by his intellect, Shelley was a Christian in the tendencies of his heart. As to his lying asleep on the hearth-rug, with his small round head thrust almost into the very fire,' this, like his 'basking in the hottest beams of an Italian sun,' illustrates nothing but his physical temperament. That he should be seen 'devouring large pieces of bread amid his profound abstractions,' simply recalls to my eye some hundred thousands of children in the streets of great cities, Edinburgh, Glasgow, London, whom I am daily detecting in the same unaccountable practice; and yet, probably, with very little abstraction to excuse it; whilst his endless cups of tea,' in so tea-drinking a land as ours, have really ceased to offer the attractions of novelty which, eighty years ago, in the reign of Dr. Johnson, and under a higher price of tea, they might have secured. Such habits, however, are inoffensive, if not particularly mysterious, nor particularly significant. But that, in defect of a paper boat, Shelley should launch upon the Serpentine a fifty pound bank note, seems to my view an act of childishness, or else (which is worse) an act of empty ostentation, not likely to proceed from one who generally exhibited in his outward deportment a sense of true dignity. He who, through his family,3 connected himself with that spirit without spot,' (as Shelley calls him in the 'Adonais,') Sir Philip Sidney, (a man how like in gentleness, and in faculties of mind, to himself!)

- he that, by consequence, connected himself with that later descendant of Penshurst, the noble martyr of freedom, Algernon Sidney, could not have degraded himself by a pride so mean as any which roots itself

in wealth. On the other hand, in the anecdote of his repeating Dr. Johnson's benign act, by 'lifting a poor houseless outcast upon his back, and carrying her to a place of refuge,' I read so strong a character of internal probability, that it would be gratifying to know upon what external testimony it rests.

6

The life of Shelley, according to the remark of Mr. Gilfillan, was among the most romantic in literary story.' Everything was romantic in his short career; everything wore a tragic interest. From his childhood he moved through a succession of afflictions. Always craving for love, loving and seeking to be loved, always he was destined to reap hatred from those with whom life had connected him. If in the darkness he raised up images of his departed hours, he would behold his family disowning him, and the home of his infancy knowing him no more; he would behold his magnificent university, that under happier circumstances would have gloried in his genius, rejecting him for ever; he would behold his first wife, whom once he had loved passionately, through calamities arising from himself, called away to an early and a tragic death. The peace after which his heart panted for ever, in what dreadful contrast it stood to the eternal contention upon which his restless intellect or accidents of position threw him like a passive victim! It seemed as if not any choice of his, but some sad doom of opposition from without, forced out, as by a magnet, struggles of frantic resistance from him, which as gladly he would have evaded, as ever victim of epilepsy yearned to evade his convulsions! Gladly he would have slept in eternal

seclusion, whilst eternally the trumpet summoned him to battle. In storms unwillingly created by himself, he lived; in a storm, cited by the finger of God, he died.

It is affecting, at least it is so for any one who believes in the profound sincerity of Shelley, a man (however erring) whom neither fear, nor hope, nor vanity, nor hatred, ever seduced into falsehood, or even into dissimulation, to read the account which he gives of a revolution occurring in his own mind at school so early did his struggles begin! It is in verse, and forms part of those beautiful stanzas addressed to his second wife, which he prefixed to 'The Revolt of Islam.' Five or six of these stanzas may be quoted with a certainty of pleasing many readers, whilst they throw light on the early condition of Shelley's feelings, and of his early anticipations with regard to the promises and the menaces of life.

'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 My spirit's sleep; a fresh May-dawn it was, When I walk'd forth upon the glittering grass, And wept-I knew not why; until there rose, From the near school-room, voices that, alas! Were but one echo from a world of woes The harsh and grating strife of tyrants and of foes.

And then I clasp'd my hands, and look'd around
(But none was near to mock my streaming eyes,
Which pour'd their warm drops on the sunny ground,)
So without shame I spake - I will be wise,
And just, and free, and mild, if in me lies

Such power for I grow weary to behold

The selfish and the strong still tyrannize

Without reproach or check. I then controll'd

My tears; my heart grew calm; and I was meek and bold.

And from that hour did I with earnest thought
Heap knowledge from forbidden mines of lore:
Yet nothing, that my tyrants knew or taught,
I cared to learn; but from that secret store
Wrought linked armor for my soul, before
It might walk forth to war among mankind : }
Thus power and hope were strengthen'd more and more
Within me,
till there came upon my mind

A sense of loneliness, a thirst with which I pined.

Alas, that love should be a blight and snare
To those who seek all sympathies in one!
Such once I sought in vain; then black despair,
The shadow of a starless night, was thrown
Over the world in which I moved alone:
Yet never found I one not false to me,

Hard hearts and cold, like weights of icy stone
Which crush'd and wither'd mine, that could not be
Aught but a lifeless clog, until revived by thee.

Thou, friend, whose presence on my wintry heart
Fell, like bright spring upon some herbless plain;
How beautiful and calm and free thou wert
In thy young wisdom, when the mortal chain
Of Custom thou didst burst and rend in twain,
And walk'd as free as light the clouds among,
Which many an envious slave then breathed in vain
From his dim dungeon, and my spirit sprung

To meet thee from the woes which had begirt it long.

No more alone through the world's wilderness,
Although I trod the paths of high intent,
I journey'd now: no more companionless,
Where solitude is like despair, I went.

Now has descended a serener hour;

And, with inconstant fortune, friends return :

Though suffering leaves the knowledge and the power
Which says-
Let scorn be not repaid with scorn.
And from thy side two gentle babes are born
To fill our home with smiles; and thus are we
Most fortunate beneath life's beaming morn;
And these delights and thou have been to me
The parents of the song I consecrate to thee.'

My own attention was first drawn to Shelley by the report of his Oxford labors as a missionary in the service of infidelity. Abstracted from the absolute sincerity and simplicity which governed that boyish movement, qualities which could not be known to a stranger, or even suspected in the midst of so much extravagance, there was nothing in the Oxford reports of him to create any interest beyond that of wonder at his folly and presumption in pushing to such extremity what, naturally, all people viewed as an elaborate jest. Some curiosity, however, even at that time, must have gathered about his name; for I remember seeing, in London, a little Indian ink sketch of him in the academic costume of Oxford. The sketch tallied pretty well with a verbal description which I had heard of him in some company, viz., that he looked like an elegant and slender flower, whose head drooped from being surcharged with rain. This gave, to the chance observer, an impression that he was tainted, even in his external deportment, by some excess of sickly sentimentalism, from which I believe that, in all stages of his life, he was remarkably free. Between two and three years after this period, which was that of his expulsion from Oxford,