But Zoe the meantime some eggs was frying, And now, by dint of fingers and of eyes, No doubt, less of her language than her look: Turns oftener to the stars than to his book: 'Tis pleasing to be schooled in a strange tongue As was the case, at least, where I have been; wrong. They smile still more, and then there intervene Pressure of hands, perhaps even a chaste kiss ; I learned the little that I know by this. Haidee and Juan at the Feast. Haidee and Juan carpeted their feet On crimson satin, bordered with pale blue; Their sofa occupied three parts complete Of the apartment-and appeared quite new ; The velvet cushions-for a throne more meetWere scarlet, from whose glowing centre grew A sun embossed in gold, whose rays of tissue, Meridian-like, were seen all light to issue. Crystal and marble, plate and porcelain, Had done their work of splendour; Indian mats There was no want of lofty mirrors, and The greater part of these were ready spread Of all the dresses, I select Haidee's: She wore two jelicks-one was of pale yellow; Of azure, pink, and white was her chemise'Neath which her breast heaved like a little billow; With buttons formed of pearls as large as peas, All gold and crimson shone her jelick's fellow, And the striped white gauze baracan that bound her, Like fleecy clouds about the moon flowed round her. One large gold bracelet clasped each lovely arm, Lockless-so pliable from the pure gold That the hand stretched and shut it without harm, The limb which it adorned its only mould; So beautiful-its very shape would charm, And clinging as if loath to lose its hold: The purest ore inclosed the whitest skin That e'er by precious metal was held in. Around, as princess of her father's land, A light gold bar above her instep rolled Announced her rank; twelve rings were on her hand; Her hair was starred with gems; her veil's fine fold Below her breast was fastened with a band Of lavish pearls, whose worth could scarce be told; Her orange-silk full Turkish trousers furled About the prettiest ankle in the world. Her hair's long auburn waves down to her heel The silken fillet's curb, and sought to shun Their bonds whene'er some Zephyr caught began To offer his young pinion as her fan. Round her she made an atmosphere of life; Her eyelashes, though dark as night, were tinged- Her nails were touched with henna; but again The power of art was turned to nothing, for They could not look more rosy than before. Juan had on a shawl of black and gold, An emerald aigrette with Haidee's hair in 't And now they were diverted by their suite, Dwarfs, dancing-girls, black eunuchs, and a poet; Which made their new establishment complete; The last was of great fame, and liked to shew it : His verses rarely wanted their due feet And for his theme-he seldom sung below it, The Death of Haidee. Afric is all the sun's, and as her earth, Her human clay is kindled; full of power For good or evil, burning from its birth, The Moorish blood partakes the planet's hour, And, like the soil beneath it, will bring forth: Beauty and love were Haidee's mother's dower; But her large dark eye shewed deep Passion's force, Though sleeping like a lion near a source. Her daughter, tempered with a milder ray, Like summer clouds all silvery, smooth, and fair, Till slowly charged with thunder, they display Terror to earth and tempest to the air, Had held till now her soft and milky way; But, overwrought with passion and despair, The fire burst forth from her Numidian veins, Even as the simoom sweeps the blasted plains. The last sight which she saw was Juan's gore, And he himself o'ermastered and cut down ; His blood was running on the very floor Where late he trod, her beautiful, her own; Thus much she viewed an instant and no moreHer struggles ceased with one convulsive groan; On her sire's arm, which until now scarce held Her writhing, fell she like a cedar felled. A vein had burst, and her sweet lips' pure dyes Were dabbled with the deep blood which ran o'er, And her head drooped as when the lily lies O'ercharged with rain: her summoned handmaids bore Their lady to her couch with gushing eyes; Days lay she in that state unchanged, though chill- All hope to look upon her sweet face bred New thoughts of life, for it seemed full of soul and estate), was a member of the House of Commons. The family was of great antiquity, tracing its descent from one of the followers of William of Normandy. In worldly prospects and distinction the poet therefore surpassed most of his tuneful brethren; yet this only served to render his unhappy and strange destiny the more conspicuously wretched. When ten years of age, he was put to a public school, Sion House, where he was harshly treated both by his instructors and by tyrannical school-fellows. He was fond of read She had so much, earth could not claim the whole....ing, especially wild romances and tales of diab Her handmaids tended, but she heeded not; Her father watched, she turned her eyes away; She recognised no being, and no spot, However dear or cherished in their day; At length those eyes, which they would fain be weaning Back to old thoughts, waxed full of fearful meaning. And then a slave bethought her of a harp: The harper came and tuned his instrument: At the first notes, irregular and sharp, On him her flashing eyes a moment bent; Then to the wall she turned, as if to warp Her thoughts from sorrow through her heart Her recollection; on her flashed the dream To be so being: in a gushing stream A parting pang, the spirit from her passed: And they who watched her nearest could not know The very instant, till the change that cast Her sweet face into shadow, dull and slow, Thus lived-thus died she; never more on her That isle is now all desolate and bare, Its dwellings down, its tenants passed away; lerie; and when very young he wrote two novels, Zastrozzi, and St Irvyne, or the Rosicrucian. From Sion House, Shelley was removed to Eton, where his sensitive spirit was again wounded by ill-usage and by the system of fagging tolerated at Eton. His resistance to all established authority and opinion displayed itself while at school, and in the introduction to his Revolt of Islam, he has portrayed his early impressions in some sweet and touching stanzas: Thoughts of great deeds were mine, dear friend, when first The clouds which wrap this world from youth did pass. I do remember well the hour which burst The harsh and grating strife of tyrants and of foes. And then I clasped my hands and looked around, So, without shame, I spake: 'I will be wise, And from that hour did I with earnest thought more Within me, till there came upon my mind A sense of loneliness, a thirst with which I pined. With these feelings and predilections (exaggerated, however, in expression, as all his personal statements were), Shelley went to Oxford. He studied hard but irregularly, and spent much of his leisure in chemical experiments. He incessantly speculated, thought, and read, as he himself has stated. At the age of fifteen he wrote two short prose romances. He had also great facility in versification, and threw off various effusions. The 'forbidden mines of lore' which had captivated his boyish mind at Eton were also diligently explored, and he was soon an avowed republican and sceptic. He published a volume of political rhymes, entitled Posthumous Poems of my Aunt Margaret Nicholson, the said Margaret being the unhappy maniac who attempted to stab George 129 III.; and he issued a syllabus from Hume's Essays, at the same time challenging the authorities of Oxford to a public controversy on the subject. Shelley was at this time just seventeen years of age! In conjunction with a fellowcollegian, Mr Hogg, he composed a small treatise, The Necessity of Atheism; and the result was that both the heterodox students were, in 1811, expelled from college. They went to London, where Shelley still received support from his family; Mr Hogg removed to York, and nearly half a century afterwards (1858) became the biographer of the early life of his poet-friend. It was the cardinal article of Shelley's faith, that if men were but taught and induced to treat their fellows with love, charity, and equal rights, this earth would realise Paradise. He looked upon religion as it was professed, and, above all, practised, as hostile, instead of friendly, to the cultivation of those virtues which would make men brothers.' Mrs Shelley conceives that, in the peculiar circumstances, this was not to be wondered at. 'At the age of seventeen, fragile in health and frame, of the purest habits in morals, full of devoted generosity and universal kindness, glowing with ardour to attain wisdom, resolved, at every personal sacrifice, to do right, burning with a desire for affection and sympathy, he was treated as a reprobate, cast forth as a criminal. The cause was, that he was sincere, that he believed the opinions which he entertained to be true, and he loved truth with a martyr's love: he was ready to sacrifice station, and fortune, and his dearest affections, at its shrine. The sacrifice was demanded from, and made by, a youth of seventeen.' Harriet Westbrook, the ceremony taking place in St George's Church, Hanover Square. Unfortunately about this time the poet became enamoured of the daughter of Mr Godwin, a young lady who could feel poetry and understand philosophy,' which he thought his wife was incapable of, and Harriet refusing to agree to a separation, Shelley, at the end of July in the same year, left England in the company of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. They made a six weeks' tour on the continent, of which he wrote a journal, and returned to London. It was discovered that, by_the_provisions of the deed of entail, the fee-simple of the Shelley estate was vested in the poet after his father's death, and he had thus power to raise money. According to his friend, Thomas L. Peacock, Shelley purchased an annuity of 1000 a year from his father, who had previously allowed him £200! The poet now established himself on the banks of the Thames, and there composed his poem, Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude (1816), designed, as he states, to represent a youth of uncorrupted feelings and adventurous genius, led forth by an imagination inflamed and purified through familiarity with all that is excellent and majestic, to the contemplation of the universe. The mind of his hero, however, becomes awakened, and thirsts for intercourse with an intelligence similar to itself. He seeks in vain for a prototype of his conception; and blasted by his disappointment, he descends to an untimely grave. In this picture, Shelley undoubtedly drew from his own experience, and in none of his subsequent works has he excelled the descriptive passages in Alastor. The copious picturesqueness of his language, and the boldness It appears that in his youth Shelley was equally of his imagination, are here strikingly exemplified. inclined to poetry and metaphysics, and hesitated Symptoms of pulmonary disease having appeared, to which he should devote himself. He ended in Shelley again repaired to the continent, in the uniting them, by no means to the advantage of summer of 1816, and first met with Lord Byron at his poetry. At the age of eighteen he produced a the Lake of Geneva. His health being restored, wild atheistical poem, Queen Mab, written in the he returned to England, and settled himself at rhythm of Southey's Thalaba, and abounding in Great Marlow in Buckinghamshire. His unforpassages of great power and melody. He had tunate wife committed suicide by drowning herself been strongly attached to his cousin, an accom- in the Serpentine River in December 1816, and plished young lady, Miss Grove, but after his Shelley married Miss Godwin a few weeks afterexpulsion from college and from home, communi- wards (December 30), the prospect of succession cation with this lady was prohibited. He then for his children to a large entailed estate having became enamoured of another beauty—a handsome apparently removed his repugnance to matrimony. blonde of sixteen, but in social position inferior A new source of obloquy and misery was, howto himself. This was a Miss Harriet Westbrook, ever, opened. Shelley claimed his children; their daughter of a person who had kept the Mount mother's family refused to give them up; they Street Coffee-house, London-a place of fashion-resisted the claim in Chancery, and the decree able resort-and had retired from business with apparently competent means. Mr Westbrook had put his daughter to a boarding-school, at which one of Shelley's sisters was also placed. The result was an elopement after a few weeks' acquaintance, and a marriage in Edinburgh in August 1811. This still further exasperated his friends, and his father cut off his allowance. An uncle, Captain Pilfold, one of Nelson's captains at the Nile and Trafalgar-generously supplied the youthful pair with money, and they lived for some time in Cumberland, where Shelley made the acquaintance of Southey, Wordsworth, De Quincey, and Wilson. His literary ambition must have been excited by this intercourse; but he suddenly departed for Dublin, whence he again removed to the Isle of Man, and afterwards to Wales. Two children were born to them. In March 1814, Shelley was married a second time to of the Lord Chancellor (Eldon) was given against him. The ground of Lord Eldon's judgment was that Shelley had published and maintained, and carried out in practice, the doctrine that marriage was a contract binding only during mutual pleasure, and that such practice was injurious to the best interests of society. In a poetical fragment on the subject, he invokes a curse on the administrator of the law, 'by a parent's outraged love,' and in one exquisite verse By all the happy see in children's growth, That undeveloped flower of budding years, Source of the sweetest hopes and saddest fears! At Marlow, Shelley composed the Revolt of Islam (1818), a poem more energetic than Alastor, yet containing the same allegorical features and peculiarities of thought and style, and rendered the same accomplished lady gave to the world two volumes of his prose Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments. Shelley's life was a dream of romance-a tale of mystery and grief. That he was sincere in his opinions, and benevolent in his intentions, is now undoubted. He looked upon the world with the eyes of a visionary, bent on unattainable schemes of intellectual excellence and supremacy. His delusion led to misery, and made him, for a time, unjust to others. It alienated him from his family and friends, blasted his prospects in life, and distempered all his views and opinions. It is probable that, had he lived to a riper age, he might have modified some of those extreme speculative and pernicious tenets, and we have no doubt that he would have risen into a purer atmosphere of poetical imagination. The troubled and stormy dawn was fast more tedious by the want of human interest. It gentle, affectionate, and generous; so that even is honourable to Shelley that, during his residence those who most deeply deplored or detested his at Marlow, he was indefatigable in his attentions opinions, were charmed with the intellectual to the poor; his widow relates that, in the winter, purity and benevolence of his life. His favourite while bringing out his poem, he had a severe amusement was boating and sailing; and whilst attack of ophthalmia, caught while visiting the returning one day, the 8th of July 1822, from Legpoor cottages. This certainly stamps with reality horn-whither he had gone to welcome Leigh his pleadings for the human race, though the Hunt to Italy-the boat in which he sailed, acnature of his philosophy and opinions would have companied by Mr Williams, formerly of the 8th deprived them of the highest of earthly consola- Dragoons, and a single seaman, went down in the tions. The poet now prepared to go abroad. A Bay of Spezia, and all perished. A volume of strong sense of injury, and a burning desire to Keats's poetry was found open in Shelley's coatredress what he termed the wrongs of society, pocket when his body was washed ashore. The rendered him miserable in England, and he remains of the poet were reduced to ashes by fire, hoped also that his health would be improved by and being taken to Rome, were deposited in the a milder climate. Accordingly, on the 12th of | Protestant burial-ground, near those of a child he March 1818, he quitted this country, never to had lost in that city. A complete edition of return. He went direct to Italy. In 1819 ap- Shelley's Poetical Works, with notes by his peared Rosalind and Helen, and the same year | widow, was published in four volumes, 1839; and The Cenci, a tragedy, dedicated to Mr Leigh Hunt. 'Those writings,' he remarks in the dedication, which I have hitherto published, have been little else than visions which impersonate my own apprehensions of the beautiful and the just. I can also perceive in them the literary defects incidental to youth and impatience; they are dreams of what ought to be, or may be. The drama which I now present to you is a sad reality. I lay aside the presumptuous attitude of | an instructor, and am content to paint, with such colours as my own heart furnishes, that which has been.' The painting is dark and gloomy; but, in spite of a revolting plot, and the insane, unnatural character of the Cenci, Shelley's tragedy is one of the best of modern times. As an effort of intellectual strength, and an embodiment of human passion, it may challenge a comparison with any dramatic work since Otway; and it is incompar-yielding to the calm noonday brightness. He ably the best of the poet's productions. In 1821 was published Prometheus Unbound, which he had written while resident in Rome. This poem,' he says, 'was chiefly written upon the mountainous ruins of the Baths of Caracalla, among the flowery glades and thickets of odoriferous blossoming trees, which are extended in ever-winding labyrinths upon its immense platforms and dizzy arches suspended in the air. The bright blue sky of Rome, and the effect of the vigorous awakening of spring in that divinest climate, and the new life with which it drenches the spirits even to inspiration, were the inspiration of this drama.' No change of scene, however, could permanently affect the nature of Shelley's speculations, and his Prometheus is as mystical and metaphysical and as daringly sceptical as any of his previous works. The cardinal point of his system is described by Mrs Shelley as a belief that man could be so perfectionised as to be able to expel evil from his own nature, and from the greater part of the creation; and the subject he loved best to dwell on was the image of one warring with the evil principle, oppressed not only by it, but by all, even the good, who were deluded into considering evil a necessary portion of humanity. His remaining works are Hellas; The Witch of Atlas; Adonais; Epipsychidion; and a variety of shorter productions, with scenes translated from Calderon and the Faust of Goethe. In Italy, Shelley renewed his acquaintance with Lord Byron, who thought his philosophy 'too spiritual and romantic.' He was temperate in his habits, had worn out some of his fierce antipathies and morbid affections; a happy domestic circle was gathered around him; and the refined simplicity of his tastes and habits, joined to wider and juster views of human life, would imperceptibly have given a new tone to his thoughts and studies. He had a high idea of the art to which he devoted his faculties. 'Poetry,' he says in one of his essays, 'is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds. We are aware of evanescent visitations of thought and feeling, sometimes associated with place or person, sometimes regarding our own mind alone, and always arising unforeseen and departing unbidden, but elevating and delightful beyond all expression; so that, even in the desire and the regret they leave, there cannot but be pleasure, participating as it does in the nature of its object. It is, as it were, the interpenetration of a diviner nature through our own; but its footsteps are like those of a wind over the sea, which the morning calm erases, and whose traces remain only, as on the wrinkled sand which paves it. These and corresponding conditions of being are experienced principally by those of the most delicate sensibility and the most enlarged imagination; and the state of mind produced by them is at war with every base desire. The enthusiasm of virtue, love, patriotism, and friendship is essentially linked with such emotions; and whilst they last, self appears as what it is, an atom to a universe. Poets are not only subject to these experiences as spirits of the most refined organisation, but they can colour all that they combine with the evanescent hues of this ethereal world; a word, a trait in the representation of a scene or passion, will touch the enchanted chord, and reanimate, in those who have ever experienced those emotions, the sleeping, the cold, the buried image of the past. Poetry thus makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the world; it arrests the vanishing apparitions which haunt the interlunations of life, and veiling them, or in language or in form, sends them forth among mankind, bearing sweet news of kindred joy to those with whom their sisters abide-abide, because there is no portal of expression from the caverns of the spirit which they inhabit into the universe of things. Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man.' The remote abstract character of Shelley's poetry, and its general want of anything real or tangible, by which the sympathies of the heart are awakened, must always prevent its becoming popular. Even to Charles Lamb it was 'icy cold.' He was a pantheistic dreamer and idealist. Yet the splendour of his lyrical verse-so full, rich, and melodious-and the grandeur of some of his conceptions, stamp him a great poet. His influence on the succession of English poets since his time has been inferior only to that of Wordsworth. Macaulay doubted whether any modern poet possessed in an equal degree the highest qualities of the great ancient masters.' His diction is singularly classical and imposing in sound and structure. He was a close student of the Greek and Italian poets. The descriptive passages in Alastor, and the river-voyage at the conclusion of the Revolt of Islam, are among the most finished of his productions. His better genius leads him to the pure waters and the depth of forest shades, which none of his contemporaries knew so well how to describe. Some of the minor poems-The Cloud, The Skylark, &c.—are imbued with a fine lyrical and poetic spirit. One striking peculiarity of his style is his constant personification of inanimate objects. In The Cenci we have a strong and almost terrible illustration of this feature of his poetry : I remember, Two miles on this side of the fort, the road With which it clings, seems slowly coming down; By the dark ivy's twine. At noonday here The Flight of the Hours in Prometheus is equally vivid, and touched with a wild inimitable grace: Behold! Stream like a comet's flashing hair: they all These are the immortal Hours, One waits for thee. Opening of Queen Mab. How wonderful is Death, The other, rosy as the morn When, throned on ocean's wave, Hath then the gloomy Power, Must then that peerless form Which love and admiration cannot view As breathing marble, perish? Leave nothing of this heavenly sight Stealing o'er sensation, Which the breath of roseate morning Will Ianthe wake again, And give that faithful bosom joy Her dewy eyes are closed, And on their lids, whose texture fine Hark! whence that rushing sound? 'Tis like the wondrous strain That round a lonely ruin swells, Which, wandering on the echoing shore, The enthusiast hears at evening: 'Tis softer than the west wind's sigh; 'Tis wilder than the unmeasured notes Of that strange lyre whose strings The genii of the breezes sweep: Those lines of rainbow light Are like the moonbeams when they fall Behold the chariot of the fairy queen! |