F the mighty singer who produced the immortal poems contained in this volume-Shelley-that "pardlike spirit, beautiful and swift," a few words, and a few words only, by way of preface. Percy Bysshe Shelley was the eldest son of Mr. (afterwards Sir) Timothy and Elizabeth Shelley, and was born at Field Place, near Horsham, Sussex, on the 4th of August 1792. "He was a beautiful boy," says his excellent critic and biographer, Mr. W. M. Rossetti, "with ringlets, deep blue eyes, a snowy complexion and exquisitely formed hands and feet," and he was remarkable for his gentleness and sweetness of disposition. From childhood he was in the highest degree sensitive, and too keenly alive to all discordant influences, physical and mental, to feel at all at ease in mixed and unruly companies. Mere clownishness of manners he could put up with, but coarseness of lauguage and sordidness of disposition excited his disgust; and of this he had more than enough at Sion House School, Brentford, to which he was sent when he was about ten years old. "The pupils here were mostly boys," says Mr. Rossetti, "numbering about sixty, sons of local tradesmen; the system of the house was mean," and the reception accorded to Shelley by his school-fellows, and their subsequent treatment of him, "full of taunting and petty persecution." Girlish in appearance and averse to rough sports, he was naturally enough deemed a proper butt for the jibes of the ruder boys; and notwithstanding the fact that, when thoroughly aroused, he would display a courage and determination, before which the boldest of his juvenile opponents for the moment would quail-such a butt he was so often made as to make his "situation one of acute misery." The effect of this upon his after-career was clearly enormous, since he was forced at the very outset of his life to have a powerful dislike for human haunts-for the actual and the real; and had his soul not been formed of the very essence of love, he, in all |