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PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY.

THE life of SHELLEY is familiar to most readers of modern literature. It involves questions too grave and extensive to be even glanced at in these pages, and I shall attempt to give but little more than its chronology.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, the eldest son of Sir TIMOTHY SHELLEY, was born at Field Place, in the county of Suffolk, on the fourth of August, 1792. When thirteen years of age, he was sent to Eton, whence at an earlier period than usual he was transferred to Oxford. While in the university he was reserved and melancholy, but studious. His thirst for knowledge was insatiable, and he directed his inquiries into every department of science and opinion. He became interested in the speculations of the French philosophers, and a convert to their fallacies. He avowed his new principles, and boldly challenged his teachers to the discussion of the truth of the Christian religion. His expulsion from the university followed, and the event exasperated and embittered his mind to the verge of madness. He was confirmed in his belief, and driven yet further from the truth, by what he deemed oppression and despotism. In the excitement of this period he wrote Queen Mab, the most wonderful work ever produced by one so young. It was unpublished several years, and it finally appeared without his consent. It is an earnest expression of the feelings born at Oxford; of unbelief, of protestation, and defiance.

His family were offended by his course at the university, and more so, soon after, by his marriage. The union was on every account unfortunate. Both were very young; and SHELLEY soon found that he could have little sympathy of taste or feeling with his wife. After the birth of two children they separated, by mutual consent, and she subsequently committed suicide, though not until he had united himself to a daughter of GoDWIN and MARY WOLSTONECRAFT. This was the great error of his life; he should not have married again while Mrs. SHELLEY lived; but an intimate knowledge of the circumstances and of his principles would have made less

harsh the condemnation which the act occasioned.

In 1814 SHELLEY went abroad, visited the more magnificent scenes of Switzerland, and returned to England by the Reuss and the Rhine. In the following summer he wrote Alastor or the Spirit of Solitude. Alastor is a young enthusiast who has vainly sought, in the works of the philosophers and in travel, the impersonation of a beau ideal which has no existence; and he dies in despair, on finding that he has spent his years in a dream. It is a noble poem, beautiful, tranquil, and solemn. The melodious versification is in keeping with the exalted melancholy of the thought. It was the ideal of SHELLEY'S emotions, in the hues inspired by his brilliant imagination, softened by the recent anticipa tion of death.

The year 1816 was spent chiefly on the shores of the lake of Geneva. It was during a voyage round this lake with Lord BYRON, with whom he had recently become acquainted, that he wrote the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, and Mont Blanc was inspired soon after by a view of that mountain while on his way through the valley of Chamouni.

In 1817 SHELLEY wrote The Revolt of Islam, and several shorter pieces and fragments. The beautiful dedication of the Revolt of Islam to his wife I have copied into this volume. Of the poem itself I shall attempt no minute description. It was his design, when commencing it, to entitle it Laon and Cythna or the Revolution of the Golden City, and to make it a story of passion; but as he advanced his plan was changed. At the end of six months, devoted to the task with unremitted ardour and enthusiasm, he finished the work, which, with all its beauty and magnificence, with all the truth that glows in the darkness of its error, it had been better for the world if he had left unwritten.

An act more infamous than any of which SHELLEY was ever even accused, was that of the Court of Chancery, under the presidency of Lord ELDON, by which he was deprived of the guardianship of his children, on the ground

that his antisocial and irreligious principles unfitted him to be their educator. This atrocious violation of the law of nature drove him from England for ever. While crossing the sea, under the impression that expatriation was necessary to preserve his child, he gave utterance to his uncontrollable emotions in some lines, addressed to his youngest son:

The billows are leaping around it,
The bark is weak and frail,

The sea looks black, and the clouds that bound it,
Darkly strew the gale.

Come with me, thou delightful child,
Come with me, though the wave is wild,
And the winds are loose; we must not stay,
Or the slaves of the law may rend thee away.
Rest, rest, shriek not, thou gentle child!

The rocking of the boat thou fearest,
And the cold spray and the clamour wild?
There sit between us two, thou dearest;
Me and thy mother-well we know
The storm at which thou tremblest so,
With all its dark and hungry graves,
Less cruel than the savage slaves
Who hunt us o'er these sheltering waves.
This hour will sometime in thy memory
Be a dream of days forgotten;

We soon shail dwell by the azure sca
Of serene and golden Italy,

Or Greece, the Mother of the free.

And I will teach thine infant tongue
To call upon those heroes old

In their own language, and will mould
Thy growing spirit in the flame

Of Grecian lore; that by such name
A patriot's birthright thou mayst claim.

When afterwards this child died at Rome, he wrote of the English burying-ground in that city, "This spot is the repository of a sacred loss, of which the yearnings of a parent's heart are now prophetic; he is rendered immortal by love, as his memory is by death. My beloved child is buried here. I envy death the body far less than the oppressors the minds of those whom they have torn from me. The one can only kill the body, the other crushes the affections."

Rosalind and Helen, which had been begun in England, was finished at the baths of Lucca, in the summer of 1818. From Lucca SHELLEY went to Venice, near which city he commenced his greatest work, Prometheus Unbound. In the winter he removed to Naples. He suffered much from ill health; and in the spring of 1819 went to Villa Valsovana, in the vicinity of Leghorn, where he wrote the Masque of Anarchy, from which Liberty, in this volume, is extracted, and the Tragedy of the Cenci. The close of the year 1919 was spent in Florence, and the ensuing summer at the baths of San Giuliano, near

Pisa. In 1820 he wrote The Sensitive Plant, Julian and Maddalo, The Witch of Atlas, and many smaller pieces. In 1821 he was still at Pisa. His principal writings this year were Epipsychidion and Adonais. In the spring of 1822 he hired a villa near Lerici, on the bay of Spezia. On the first of July he left home, in a small vessel which had been built for him, to meet his friend LEIGH HUNT, who had just arrived at Pisa. Two weeks after, he was lost in a storm at sea. In Adonais he had almost anticipated his destiny. When the mind figures his boat veiled from sight by the clouds, as it was last seen upon the ocean, and then the waves, when the storm had passed, without a sign of where it had been, it may well regard as prophecy the last stanza of the hymn to the memory of his brother bard:

The breath, whose might I have invoked in song,
Descends on me; my spirit's bark is driven,
Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng,
Whose sails were never to the tempest given;
The massy earth and sphered skies are riven;

I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar;
Whilst burning through the inmost veil of heaven,
The soul of Adonais, like a star,

Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.

SHELLEY'S predominant faculty was his imagination. Fantasy prevails to such an extent in his long poems, that they are too abstract for the "daily food" of any but ideal minds. No modern poet has created such an amount of mere imagery. There is a want of simplicity and human interest about his productions which render them "caviare to the general." He has been well designated as the poet for poets. Two or three of his short pieces are models of lyric beauty. His classic dramas abound in rich metaphors. The Cenci is unquestionably the most remarkable of modern plays. Greek literature modified his taste, and a life of singular vicissitude disturbed the healthful current of a soul cast in a gentle but heroic mould. His aspirations were exalted, and his genius of the first order. Notwithstanding all the injustice done him by men prejudiced by his irreligious opinions, it is my belief, from a careful study of his life, that the world has scarcely furnished a more noble nature. He might have been a Christian had he suffered less from man's inhumanity. The weakness and wickedness which made him an exile from his home and country, hardened his heart and petrified his feelings against an influence

which is rarely powerful save when it comes in the guise of love.

The last edition of SHELLEY's writings, published by Mr. Moxon, was edited by his widow, the author of Frankenstein, a woman worthy to be the wife of such a man. Its notes, with the text, constitute the best biography of the poet.

In our own country more justice has been done to SHELLEY's genius, motives, and actions than they have received at home. I refer with pleasure for a more elaborate discussion

THE SENSITIVE PLANT.

PART I.

A SENSITIVE Plant in a garden grew,
And the young winds fed it with silver dew,
And it open'd its fan-like leaves to the light,
And closed them beneath the kisses of night.
And the spring arose on the garden fair,
And the Spirit of Love felt everywhere;

And each flower and herb on earth's dark breast
Rose from the dreams of its wintry rest.
But none ever trembled and panted with bliss
In the garden, the field, or the wilderness,
Like a doe in the noontide with love's sweet want,
As the companionless Sensitive Plant.
The snowdrop, and then the violet,

Arose from the ground with warm rain wet,
And their breath was mix'd with fresh odour, sent
From the turf, like the voice and the instrument.
Then the pied wind-flowers and the tulip tall,
And narcissi, the fairest among them all,
Who gaze on their eyes in the stream's recess,
Till they die of their own dear loveliness;
And the Naiad-like lily of the vale,
Whom youth makes so fair and passion so pale,
That the light of its tremulous bells is seen
Through their pavilions of tender green;
And the hyacinth purple, and white, and blue,
Which flung from its bells a sweet peal anew
Of music so delicate, soft, and intense,
It was felt like an odour within the sense;
And the rose like a nymph to the bath addrest,
Which unveil'd the depth of her glowing breast,
Till, fold after fold, to the fainting air
The soul of her beauty and love lay bare:
And the wand-like lily, which lifted up,
As a Mænad, its moonlight-colour'd cup,
Till the fiery star, which is its eye,
Gazed through clear dew on the tender sky;
And the jessamine faint, and the sweet tuberose,
The sweetest flower for scent that blows;
And all rare blossoms from every clime
Grew in that garden in perfect prime.
And on the stream whose inconstant bosom
Was prankt under boughs of embowering blossom,
With golden and green light, slanting through
Their heaven of many a tangled hue,

Broad water-lilies lay tremulously,

And starry river-buds glimmer'd by,

of his claims than I can here present, to Rambles and Reveries, by my friend H. T. TUCKERMAN; a volume which contains a series of essays on the modern English poets, by one of the most elegant and discriminating critics of the day.

SHELLEY left but one child, a son, PERCY FLORENCE SHELLEY, who, by the death of the poet's father in the summer of 1844, has become a baronet and succeeded to the family estates. Sir PERCY SHELLEY is now about twenty-five years of age.

And around them the soft stream did glide and dance
With a motion of sweet sound and radiance.
And the sinuous paths of lawn and of moss,
Which led through the garden along and across,
Some open at once to the sun and the breeze,
Some lost among the bowers of blossoming trees,
Were all paved with daisies and delicate bells
As fair as the fabulous asphodels;
And flowrets which drooping as day droop'd too,
Fell into pavilions, white, purple, and blue,
To roof the glow-worm from the evening dew.
And from this undefiled Paradise

The flowers (as an infant's awakening eyes
Smile on its mother, whose singing sweet
Can first lull, and at last must awaken it,)
When heaven's blithe winds had unfolded them,
As mine-lamps enkindle a hidden gem,
Shone smiling to heaven, and every one
Shared joy in the light of the gentle sun;
For each one was interpenetrated

With the light and the odour its neighbour shed,
Like young lovers whom youth and love make dear,
Wrapp'd and fill'd by their mutual atmosphere.
But the Sensitive Plant which could give small fruit
Of the love which it felt from the leaf to the root,
Received more than all, it loved more than ever,
Where none wanted but it, could belong to the giver;
For the Sensitive Plant has no bright flower;
Radiance and odour are not its dower;

It loves, even like love, its deep heart is full,
It desires what it has not, the beautiful!
The light winds which from unsustaining wings
Shed the music of many murmurings;
The beams which dart from many a star
Of the flowers whose hues they bear afar;
The plumed insects swift and free,
Like golden boats on a sunny sea,
Laden with light and odour, which pass
Over the gleam of the living grass;
The unseen clouds of the dew, which lie
Like fire in the flowers till the sun rides high,
Then wander like spirits among the spheres,
Each cloud faint with the fragrance it bears;
The quivering vapours of dim noontide,
Which, like a sea, o'er the warm earth glide,
In which every sound, and odour, and beam,
Move, as reeds in a single stream;

Each and all like ministering angels were
For the Sensitive Plant sweet joy to bear,

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THERE was a Power in this sweet place,
An Eve in this Eden; a ruling grace
Which to the flowers, did they waken or dream,
Was as God is to the starry scheme.
A lady, the wonder of her kind,
Whose form was upborne by a lovely mind
Which, dilating, had moulded her mien and motion
Like a sea-flower unfolded beneath the ocean,
Tended the garden from morn to even:
And the meteors of that sublunar heaven,
Like the lamps of the air when night walks forth,
Laugh'd round her footsteps up from the earth!
She had no companion of mortal race,

But her tremulous breath and her flushing face
Told, whilst the morn kiss'd the sleep from her eyes,
That her dreams were less slumber than Paradise:
As if some bright Spirit for her sweet sake

Had deserted heaven while the stars were awake,
As if yet around her he lingering were,
Though the veil of daylight conceal'd him from her.
Her step seem'd to pity the grass it prest;
You might hear, by the heaving of her breast,
That the coming and the going of the wind
Brought pleasure there and left passion behind.
And wherever her airy footstep trod,
Her trailing hair from the grassy sod
Erased its light vestige, with shadowy sweep,
Like a sunny storm o'er the dark green deep.
I doubt not the flowers of that garden sweet
Rejoiced in the sound of her gentle feet;
I doubt not they felt the spirit that came
From her glowing fingers through all their frame.
She sprinkled bright water from the stream
On those that were faint with the sunny beam;
And out of the cups of the heavy flowers
She emptied the rain of the thunder showers.
She lifted their heads with her tender hands,
And sustain'd them with rods and ozier bands;
If the flowers had been her own infants, she
Could never have nursed them more tenderly.
And all killing insects and gnawing worms,
And things of obscene and unlovely forms,
She bore in her basket of Indian woof,
Into the rough woods far aloof:

In a basket, of grasses and wild flowers full,
The freshest her gentle hands could pull
For the poor banish'd insects, whose intent,
Although they did ill, was innocent.
But the bee and the beamlike ephemeris,
Whose path is the lightning's, and soft moths that
The sweet lips of the flowers, and harm not, did she
Make her attendant angels be.

And many an antenatal tomb,

Where butterflies dream of the life to come,
She left clinging round the smooth and dark
Edge of the odorous cedar bark.

This fairest creature from earliest spring
Thus moved through the garden ministering
All the sweet season of summer tide,
And ere the first leaf look'd brown-she died!
PART III.

THREE days the flowers of the garden fair,
Like stars when the moon is awaken'd, were,
Or the waves of Baiæ, ere luminous
She floats up through the smoke of Vesuvius.
And on the fourth, the Sensitive Plant
Felt the sound of the funeral chant,

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And the steps of the bearers, heavy and slow,
And the sobs of the mourners deep and low;
The weary sound and the heavy breath,
And the silent motions of passing death,
And the smell, cold, oppressive, and dank,
Sent through the pores of the coffin plank;
The dark grass, and the flowers among the grass,
Were bright with tears as the crowd did pass;
From their sighs the wind caught a mournful tone,
And sate in the pines and gave groan for groan.
The garden, once fair, became cold and foul,
Like the corpse of her who had been its soul;
Which at first was lovely as if in sleep,
Then slowly changed, till it grew a heap
To make men tremble who never weep.
Swift summer into the autumn flow'd,
And frost in the mist of the morning rode,
Though the noonday sun look'd clear and bright,
Mocking the spoil of the secret night.
The rose leaves, like flakes of crimson snow,
Paved the turf and the moss below.

The lilies were drooping, and white, and wan,
Like the head and the skin of a dying man;
And Indian plants, of scent and hue
The sweetest that ever were fed on dew,
Leaf after leaf, day by day,

Were mass'd into the common clay.

And the leaves, brown, yellow, and gray, and red,
And white with the whiteness of what is dead,
Like troops of ghosts on the dry wind past;
Their whistling noise made the birds aghast.
And the gusty winds waked the winged seeds
Out of their birth-place of ugly weeds,
Till they clung round many a sweet flower's stem,
Which rotted into the earth with them.
The water-blooms under the rivulet
Fell from the stalks on which they were set;
And the eddies drove them here and there,
As the winds did those of the upper air.
Then the rain came down, and the broken stalks
Were bent and tangled across the walks;
And the leafless net-work of parasite bowers

Mass'd into ruin, and all sweet flowers.
Between the time of the wind and the snow,
All loathliest weeds began to grow,

Whose coarse leaves were splash'd with many a speck,

Like the water-snake's belly and the toad's back.
And thistles, and nettles, and darnels rank,
And the dock, and henbane, and hemlock dank,
Stretch'd out its long and hollow shank,
And stifled the air till the dead wind stank.
And plants, at whose names the verse feels loath,
Fill'd the place with a monstrous undergrowth,
Prickly, and pulpous, and blistering, and blue,
Livid, and starr'd with a lurid dew.

And agarics and fungi, with mildew and mould,
Started like mist from the wet ground cold;
Pale, fleshy, as if the decaying dead
With a spirit of growth had been animated!
Spawn, weeds, and filth, a leprous scum,
Made the running rivulet thick and dumb,
And at its outlet, flags huge as stakes

Dammed it up with roots knotted like watersnakes.

And hour by hour, when the air was still,

The vapours arose which have strength to kill:
At morn they were seen, at noon they were felt,
At night they were darkness no star could melt.
And unctuous meteors from spray to spray
Crept and flitted in broad noonday
Unseen; every branch on which they alit
By a venomous blight was burn'd and bit.
The Sensitive Plant, like one forbid,
Wept, and the tears within each lid
Of its folded leaves, which together grew,
Were changed to a blight of frozen glue.
For the leaves soon fell, and the branches soon
By the heavy axe of the blast were hewn ;
shrank to the root through every pore,
The sap
As blood to a heart that will beat no more.
For winter came: the wind was his whip:
One choppy finger was on his lip:

He had torn the cataracts from the hills,
And they clank'd at his girdle like manacles;
His breath was a chain which without a sound
The earth, and the air, and the water bound;
He came, fiercely driven in his chariot-throne
By the tenfold blasts of the arctic zone.
Then the weeds which were forms of living death
Fled from the frost to the earth beneath.
Their decay and sudden flight from frost
Was but like the vanishing of a ghost!
And under the roots of the Sensitive Plant
The moles and the dormice died for want:
The birds dropp'd stiff from the frozen air,
And were caught in the branches naked and bare.
First there came down a thawing rain,
And its dull drops froze on the boughs again;
Then there steam'd up a freezing dew
Which to the drops of the thaw-rain grew ;
And a northern whirlwind, wandering about
Like a wolf that had smelt a dead child out,
Shook the boughs thus laden, and heavy and stiff,
And snapp'd them off with his rigid griff.
When winter had gone and spring came back,
The Sensitive Plant was a leafless wreck;

But the mandrakes, and toadstools, and docks, and darnels,

Rose like the dead from their ruined charnels.

CONCLUSION.

WHETHER the Sensitive Plant, or that Which within its boughs like a spirit sat Ere its outward form had known decay, Now felt this change, I cannot say. Whether that lady's gentle mind, No longer with the form combined Which scattered love, as stars do light, Found sadness, where it left delight, dare not guess; but in this life Of error, ignorance, and strife, Where nothing is, but all things seem, And we the shadows of the dream, It is a modest creed, and yet Pleasant, if one considers it, To own that death itself must be, Like all the rest, a mockery. That garden sweet, that lady fair, And all sweet shapes and odours there, In truth have never pass'd away : "Tis we, 'tis ours, are changed; not they. For love, and beauty, and delight, There is no death nor change: their might Exceeds our organs, which endure No light, being themselves obscure.

LOVE.

THOυ art the wine whose drunkenness is all
We can desire, O Love! and happy souls,
Ere from thy vine the leaves of autumn fall,
Catch thee and feed from thine o'erflowing bowls,
Thousands who thirst for thy ambrosial dew.
Thou art the radiance which when ocean rolls
Investeth it; and when the heavens are blue
Thou fillest them: and when the earth is fair
The shadows of thy moving wings imbue
Its deserts, and its mountains; till they wear
Beauty, like some bright robe. Thou ever soarest
Among the towers of men; and as soft air
In spring, which moves the unawakened forest,
Clothing with leaves its branches bare and bleak,
Thou floutest among men; and age implorest
That which from thee they should implore:-the
Alone kneel to thee, offering up the hearts [weak
The strong have broken-yet where shall any seck
A garment, whom thou clothest not?

THE UNATTAINED.

To thirst and find no fill-to wail and wander With short unsteady steps-to pause and ponderTo feel the blood run through the veins and tingle Where busy thought and blind sensation mingle; To nurse the image of unfelt caresses Till dim imagination just possesses The half-created shadow.

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