BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE.

Percy Bysshe Shelley was born at Field Place, near Horsham in Sussex, August 4, 1792. He was educated at Eton and at Oxford. While a student at the latter place, he wrote a pamphlet, entitled The Necessity of Atheism, which caused his expulsion from college. This occurred in 1811, and in the same year he married Harriet Westbrook, from whom, three years later, he separated. In 1816 he married Mary Godwin. In 1818 he left England for Italy, where he remained until his death by drowning in the gulf of Spezia, July 8, 1822. His first considerable poem, "Queen Mab," was published in 1813; "Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude," in 1816; "The Revolt of Islam," in 1818; and "Epipsychidion" and "Adonais" in 1821. His two dramas, the "Cenci" and "Prometheus Unbound," were issued, the former in 1819, the latter in 1821.

"Shelley's early rupture with the English world," says Hales, "lost him all the advantages which a fuller experience of it and a longer intercourse with it might have given. That world was no less estranged from him than he from it. It misunderstood and misinterpreted him throughout his career. It covered him with its opprobrium. Assuredly, he was not the man that world painted. It by no means follows that because Shelley did not repeat the ordinary creeds, and even mocked at them, that he believed nothing. Shelley was never in his soul an atheist: it was simply impossible with his nature that he should be; what he did deny and defy was a deity whose worship seemed, as he saw the world, consistent with the reign of selfishness and bigotry."

Lord Macaulay says: "We doubt whether any modern poet has possessed in an equal degree some of the highest qualities of the great ancient masters. The words bard and inspiration, which seem so cold and affected when applied to other modern writers, have a perfect propriety when applied to him. He was not an author, but a bard. His poetry seems not to have been an art, but an inspiration. Had he lived to the full age of man, he might not improbably, have given to the world some great work of the very highest rank in design and execution."

Leigh Hunt says: "Assuredly, had he lived, he would have been the greatest dramatic writer since the days of Elizabeth. In general, if Coleridge is the sweetest of our poets, Shelley is at once the most ethereal and most gorgeous—the one who has clothed his thoughts in draperies of the most evanescent and most magnificent words and imagery. His poetry is as full of mountains, seas, and skies, of light, and darkness, and the seasons, and all the elements of our being, as if Nature herself had written it, with the Creation and its hopes newly cast around her, not, it must be confessed, without too indiscriminate a mixture of great and small, and a want of sufficient shade—a certain chaotic brilliancy, 'dark with excess of light.'"

Another English poet says: "Shelley outsang all poets on record but some two or three throughout all time; his depths and heights of inner and outer music are as divine as nature's, and not sooner exhaustible. He was alone the perfect singing-god; his thoughts, words, deeds, all sang together."

"The poet who creates a new ideal, and fills men's hearts with the flame of a divine desire, is a practical force in the stream of human development—and this Shelley has done. So much of his poetry is full of the tender melancholy of the moonlight he loved, that the world is still half blind to his highest bardic character, as the poet of a spiritual dawn, the eager spirit who flies forward—

Even his moonlight seems to reflect the beams of some unrisen sun; and his sunlight has all the ethereal exhilaration of that of the first hours of a glorious day."—John Todhunter.

Other Poems to be Read: Adonais; The Sensitive Plant; The Cloud; Mount Blanc; To Wordsworth; The Euganean Hills; Liberty; Alastor; Prometheus Unbound.

References: De Quincey's Essays; Jeaffreson's The Real Shelley; Shelley (English Men of Letters), by J. A. Symonds; Leigh Hunt's Imagination and Fancy; Rossetti's Memoir of Shelley; Dowden's Life of P. B. Shelley; Moore's Life of Lord Byron; Middleton's Shelley and his Writings; Medwin's Life of Shelley; Trelawney's Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron; Todhunter's Shelley: A Study.