justly views this bold assertion as 'startling and probably erroneous.'

NOTE 2. Page 41.

Since the boyish period in which these redressing corrections occurred to me, I have seen some reason (upon considering the oriental practice of placing live coals in a pan upon the head, and its meaning as still in use amongst the Turks) to alter the whole interpretation of the passage. It would too much interrupt the tenor of the subject to explain this at length: but, if right, it would equally harmonize with the spirit of Christian morals.

NOTE 3. Page 51.

'Family' i. e., The gens in the Roman sense, or collective house. Shelley's own immediate branch of the house did not, in a legal sense, represent the family of Penshurst, because the rights of the lineal descent had settled upon another branch. But his branch had a collateral participation in the glory of the Sidney name, and might, by accidents possible enough, have come to be its sole representative.

NOTE 4. Page 54.

'Of Custom: This alludes to a theory of Shelley's, on the subject of marriage as a vicious institution, and an attempt to realize his theory by way of public example; which attempt there is no use in noticing more particularly, as it was subsequently abandoned. Originally he had derived his theory from the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, the mother of his second wife, whose birth in fact had cost that mother her life. But by the year 1812, (the year following his first marriage,) he had so fortified, from other quarters, his previous opinions upon the wickedness of all nuptial ties consecrated by law or by the church, that he apologized to his friends for having submitted to the marriage ceremony as for an offence; but an offence, he pleaded, rendered necessary by the vicious constitution of society, for the comfort of his female partner.

NOTE 5. Page 56.

'Two counties: '—the frontier line between Westmoreland and Cumberland, traverse obliquely the Lake of Ulleswater, so that the banks on both sides lie partly in both counties.

:

NOTE 6. Page 58.

'At that time!'-the reader will say, who happens to be aware of the mighty barriers which engirdle Grasmere, Fairfield, Arthur's Chair, Seat Sandal, Steil Fell, &c. (the lowest above two thousand, the higher above three thousand feet high,) — 'what then? do the mountains change, and the mountain tarns?' Perhaps not: but, if they do not change in substance or in form, they change countenance' when they are disfigured from below. One cotton-mill, planted by the side of a torrent, disenchants the scene, and banishes the ideal beauty even in the case where it leaves the physical beauty untouched a truth which, many years ago, I saw illustrated in the little hamlet of Church Coniston. But is there any cotton-mill in Grasmere? Not that I have heard: But if no water has been filched away from Grasmere, there is one water too much which has crept lately into that loveliest of mountain chambers; and that is the 'water-cure,' which has built unto itself a sort of residence in that vale; whether a rustic nest, or a lordly palace, I do not know. Meantime, in honesty it must be owned, that many years ago the vale was half ruined by an insane substruction carried along the eastern margin of the lake as a basis for a mail-coach road. This infernal mass of solid masonry swept away the loveliest of sylvan recesses, and the most absolutely charmed against intrusive foot or angry echoes. It did worse: it swept away the stateliest of Flora's daughters, and swept away, at the same time, the birth-place of a well known verse, describing that stately plant, which is perhaps (as a separate line) the most exquisite that the poetry of earth can show. The plant was the Osmunda regalis;

'Plant lovelier in its own recess Than Grecian Naiad seen at earliest dawn

Tending her fount, or lady of the lake

Sole-silting by the shores of old romance.'

It is this last line and a half which some have held to ascend in beauty as much beyond any single line known to literature, as the Osmunda ascends in luxury of splendor above other ferns. I have restored the original word lake, which the poet himself under an erroneous impression had dismissed for mere. But the line rests no longer on an earthly reality—the recess, which suggested it, is gone: the Osmunda has fled; and a vile causeway, such as Sin and Death build in Milton over Chaos, fastening it with 'asphaltic slime' and 'pins of adamant,' having long displaced the loveliest chapel (as I may call it) in the whole cathedral of Grasmere, I have since considered Grasmere itself a ruin of its former self.

NOTE 7. Page 63.

'Alastor,' i. e. Shelley. Mr. Gilfillan names him thus from the designation, self-assumed by Shelley, in one of the least intelligible amongst his poems.

NOTE 8. Page 63.

The immediate cause of the catastrophe was supposed to be this: Shelley's boat had reached a distance of four miles from the shore, when the storm suddenly arose, and the wind suddenly shifted: 'from excessive smoothness,' says Mr. Trelawney, all at once the sea was 'foaming, breaking, and getting up into a very heavy swell.' After one hour the swell went down; and towards evening it was almost a calm. The 'circumstances were all adverse: the gale, the current setting into the gulf, the instantaneous change of wind, acting upon an undecked boat, having all the sheets fast, overladen, and no expert hands on board but one, made the foundering as sudden as it was inevitable. The boat is supposed to have filled to leeward, and (carrying two tons of ballast) to have gone down like a shot. A book found in the pocket of Shelley, and the unaltered state of the dress on all the corpses when

washed on shore, sufficiently indicated that not a moment's preparation for meeting the danger had been possible.

NOTE 9. Page 64.

See The Seven against Thebes' of Eschylus.

NOTE 10. Page 67.

'The eternal child :' this beautiful expression, so true in its application to Shelley, I borrow from Mr. Gilfillan; and I am tempted to add the rest of his eloquent parallel between Shelley and Lord Byron, so far as it relates to their external appearance: 'In the forehead and head of Byron there is more massive power and breadth: Shelley's has a smooth, arched, spiritual expression; wrinkle there seems none on his brow; it is as if perpetual youth had there dropped its freshness. Byron's eye seems the focus of pride and lust; Shelley's is mild, pensive, fixed on you, but seeing you through the mist of his own idealism. Defiance curls on Byron's nostril, and sensuality steeps his full large lips: the lower features of Shelley's face are frail, feminine, flexible. Byron's head is turned upwards; as if, having risen proudly above his contemporaries, he were daring to claim kindred, or to demand a contest, with a superior order of beings: Shelley's is half bent, in reverence and humility, before some vast vision seen by his own eye alone. Misery erect, and striving to cover its retreat under an aspect of contemptuous fury, is the permanent and pervading expression of Byron's countenance : — sorrow, softened and shaded away by hope and habit, lies like a "holier day" of still moonshine upon that of Shelley. In the portrait of Byron, taken at the age of nineteen, you see the unnatural age of premature passion; his hair is young, his dress is youthful; but his face is old: -in Shelley you see the eternal child, none the less that his hair is gray, and that " seems half his immortality."

sorrow