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SHELLEY'S ESSAYS.

Two volumes of essays, letters, and translations, by the late Percy B. Shelley, have lately been published by his widow. As usual in Shelley's works, one finds in these volumes a good deal of the bad, mixed up with the beautiful. They were either very injudicious or very false friends who counselled Mrs. Shelley to publish the unfinished pieces of ill-directed daring which are to be found in this publication. If she took no counsel, her own rashness is very much to blame. Her preface is written in a masculine manner, but not well written. There are many things in it of a nature to offend well regulated minds. The late Mr. Shelley is spoken of with a sort of idolatry, which is not easy to be excused, even on the part of his widow. I suppose it is sincere, and therefore regard it with pity. Were it hypocritical it could not be more extravagant. Besides all this, it is in a great degree nonsense; a thing exceedingly common indeed, and much more common than the opposite, but still proper to be censured. It is notorious that Shelley's works, while admired by many for their imaginative and descriptive beauty, are nevertheless abhorred by many of the purest minded for their impiety. Now, it is of this man, and with reference also to a tract

of his, in which he argues against the credibility of a future state of existence, that the writer of the preface says-" To me death appears to be the gate of life, but my hopes of an hereafter would be pale and drooping did I not expect to find that most perfect and beloved specimen of humanity on the other shore." It is not blamable that Mr. Shelley's widow should thus feel, but it is very irrational that she should thus write and publish. It is said also in the preface, concerning a fragment of a speculation on morals, in the first volume, that "it is remarkable for its subtlety and truth-it was found on a single leaf disjoined from any other subjectit gives the true key to the history of man, and, above all, to those rules of conduct whence mutual happiness has its source and security." It is offensive that any one undertaking the office of editor should pronounce such extravagant eulogy upon what is submitted for the public judgment. Moreover, the panegyric is absurdly erroneous. The fragment it refers to is not intelligible, and does not possess even the ordinary merit of grammatical English. That this is true may be judged of from the opening sentence, which is this-"The internal influence derived from the constitution of the mind from which they flow produces that peculiar modification of actions which make them intrinsically good or evil." This, O intelligent listener, is an honest specimen of that brief

fragmentary essay which, in the wild extravagance of irrational praise, is called "the true key to the history of man!"

But that which is most greatly to be condemned in the book, as a public offence against reason and piety, and an injustice even to the unhappy author, is the publication of a fragmentary essay "on a future state," in which the most dreadful and hopeless doctrines of mere materialism are plainly advocated. The author, after contemplating the circumstances of material organization, and also the circumstance of death, proceeds to the conclusion that the common observer of such things must lose all hope that the dead do not cease to be; and he has the awful temerity to add, that "the natural philosopher, in addition to the sensations common to all men inspired by the event of death, believes that he sees with more certainty that it is attended with the annihilation of sentiment and thought." This is very dreadful, and reason and justice at once pronounce that under no circumstances should such statements be published as the writing of one who, were he alive, would possibly have resisted such publication. Think how fearful the result would be if every idle thought of a daringly speculative man's mind were published. Some there are so wanting in inward delicacy that they scruple not to write down whatever they think, though they have enough of delicacy towards others to shrink

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from the publication of what they have written. It is very ill treatment of the memory of such persons to publish the written fragments of their worst thoughts. But in the case of Mr. Shelley, it seems clear that he repented him of his impious materialism; for in another tract, that on life," which precedes that " on a future state," in the compilation of the book of Mrs. Shelley, but which appears to have followed it in the history of the author's mind, he says"The shocking absurdities of the popular philosophy of mind and matter, its fatal consequences in morals, and their violent dogmatism concerning the source of all things, had early conducted me to materialism. This materialism is a seducing system to young and superficial minds. It allows its disciples to talk, and dispenses them from thinking. But I was discontented with such a view of things as it afforded; man is a being of high aspirations, looking both before and after, whose thoughts wander through eternity, disclaiming alliance with transcience and decay, incapable of imagining to himself annihilation; existing but in the future and the past; being not what he is, but what he has been, and shall be. Whatever may be his true and final destination, there is a spirit within him at enmity with nothingness and dissolution."

What can be a greater outrage upon common sense and common justice than to publish, fol

lowing this, as the work of the same hand, a tract full of the worst common-places of materialism as applied to the subject of life beyond the grave? Is it not evident, from the above passage, that the mind of the man had outgrown this pernicious folly? And is it the part of a friend to drag such offensiveness from some nook where its author had perhaps forgotten it, and thus to thrust it before the public, bringing the scorn of the wise upon his judgment, and the abhorrence of the pious upon his irreligion? Such a publication does Shelley grievous wrong; and he, alas! with all the enthusiasm of his feeling for the beautiful, and all the taste and elegance of his scholarship, was not a man whose life and writings can afford to bear more of reproach than is their just due.*

Having said thus much of the new volumes of her late husband's writings which Mrs. Shelley

* Compare with Mr. Shelley's reflections on man as a mental being the stately and dazzling Christian eloquence of Sir Thomas Browne :—“ The sufficiency of Christian immortality frustrates all earthly glory, and the quality of either state after death makes a folly of posthumous memory. God, who only can destroy our souls, and hath assured our resurrection, either of our bodies or our names, hath directly promised no duration. Wherein there is so much of chance that the boldest expectants have found unhappy frustration, and to hold long subsistence seems but a scape in oblivion. But man is a noble animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave; solemnizing nativities and deaths with equal lustre, nor omitting ceremonies of bravery in the infamy of his nature."

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