Shelley, that of his early death excepted, this marriage was by far the greatest. Harriet Grove, out of sympathy for Shelley's sufferings, had at one time thought herself sufficiently in love to have been justified in becoming his wife; Shelley in a similar way, out of pity for certain troubles of Harriet Westbrook, had been induced to become her husband. "Harriet was not only delightful to look at," says Mr. Rossetti, but altogether most agreeable. She dressed with exquisite neatness and propriety; her voice was pleasant and her speech cordial; her spirits were cheerful and her manners good." She was withal, "well-educated," a "pleasant reader," and well skilled in music. Surely with such a woman the best of men—and Shelley was one of the best of men-might have lived, one would naturally have thought, on the best of terms? And for a short time he did so ; then-the world has long known what afterwards befell, and the reason of the dire calamity lay in the fact that Shelley had mistaken pity for something else, and that in reality he had never truly loved the woman he had taken to be his wife. His error was a huge one, and the cooling down of his affection, then discord, then separation, then suicide on the wife's part, was the consequence. The weakest in this

case, as in others, went to the wall; but let it not for a moment be supposed that the strongest passed on unscathed. An avenging Nemesis followed the young poet's footsteps to the end, and the furies of Regret, Remorse, and Shame threw their raven shadow o'er his life, and his soul—at least so long as it remained tagged to his frail body-his "soul from out that shadow was lifted nevermore!" Such at least is my conviction, and I would hail with delight any reliable account that would lead me to a happier conclusion. I do not think that Shelley was guilty of any wilful wrong, but the gravity of the errors he committed in his marriage of, and then separation from, Harriet, leading as they did to the most tragic consequences, were such as to smite his sensitive being to the centre; and if any proofs were wanting for this more than are afforded by the facts of his outer life, we have only to refer to his songs, which in Shelley's case were, even far more than the songs of Byron were in his, a veritable reflection of the inner man. His "sweetest songs" at all times were those which told of "saddest thought;" but after the tragical death of Harriet, and his union with Mary Godwin, with whom he had eloped on parting from Harriet, the sorrow of his songs, and more especially of his greatest ones, grew deeper * B

and deeper. The surprising fecundity of his genius after his second marriage is ascribed in some measure to the harmony which prevailed between him and his second wife, and this too may have been without at all affecting the truth of my intimations. Poetry is an art as well as an inspiration, and quietude and social harmony are among the essentials for its successful cultivation; but these may exist while the soul itself is carried away through the force of bitter memories to "look on the past and stare aghast at the spectres wailing pale and ghast, of hopes which thou and I beguiled to death on life's dark river!" What a sigh! and what a world of pain and mental torment are discovered by these few words in inverted commas, and yet these are from a lyric penned in 1817, and when he was the husband of his truly beloved Mary Godwin. Without casting any aspersions on poor Harriet-for in years she was only a girl (and he was little more than a boy)— during her connection with Shelley, it ought to be said, however, that it is some credit to Mary that our bard's genius found a free, high, and triumphant expression under her care. During his connection with Harriet he had produced his first great effort in verse, the "Queen Mab," but after his second marriage every succeeding year had its

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immortal product. First of that glorious progeny came Alastor," 1816; then the "Revolt of Islam," 1817; then the "Rosalind and Helen," and "Julian and Maddalo" both 1818; then "The Cenci," 1819; the "Witch of Atlas" and the "Prometheus Unbound," 1820; the "Epipsychidion," the "Adonais," and the "Hellas," all in 1821; and he was engaged on other works when death by drowning put an end to his career on the 4th of July 1822. Such a career! Besides the great poems named, he, during the same wonderful period, poured forth a flood of lyrics and lesser pieces which in themselves had won for him a rank only second to the highest in literature. great poems named raise him among those who Occupy the highest rank. In many of his pieces he displayed too strong a predilection for the merely fanciful, but his greatest efforts are noted beyond these of all other poets since Milton for the magnificent and the sublime. In sublimity he was only surpassed by Milton and Shakespeare, and "no, nobody," says Leigh Hunt, "had a style so Orphic. His poetry is so full of mountains, seas, and skies, of light and darkness, and the seasons, and all the elements of our being, as if Nature herself had written it with the creation and its hopes newly cast around her; but it

must be confessed not without too indiscriminate a mixture of great and small, and a want of sufficient shade-a certain chaotic brilliancy, 'dark with excess of light."" Besides this fault,

which arises out of a plethora of fancy, there is another which is the offspring of an excessive fondness for knotty mental problems and subjects which rather belong to the sphere of the metaphysician than that of the poet, and in the treatment of which he necessarily discarded the example and precept of Milton, who held that poetry ought to be "simple, sensous, and passionate" or "impassioned," as Coleridge has it-and both of these defects infect even the very greatest of his productions-"The Cenci" excepted. These charges may be brought especially and most emphatically against the Prometheus Unbound," and yet in despite of all, this must be conceded to be one of the most marvellous poems in the language! The conception of this drama, and more especially of the characters of the hero, and of Asia, and Panthea, are worthy of Milton, though the execution in detail and throughout is not equal to what we would have expected in a similar work from the hand of that mighty master. If not as a whole, however, yet in long passages, even in the dialogue, he equals the best poets when at their