it would be owing entirely to your perseverance in the groundless apprehensions which dictated your communication received this day, and conscious terror would be perverted into an argument of guilt.

“I have just received a most kind and encouraging letter from Mr. Moore on the subject of my poem. I have the fairest chance of the public approaching my work with unbiassed and unperverted feeling; the fruit of reputation (and you know for what purposes I value it) is within my reach. It is for you, now you have been once named as publisher, and have me in your power, to blast all this, and to hold up my literary character in the eye of mankind as that of a proscribed and rejected outcast. And for no evil that I have ever done you, but in return for a preference, which, although you falsely now esteem injurious to you, was solicited by Hunt, and conferred by me, as a source and a proof of nothing but kind intentions.

"Dear Sir,

"I remain your sincere well-wisher,

"PERCY B. SHELLEY."

The poet, however, was afterwards convinced of the propriety of making certain alterations; and the work was issued in the following January under the title of the Revolt of Islam.

66

This eloquent and passionate poem was composed partly on the Thames, while the poet rocked idly in his boat as it floated under the beech groves of Bisham;" partly during wanderings among the beautiful scenery of the neighborhood. The mingled luxuriance and wildness of the country surrounding his dwelling gave Shelley the greatest delight; but this pleasure was marred by the pain arising from the contemplation of the extreme poverty everywhere visible in Marlow. Many of the

women of that town were (and are still) lacemakers an occupation which, while it entails loss of health, is very ill-paid. The amount of distress existing in the winter of 1817-18 was very severe; the poor-laws were administered with rigor; the late war had frightfully augmented taxation, while the peace had thrown many persons, who had served as soldiers, back on the rural population; and a bad harvest had added to the other sources of human misery. "Shelley," says his widow, "afforded what alleviation he could. In the winter, while bringing out his poem, he had a severe attack of ophthalmia, caught while visiting the poor cottages."*

The poem at once inspired all lovers of literature with considerable interest in the author; but it found many severe critics. Even Godwin urged several objections to its general style; to which the poet replied in an interesting letter (dated December 11th, 1817), containing a very deeply-felt and accurate estimate of the peculiar tendencies of his own mind.

"I have read and considered," he writes, "all that you say about my general powers, and the particular instance of the poem in which I have attempted to develop them. Nothing can be more satisfactory to me than the interest which your admonitions express. But I think you are mistaken in some points with regard to the peculiar nature of my powers, whatever be their amount. I listened with deference and self-suspicion to your censures of Laon and Cythna; but the productions of mine which you commend hold a very low place in my own esteem, and *Note to the Revolt of Islam in the collected edition of the Poems.

this reassured me, in some degree at least. The poem was produced by a series of thoughts which filled my mind with unbounded and sustained enthusiasm. I felt the precariousness of my life, and I resolved in this book to leave some records of myself. Much of what the volume contains was written with the same feeling, as real, though not so prophetic, as the communications of a dying man. I never presumed, indeed, to consider it anything approaching to faultless; but, when I considered contemporary productions of the same apparent pretensions, I will own that I was filled with confidence. I felt that it was in many respects a genuine picture of my own mind. I felt that the sentiments were true, not assumed; and in this have I long believed — that my power consists in sympathy, and that part of imagination which relates to sentiment and contemplation. I am formed, if for anything not in common with the herd of mankind, to apprehend minute and remote distinctions of feeling, whether relative to external nature or the living beings which surround us, and to communicate the conceptions which result from considering either the moral or the material universe as a whole. . Yet, after all,

I cannot but be conscious, in much of what I write, of an absence of that tranquillity which is the attribute and accompaniment of power. This feeling alone would make your most kind and wise admonitions, on the subject of the economy of intellectual force, valuable to me. And, if I live, or if I see any trust in coming years, doubt not but that I shall do something, whatever it may be, which a serious and earnest estimate of my powers will suggest

to me, and which will be in every respect accommodated to their utmost limits."

It is not difficult to understand why Godwin failed to appreciate the new production of his son-in-law. He had formed his tastes in poetry by a life-long perusal of our old English masters the men of the Shakspearean and Miltonic eras; and it was impossible that he could have gone to a better school. But the poetry of Shelley — excepting in as far as it was inspired, in its metaphysical part, by the genius of ancient Greece was essentially modern in its character. It mingled the impalpable suggestions of mysticism with images of exotic splendor, tropical in the heat and glory of their hues, touched with a light that seemed to dawn from some remote and supernatural future, and often dim with the too great intensity of the writer's emotions and the excessive radiance in which he robed his subtle imaginings. The practical, acute, clear mind of Godwin could not live, with any comfort to itself, in this region of ethereal, though sublime magnificence; neither his temperament nor his intellectual habits fitted him for deriving any high degree of pleasure from a practice so opposed to his own. But Shelley has helped to make the times more poetical; and the flame-like energy and grandeur, the tumultuous passion, and the strange visionary beauty of the Revolt of Islam are now universally acknowledged.

In the same year, Shelley also wrote the highly mystical fragments of Prince Athanase-fragments, however, full of beauty and music; a large part of Rosalind and Helen; a few small poems; and a pamphlet advo

cating Parliamentary Reform, published under the signature of the "Hermit of Marlow." This political work is remarkable for the statesmanlike calmness of the writer's opinions, and the moderation of his demands. Shelley here proposed that committees should be formed with a view to polling the entire people on the subject which was then, as now, agitating the whole nation. He disavowed any wish to establish universal suffrage at once, or to do away with monarchy and aristocracy, while so large a proportion of the people remained disqualified by ignorance from sharing in the government of the country, though he looked forward to a time when the world would be enabled to "disregard the symbols of its childhood;" and he suggested that the qualification for the suffrage should be the registry of the voter's name as one who paid a certain small sum in direct taxes. Such were the views of a political thinker who was equally removed from being a Tory or a demagogue.

At the end of this year (1817), a relapse of the severe attack of ophthalmia, caught from his visits to the poor cottagers in his neighborhood, deprived Shelley of his usual resource of reading. In looking over the journal in which, from day to day, Mrs. Shelley was in the habit of noting their occupations, as well as passing events, one is struck with wonder at the number of books which they read in the course of the year. At home or travelling- before breakfast, or waiting for the mid-day meal· by the side of a stream, or on the ascent of a mountain a book was never absent from