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a crude poem attacking dogmatic religion and the social state. The scandal which it created was soon increased by incidents of another kind. Shelley's marriage with Harriet Westbrook had not only been hasty and rash; it had been founded upon no sympathy of nature or genuine love, but had come from Shelley's impetuous offer to release her from what he deemed the "oppression" of her parents. They separated, and Shelley formed a union with a daughter of William Godwin. This was followed by Harriet Westbrook's suicide, and the departure of Shelley and Mary Godwin from England into lasting exile. The shock of the tragedy dealt a blow to Shelley's already delicate health, and pursued him with dark thoughts in the bright land of Italy, where he spent the short remainder of his life.

Shelley in Italy.-In Italy his powers developed rapidly. At Este, near Venice, where the Shelleys had gone to be near Byron, the beautiful "Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills," were composed, as well as "Julian and Maddalo," a poem in which Byron figures. At Rome, amid the tangle of flowers and vines which at that time covered the mountainous ruins of the Baths of Caracalla, Shelley wrote his lyrical drama, Prometheus Unbound. "The blue sky of Rome," he writes, "and the effect of the vigorous awakening of spring in that divinest climate, and the new life with which it drenches the spirit even to intoxication, were the inspiration of this drama."

In the same wonderfully fruitful year he produced The Cenci, a drama intended for the stage, and written in much more simple and every-day language than his other works. This was composed in a villa near Leghorn, in a glazed terrace at the top of the house, overlooking the Mediterranean and flooded with the sun of the Italian summer, in the almost overpowering intensity of which Shelley's tropic nature took a singular, not to say an uncanny, delight. At Florence, where he went in the fall of the same year, the great "Ode to the West Wind" was composed, in a wood beside the Arno, on a day of magnificent storm, when the wind was collecting the vapors which pour down the autumnal rains.

The next two years, 1820-1821, were spent chiefly at Pisa. Several congenial friends gathered about Shelley. Among them were Lord Byron, Edward Williams, who was to share Shelley's tragic death, and Captain Trelawney, a picturesque and adventurous character, who has left us in his "Reminiscences," a record of Shelley's last days as vivid as Hogg's memorial of the poet's life at Oxford. To this happy period belong some of Shelley's most memorable poems; "The Sensitive Plant," suggested, we are told, by the flowers which crowded Mrs. Shelley's sitting-room, exhaling their fragrance to the rich Italian sunlight; "The Witch of Atlas," written after a trip to the pilgrimage-shrine of Mount San Pellegrino; the "Ode to a Skylark," the most popular of all Shelley's lyrics; and "Epipsychidion," a rhapsody addressed to a beautiful young Italian girl, Emilia Viviani, whom the Shelleys found immured against her will in a convent. This last poem is remarkable as embodying the poet's conception of love, on its ethereal and mystic side. Speaking of "Epipsychidion" to a friend, he said, "It is a mystery; as to real flesh and blood, you know I do not deal in these articles;" and he complained that even the elect among his readers, in their interpretation of the poem, reduced him to the level of a servant-girl and her sweetheart.

"Adonais": Shelley's Death.-Shelley's last days were spent in a bare, high-ceiled, white-washed villa at Lerici, on the Gulf of Spezia. With his friend Williams he had built a sail-boat, christened by Byron the "Don Juan." Shelley was passionately fond of sailing, and much of the poetry of his last months was written while gliding over the flashing blue waters of the gulf. In April of 1821 the news of Keats's death at Rome reached Shelley; and the unfounded belief that it had been accelerated by a sneering review of Endymion in the Quarterly led him to write the wonderful threnody "Adonais," in the dead poet's memory. At the close of "Adonais," Shelley sees himself swept out by a tempest upon some vast ocean of the spirit:

"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 spherèd 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."

In July of 1822, a few months after these prophetic lines were written, Shelley's boat, returning from Leghorn to Lerici, with himself, his friend Williams, and a sailor-boy, was overwhelmed by one of those swift storms which sweep the Mediterranean during the summer heats. Some days later Shelley's body was washed ashore at Viareggio. It was burned by Trelawney and Byron on the beach; the ashes were placed in the Protestant cemetery at Rome, near the grave where, a few months before, Keats had been laid.

Shelley as Seen by his Contemporaries.-Shelley's figure was slight and fragile. His wavy brown hair became gray very early in life, but his face remained to the end strikingly smooth, fresh-colored and youthful. "His features," says Hogg, "were not symmetrical, but the effect of the whole was extremely powerful. They breathed an animation, a fire, an enthusiasm, a vivid and preternatural intelligence, that I never met with in any other countenance." His passion for study was so intense that to open a great book for the first time threw him into a violent excitement-"his cheeks glowed, his eyes became bright, his whole frame trembled, and his entire attention was immediately swallowed up in the depths of contemplation." Trelawney's account of his first meeting with Shelley brings him vividly before our eyes. "Swiftly gliding in, blushing like a girl, a tall, thin stripling held out both his hands; and although I could hardly believe, as I looked at his flushed, feminine, and artless face, that it could be the poet, I returned his warm pressure. After the ordinary greetings and courtesies he sat down, and listened. I was silent from astonishment. Was it possible this mild-looking, beardless boy could be the veritable monster, at war with all the world? excommunicated by the fathers of the church, deprived of his civil rights by the fiat of a grim Lord Chancellor, discarded by every member of his family, and denounced by the rival

sages of our literature as the founder of a 'Satanic school""? Among the circle of his Pisan friends, the poet was known by two nicknames, "Ariel" and "The Snake." Both are highly descriptive. The first suggests his unearthliness and spirituality; the second was given him because of his sinuous figure, noiseless, gliding movement, bright eyes, and perhaps, too, because of a slight touch of the uncanny in him. Yet it would leave us with a false impression not to remember that all his friends testify to his manliness, his genuineness, his virile mind. The fibre of his nature was as strong as it was delicate and strange.

The "Prometheus Unbound."-Shelley's most characteristic work, both in thought and style, is Prometheus Unbound. The subject was suggested by a lost drama of Æschylus, in which Prometheus, the heroic friend and lover of mankind, was unchained from a bleak precipice where the tyrant Zeus had hung him. In Shelley's treatment Prometheus represents, not a superhuman helper of mankind, but Mankind itself, heroic, just, gentle, sacredly thirsting after liberty and spiritual gladness, but chained and tortured by the ruler of Heaven. In the fulness of time Demogorgon (Necessity) hurls the tyrant from his throne; and Prometheus, amid the songs of Earth and the Moon, is united to Asia, the spirit of love in nature. Here as elsewhere, Shelley shows himself a child of the French Revolution, in believing that it is only some external tyranny-the might of priests and kings, the weight of "custom," the dark dreams of superstition which keeps mankind from rising to his ideal stature. But if the philosophy of Prometheus Unbound is immature, and tinged with the misconceptions of the time, the nobility of its mood, the heroic enthusiasm which it voices, make it eternally inspiring. And for its spirit of sacred passion the verse of the poem is a glorious vesture. The unearthly beauty of its imagery, the keen ethereal music of its songs and choruses, make this not only Shelley's highest achievement, but a fixed star in the firmament of poetry.

Shelley as a Lyric Poet.—It is in its lyrics that Prometheus reaches its greatest altitudes, for Shelley's genius was essentially lyrical. In all his best songs and odes, the words

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