of England, and by living abroad escaped the measures which his creditors took to collect what he owed them measures which his biographers gravely call "indignities!" He lived at many places; always without the morality, decency and sterling honesty which have made illustrious the names of most of his brother poets, from Chaucer to 'Tennyson. Look at his insolent disregard of the rights of those who had trusted him, and compare it with Scott's noble self-martyrdom in the payment of debts from which he had drawn no gain!

In 1823 he gave his services to the cause of Grecian independence and entered heart and soul into the war with Turkey. While preparing for the siege of Lepanto he contracted the fatal illness which ended his life at Missolonghi, April 19, 1824.

Being so marked a figure, personally, we must make a place for his portrait as drawn by Lady Blessington, a year before his death:

I had fancied him taller, with a more dignified and commanding air. His appearance is, however, highly prepossessing, his head finely shaped, his forehead open, high and noble; his eyes are grey and full of expression, but one is visibly larger than the other; his mouth is the most remarkable feature in his face, the upper lip of Grecian shortness and the corners descending, the lips full and finely cut. In speaking he shows his teeth very much, and they are white and even, but I observed even in his smile—and he smiles frequently— there is something of a scornful expression in his mouth that is evidently natural and not, as many suppose, affected. . . . He is very slightly lame, and the deformity of his foot is so little remarkable that I am not now aware which foot it is. Were I to point out the prominent defect of Lord Byron, I should say it was flippancy, and a total want of that natural self-possession and dignity which ought to characterize a man of birth and education.

If one might venture to characterize in a few words so vast a genius as that set forth in Byron's poems, it may be said to be the embodiment of self; to show passion rather than affection, volcanic fire rather than homely warmth,

noon and midnight without twilight, wit without genial humor, strength without sweetness, grief without sympathy, and joy without contentment.

ERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY (1792-1822) has been called "the poet of poets." In his ethereal fancies he seemed to soar with sustained flight, like his own skylark, in a region which common mortals rarely reach and soon abandon, sinking toward earth again from the rarer air above. Unhappily this delicately creative mind was marred by a lack of capacity to follow the path of morality and religion, a lack showing itself on the one hand in his irregular life, and on the other in the atheistical tendency of his writings.

Shelley was not, like so many of our poets, born to poverty. His father was a baronet, Sir Timothy Shelley, and expected his son to grow up into a respectable, commonplace person like himself; but nature, in endowing the boy with a sensitive and unmanageable soul, frustrated the father's intentions. Shelley was the victim of some tyranny and ill-usage at school, which increased his inborn hatred of law and control; and his life was one long rebellion against the established order of things, under whatever form it presented itself. After writing a pamphlet on atheism, for which he was expelled from college, and a poem in the same spirit entitled "Queen Mab," he brought his father's displeasure to a climax by a runaway marriage with Harriet Westbrook, the daughter of an innkeeper, a girl of seventeen, he himself being then still under twenty. Sir Timothy did not disown his son for this act of insubordination, but desired no more of his company, though he made him a small

allowance to live on. After a time Shelley grew tired of Harriet-she "could not feel poetry or understand philosophy," he said—and, abandoning her and her two children, he went off to Italy with Mary Godwin, another girl of seventeen, daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, who both entertained the same ideas in regard to marriage as did Shelley and the younger Mary. In the next act of this tragic drama poor Harriet drowns herself, and Shelley marries Mary Godwin. As one of his kindest biographers has said, "the fact that he ought to do a thing was enough to make Shelley set himself against it." The indulgence of the moment's desire was the only duty he acknowledged. A few years brought his strange, wayward life to a close. He was at Spezia, in Italy, and had gone out with his friend Williams, and a sailor boy, for a sail on the bay. A squall came up, the boat capsized, and all three were drowned. After much search, Shelley's body was found, and Lord Byron, with other friends, burned it upon the sea-shore, according to the old Grecian custom. In a pocket was a volume of Keats, who had died the year before, and to whose memory Shelley had written the exquisite poem of "Adonaïs." The ashes were laid in the Protestant cemetery at Rome. At the time of his death, Shelley was not quite thirty years old.

In the airy grandeur of his imaginings and the melody of his verse, Shelley has perhaps never been surpassed. His writing is unequal. Some of the longer poems, like "The Revolt of Islam," and "Alastor," are exceedingly obscure; "Prometheus Unbound," the most splendid effort of his genius, is marred by the impious daring of its sentiments; "The Cenci," a work of tremendous power, is repulsive from its subject; but the lovely "Skylark," the "Cloud" and the "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" are pure poetry. Shelley's personal appearance was in harmony with his mental graces. He was tall and slender, with wavy dark

brown hair, deep blue eyes and youthful face full of spirituality. His biographer, W. M. Rossetti, says of him: "He was generosity, unworldliness and disinterestedness personified," a dictum which his treatment of heartbroken Harriet Westbrook Shelley scarcely bears out.

John Keats (1795-1821) was the youngest of the group we have been occupied with, and the first to depart. Of humble origin (which meant then exclusion from the ranks of that higher class where culture is a matter of course), he was apprenticed to a surgeon, and tried bravely to do his duty in an uncongenial task. Poetry, however, was in his nature and would find its way out. His first collection of poems, published at twenty-two, contained nothing remarkable, except the glorious sonnet "On first looking into Chapman's Homer." The second, "Endymion," which came out the next year with a modest preface, gave early promise of a finer flight than it, as a whole, displayed, though it contained much that was admirable. In the third and last, the world saw a full-fledged poet, worthy to stand among the noblest.

To return to his early endeavors. Having published some poems in Leigh Hunt's "Examiner," Keats was brought to the notice of literary men who recognized his merit and made him welcome among them. The drudgery of the mortar and pill-box was exchanged for more congenial occupation; and he devoted himself to writing poetry with the eagerness which characterized everything he did.

The great reviews attacked "Endymion" with fierce and contemptuous abuse, and the story was long current that the article in the "Quarterly" hastened Keat's death. He was undoubtedly deeply wounded and discouraged by it; but he came of a consumptive family, and his early death may not be chargeable to the strictures of "Blackwood" and the "Quarterly."

He answered the criticisms on his youthful work with a quiet dignity which must have put his savage critics to the blush:

J. S. is perfectly right in regard to the “slip-shod Endymion.” That it is so is no fault of mine. No! though it may sound a little paradoxical to say so, it is as good as I had power to make it myself.

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I have written independently without judgment; I may write independently and with judgment hereafter. The genius of poetry must work out its own salvation in a man. It can not be matured by law and precept, but by sensation and watchfulness. In Endymion I leaped headlong into the sea, and thereby have become better acquainted with the soundings, the quicksands and the rocks, than if I had stayed upon the green shore and piped a silly pipe, and taken tea and comfortable advice.

And then he went on to write the noble poem of "Hyperion," which remains a fragment because he felt unable to do the subject justice. Next followed in quick succession the terribly picturesque "Lamia," and "Isabella;" the "Eve of Saint Agnes," a poem perfect in its exquisite melody and tenderness; the "Ode to a Grecian Urn," breathing the very spirit of classic refinement and dainty grace; the "Ode to a Nightingale," almost overpowering in its intensity of feeling; several lovely sonnets, and much more that makes us regret that so fair a fruitage should be nipped and blasted before it arrived at its prime. At the age of twenty, the symptoms of consumption appeared. He went to Rome, hoping there to find at least some alleviation of his disease; but the change did him no good, and after a few months of suffering he was laid to rest, "Within the shadow of the pyramid of Caius Cestius."

On the tomb, by his own direction, are inscribed the words, "Here lies one whose name was writ in water." Shelley said of his burial - place, "It makes one in love with death to think of being buried in so sweet a place," - little thinking how soon all that remained of his own mortal tenement would be laid beside him. Keats said, while lying in his last illness, "I feel the daisies growing