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his father. These terms, however, were marriage a short time before, he now utterly unacceptable to the rebellious spirit makes up his mind to try and be converted to which they were addressed; and while to it. "Marriage, Godwin says, is hateful, Hogg, more dutiful, returned to his native detestable," he cries, in the beginning of county to study in York the humble but May; "a kind of ineffable sickening dishonourable trade of conveyancing, Shelley gust seizes my mind when I think of this remained in London in Poland Street, not most despotic, most unrequired fetter an attractive region, in lodgings which he which prejudice has forged to confine its had been attracted to by the paper with energies." But in August, as soon as this which the walls were covered, and which startling prospect has opened upon him, was printed in imitation of a trellis over- he writes to his friend, "I will hear your grown with grapes! Here and elsewhere arguments for matrimonialism;" and soon in London he remained, with occasional after declares that the plea of "impractivisits to his home in the country, and the cability, and, what is even worse, the dishouses of other relatives, till the end of proportionate sacrifice which the female is August, when the scenes suddenly shifted, called upon to make these arguments and a new chapter began in his career.

I cannot withstand." It seems to us It is not easy to know how the boy-poet that there is something extremely honourlived during this interval. Mr. Rossetti able to the lawless youth in this sudden tells us it was on the little savings of his conversion. So far from rejecting the sisters, which they sent to him by means principle of marriage in order to excuse of one of their schoolfellows, Harriet West- his own passions, he becomes converted to brook, a beautiful girl of sixteen. Wheth- the bond distasteful to him, as soon as the er this was so or not- and the fact that responsibility of another's happiness is Shelley himself positively informed Hogg thrown on his astonished shoulders. Had in May: "I have come to terms with my he, with his avowed principles and ruined father. I call them very good ones. I am character, carried off the imprudent girl to possess £200 per annum," makes it un- who threw herself on his protection, withlikely yet it is certain that Harriet was out troubling himself about the results, it at school with Shelley's sisters, though of would have been perfectly natural and in much inferior condition, her father being character. But there is a gleam of noble-. the keeper of a tavern- and that he be-ness in this sudden pause which comes in came acquainted with her through their the midst of his excitement this thought means. The philosopher of nineteen had for the other who trusts herself to him, a great many conversations upon profound which is equally fine and unexpected. To and interesting subjects with the open- our thinking, it is perhaps the finest thing minded and lovely-faced listener of sixteen, in all Shelley's life. who, for her part, was very sick of being at school, and of all the restraints which generally limit the independence of the British subject at that age. No doubt she learned a great deal from Shelley, who informs his friend on one occasion that "Miss Westbrook is reading Voltaire's 'Dictionnaire Philosophique,' "" perhaps not quite the kind of literature most appropriate in the circumstances. A little later he reproves Hogg gravely for the vulgar nonsense of supposing him to be in love with Harriet; but in his very next letter announces to him, that in consequence of the brutal tyranny of Harriet's father, "who has persecuted her in the most horrible way by endeavouring to compel her to go to school," "she has thrown herself on my protection." This conclusion, equally mad and foolish on the girl's side, is, however, received on the boy's with very highly honourable sentiment. He is staggered for the moment, and reels under the "flattering distinction;" but whereas he had expressed a very unfavourable opinion of

He had nowhere expressed any love for Harriet before this. He had spoken much of her, it is true, as a young man does of a girl to whom he is being gradually attracted; but, it would seem, was still far from having reached anything like passion, when the foolish impatient young creature thus took matters into her own hands. Shelley, however, does not appear to have ever thought of resisting. With the same high honour which we have just remarked upon, it is evident that he held himself committed to Harriet as soon as she had thus committed herself to him—a fact which shows that, under all the wildness of his strange nature, the soul of a true and knightly gentleman existed in him. He took her to Edinburgh, and married her there, according to his friend's account; and there, for the first time since their Oxford adventure, Hogg saw again his "incomparable friend.' The incomparable friend was nineteen, and his bride sixteen. They had as much knowledge of the world between them as two babies; and they

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had, or thought they had, two hundred | wisp, or the mischievous wanderer Puck a-year, and the displeasure and alienation himself, had a wilder, more fantastic existof all their friends. But none of these ence. The strange trio-for Harriet's things troubled the serenity of these sister remained with them—went to York dream-creatures. Never was there a pic- for a few weeks, to be near Hogg, then ture of more absolute yet pretty foolish- plunged suddenly off into Cumberland, to The three roamed about together, Keswick, where they made friends with the baby-pair being of another strain from Southey, and where Shelley commenced those impassioned lovers who dislike the the correspondence with William Godwin, presence of a third party; and at home in which was to influence so much his future their lodgings Harriet read aloud the most life. In three months' time the eccentric proper and instructive of books, and was party were off again from this seclusion, ever serene, blooming, smiling, neat, and and this time, of all places, in the world, it imperturbable one would have said the was Dublin they went to; and their obvery wife for an excitable and half-crazed ject (of all objects in the world) was "to poet a warm, placid, steady prop for forward as much as we can Catholic Emanhim to lean upon. To be sure, Nemesis cipation"! In pursuance of this, when he arrived after a few pleasant weeks, in the arrived in Dublin, Shelley published a shape of a grim schoolmistress-like elder pamphlet, "An Address to the Irish Peosister, who kept them all in order. But ple," and also proposals for an association except for this uncomfortable alien ele- of philanthropists to regenerate the nation ment, the match would not seem at first by intellectual and moral means. to have been at all an unsuccessful one. first was cheaply printed, and written in Harriet was always ready to pack up and language "wilfully vulgarized, in order to be off at an hour's notice. She was ready reduce the remarks it contains to the taste to move into Wales or Ireland or Cumber- and comprehension of the Irish peasantry." land, wherever novelty and Shelley bade Shelley himself is said to have distributed her. She was perfectly good-tempered and this pamphlet from the balcony of the insouciante. She gave in to all his disor- house he lived in to the passers-by. He derly ways, and was indeed as easy about also appeared and spoke at one meeting, meals and hours as he was, dispensing at least, where O'Connel and other notable with the one and forgetting the other; persons were present. Perhaps that asand so far the marriage was not such an tute demagogue was not sorry to have the absolute failure as, according to all human name of the son of an English member of laws, it ought to have been. Parliament in the list of his supporters at However, as was natural, it raised a new that early period. However, this wild and imbroglio, and apparently cut off Shelley aimless crusade, undertaken heaven knows from all further personal intercourse with why, and ending in nothing, did not last his family. The Shelleys have been wildly long. They went to Ireland in the end of vituperated, as indeed have been all who February, and by the 25th April we find have ventured to lift a hand against the the little family in Wales, from whence poet -a doom which even the present they took another flight to Devonshire, rewriter does not hope to escape; but in re-turning in autumn to Wales again, but to ality it is very evident that their son had a different spot. Their new residence was done everything a son could do to offend Tanyrallt in Carnarvonshire, and there ocand wound them. He had brought a pub-curred a mysterious accident, which Shellic stigma on his name; he had attempted ley either dreamt, invented, or really ento fill the mind of at least one of his sisters countered, no one can tell which. All at with his own wildly sceptical ideas; and once, from out of their solitude, frantic now he had made the most glaring mésal-shrieks from the young husband and wife liance on the very back of his other offences. made themselves audible to all their Parental anger had not got time to cool friends. Some wretch in human form had when it was thus fanned into fiercest blaze attempted to assasinate Shelley! again. We are never formally told, how- ball of the assassin's pistol had penetrated ever, that Shelley's two hundred a-year the poet's nightgown, and with headlong was withdrawn from him; and it is certain terror the little party fled from the house that he managed to live somehow, to make and country, once more plunging across continual changes and long journeys, the Channel to Ireland. The next thing amusements which are far from being in- we hear of them is that they are mooning expensive, during the three years which about Killarney, and enjoying themselves ensued. And what years these were! according to their fashion, after this asNever Pixie of the wilds, never Will-o'-the-tounding incident. No further inquiries,

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it appears, have thrown any light on this his deification of that secondary mental bewildering mystification, if mystification quality, resistance, and absolute incapacity it was. Mr. Hogg, it is evident, did not to understand the much loftier sentiment believe a word of it, and smiles at the of harmony, obedience, and subordination breathless prayer for a little breathing-qualities quite indispensable to any lofty time and twenty pounds, to enable him to ideal. Queen Mab" reveals another get over it, which the poet, still panting tendency equally strange. No one, we bewith his flight, makes to several of his lieve, ever has glanced at this audacious friends. The whole story is tragically ri- production, without an involuntary sense diculous, though it is evident that, whether of incongruity, a jar of something contrafalse or true, Shelley believed in it, and at- dictory, which at the first moment it is diftributed even some of the fluctuations of ficult to give a reason for. On further exhis own health to its results. This oc- amination, it will be seen that this involcurred in the beginning of March 1813. In untary jar arises from the extraordinary April they were again in London, where, choice at once of the name and preliminor in its neighbourhood, they continued ary machinery of the poem. The name until the next scene in the wild drama be- is already enshrined in the English soul. It is that of that tiniest empress, In shape no bigger than an agate-stone On the forefinger of an alderman" who drives over courtiers' knees and ladies' lips in her fairy chariot, daintiest and most fanciful of equipages. tricksome sprite is the apparition that presents herself before us even now, despite of Shelley, when we read the name. We think of her "waggon-spokes made of long spinners' legs," the hood of her vehicle of the wings of grasshoppers, her whip of cricket-bone, her team of little atomies, innocentest and most fantastic of imaginations. Shelley, all-indifferent to the foregone fancy, imposes the delightful levity of this name upon his solemnly didactic fairy who is grand as a tragedy queen.. Queen Mab, thus travestied, comes to the side of a sleeping maiden, Ianthe, lovely and innocent, and carries off the soul, released for the moment from its beautiful covering. The fair spirit and the fairy

It was, however, during this agitated. and troublous period that Shelley's first poem, and that which perhaps so obstinate is human feeling when once powerfully impressed-is most generally known at least by name, "Queen Mab," was written. It seems so vain at this period to rediscuss a poem already over-discussed, and which is so very unlikely either to attract or influence the present generation, that we will confine ourselves to quoting Mr. Rossetti's verdict on the subject, in which we substantially agree:

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"As to the poetical merits of Queen Mab,' I think the ordinary run of criticism is at fault. Some writers go to the ridiculous excess of speaking of it as not only a grand poem, but actually the masterpiece of its author: and even those who stop far short of this expatiate in loose talk about its splendid ideal passages, gorgeous elemental imagery, and the like. The fact is that Queen Mab' is a juvenile production in the fullest sense of the word- as nobody knew better than Shelley a few years afterwards; and furthermore, unless I am much mistaken, queen go off together in a state chariot of the most juvenile and unremarkable section of a very different form from that original one. It is a pearly and pellucid car," it is the ideal one. The part which has some considerable amount of promise, and even of with "celestial coursers," endowed with "filmy pennons and "reins of light." positive merit at times, is the declamatory part the passages of flexible and sonorous blank Such in its turgid grandeur is the maverse, in which Shelly boils over against kings chinery of the poem. And where do the or priests, or the present misery of the world voyagers go? To investigate the miseries of man, and in acclaiming augury of an era of of earth, the horrors of tyranny and reliregeneration. Those passages, with all their gion, the falsehood of revelation, the cruel obvious literary crudities and imperfections, are, fiction of Christianity! Never was in their way, of real mark, and not easily to be more strange contradiction to all poetic overmatched by other poetic writing of that anticipations and all rules of art and nature. least readable sort, the didactic-declamatory." It is so wildly perverse that the ingenuous reader can scarcely believe it serious. But to the poet the idea of such a hideous panorama exhibited by a fairy to a pure mortal maiden has no incongruity in it. His mind fails to seize the subtle sense of inappropriateness. He is unable to cape from the ruling tendency of his own

There is one thing, however, which we may note here, and which is everywhere and at all times characteristic of Shelley: a curious twist which his mind seems to have taken from the first, like some growing thing warped and thwarted by a freak of nature. We have already remarked upon

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spirit into the nature of any other. The stoncraft, where the two had met, whether succession of tableaux which, after grave accidentally or not we are not told; but and long preparation, Milton permits Ra- where Shelley, "in burning words, poured phael to show to Adam, is utterly exceed-out the tale of his wild past-how he ed in horror and melancholy by the fierce had suffered, how he had been misled, and scenes unfolded by Mab to Ianthe without how, if supported by her love, he hoped any preparation or any purpose at all. in future years to enrol his name with the The same curious want of perception re- wise and good who had done battle for their curs constantly in all Shelley's works; fellow-men, and been true, through all adeverything seems to have been twisted to verse storms, to the cause of humanity." him out of naturalness, out of harmony This sentimental nonsense, which is very his sweet bells are always jangled. He like Mary Shelley's own outpourings, and turns to darkness, and mystery, and de- no doubt came from her, is very much less spair, and horror wantonly, when all the calculated to mollify and touch the reader sweeter secrets of nature are open to him; over the story of this strange transaction, and without knowing, with the most curi- than are the following tremulous verses, ous obtuseness in the midst of his genius, in which the reflection of a certain strugunfolds all this horror and misery to us gle and effort at self-restraint seems eviby the most unfit interpreters-by the in- dent:tervention of a fairy, and the dreams of a sleeping girl.

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We need not add anything about the opinions expressed in this poem. It is these only, thanks to the clamour of many good but foolish people, that have kept this audacious piece of juvenile braggadocio afloat. The ideal part of "Queen" Mab" is evidently founded on "Thalaba," which was, it is said, Shelley's favourite poem at this period, and would have perished long ago out of mortal ken but for the bold atheism of its second part and of the notes, which the horror of the many has kept a certain life, or rather tradition of life, in. Had it not filled hosts of people who never read it with this visionary would, fright and hatred, "Queen Mab " we do not doubt, have been dead and forgotten long ago.

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Upon my heart thy accents sweet
Of peace and pity fell like dew
On flowers half-dead; thy lips did meet
Mine tremblingly, thy dark eyes threw
Their soft persuasion on my brain,
Charming away its dream of pain.
We are not happy, sweet! our state

Is strange, and full of doubt and fear-
More need of words that ills abate.

Reserve or censure come not near
Our sacred friendship, lest there be
No solace left for thee or me.

"Gentle and good and mild thou art,

Nor can I live if thou appear
Aught but thyself, or turn thy heart

Away from me, or stoop to wear
The mask of scorn, although it be
To hide the love thou feel'st for me."

This ominous poem indicates with sufIn June of the year 1814, another new ficient distinctness what was coming; and personage becomes visible in Shelley's about the middle of June Shelley left the wild story. His friend Hogg had gone cottage at Bracknell, where he had been with him to Godwin's shop, and into an living with his wife, and which for some inner room, where, however, the philoso- time had been growing more and more pher was not to be found. While the poet uncongenial to him as a home, and went to paced about in impatience, "the door was London. He does not seem ever to have partially and softly opened. A thrilling seen Harriet again, nor his child, the baby voice called Shelley!' A thrilling voice Ianthe, who had been born a short time beanswered 'Mary!' and he darted out of fore; but whether he deserted her cruelly the room. This is the first time that or separated from her politely and amicathe second partner of Shelley's existence bly, is a matter which between them the becomes apparent to us. In this same biographers have not yet decided. He did month were written some verses addressed part from her, however, absolutely and to her, which breathe all the 'troublous for ever, and some six weeks after started passion of a soul perhaps still trembling for the Continent with his Mary, and beand doubting what its next step was to be. gan an altogether new period of his life. That they had by this time betrayed their This event is treated with such philosophmutual love to each other is evident. Ac-ic calm by everybody concerned that it cording to Lady Shelley, this betrayal oc- would be a kind of anachronism to pause curred in a very strange scene, in St Pan- and discuss it, as if it bore any relation to cras' churchyard, by the grave of Mary morals or the abstract standard of right Godwin's mother, the famous Mary Wol-' and wrong. Nought was done in hate,

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but all in honour." Harriet, if abandoned | far as a boat could go, spending about a was still thought of with perfect friendli- fortnight in the excursion; and with charness, it would appear. Poor soul! she acteristic stubbornness struggling all the was not far off the birth of her second way against the current, instead of adoptchild! an aggravation of her position ing the easier expedient generally prewhich no one seems to have taken into ac- ferred by aquatic persons, of coming down count; but it is to be hoped that the fact and floating with the stream. This, howthat "Mary also continued on amicable ever, is a remark by the way; and it is terms with her," was some consolation to more interesting to note a much stronger the young mother not yet twenty. She instance of poetic perverseness: which is went to Bath, to her father, while the oth- the total absence of any influence either er pair went off to Switzerland. On their from the glorious Windsor woods or the return from their trip in autumn, Mr. Ros- Thames in the poem of " Alastor." There setti informs us that Shelley "consulted is a voyage-but it is a wild voyage, in a legal friend with a view to reintroduc- which a boat unguided is driven "through ing Harriet into his household as a perma- the white ridges of the chafed sea." There nent inmate it is to be presumed, strictly is a river, but it is a "boiling torrent" and solely as a friend of the connubial pair, flowing through a cavern, and making its Mary and himself; and it required some way through crags which "closed around little cogency of demonstration on the with black and jagged arms" (by the way, part of the lawyer to convince the prime- the boat in this case too continues its val intellect of Shelley "that this arrange- course up the stream); and there is a ment was an impracticable one. But not-forest, but it has not the daylight breadth withstanding these amiable intentions, the of English woods. From all the sweet unfortunate young woman drowned herself a little more than two years after, and there was an end of her young life and one portion of the poet's. It is said he was deeply affected by this occurrence; and we must hope it was true, though indeed no evidence is given from his own hand of any sort of penitence or sorrow either in prose or verse.

nature around him he draws nothing, or next to nothing. His poet-hero roams wildly over the world in search of a lost ideal; but that world is exclusively a dream-world, a wild composition of caves and rocks, of icy summits and putrid marshes, of tropical woods clothed with brilliant-flowered parasites, of grey precipices and rock-rooted solemn pines. Shelley's life thus divides itself into two There is a wild and melancholy cadence epochs, the reign of Harriet and that of about the poem, and many beautiful lines; Mary; the latter being, so far as poetry is but the weird strangeness of every detail, concerned, much the richer of the two. and the absolute want of human features Whether, however, this was Mary's influ- in the vague hero, make it hard to hold ence, or merely the natural development fast the strain, a peculiarity common to of his mind, it would be difficult to say. many of Shelley's works. "In 'Alastor,'" He had scarcely reached man's estate says Mr. Rosetti, "we at last have the even at the period when he formed this genuine, the immortal Shelley," and he second connection, being but twenty-two designates the poem as "full-charged with years old, though for so many years he meaning." This may be; but the meanhad had no guidance but that of his own per- ing is one which most readers will strive verse and most wayward will, and no code in vain to grasp, and which, for our own but that of inclination. The newly-united part, we do not think worth the pains. pair went to Switzerland, as we have said; Shelley, however, has certainly struck here then returned, and-in consequence of the key-note of that melodious flow of the favourable change in his fortune pro-word-music which is his undoubted posduced by the death of Shelley's grand- session.

father, which made him the immediate In 1816 the pair went again to Switzheir of a considerable entailed estate - erland, and met with Lord Byron, in they took a handsome house at Bishop-whose constant company they seem to have gate, near Windsor, on the edge of the Great Park and Forest. Here they seem to have remained more than a year, and here the poem of "Alastor" was written. While here they made an excursion on the Thames, in which it appears to us Shelley showed his usual perversity. They went up the river as far as Lechlade, almost as

lived for some time. This intercourse had results which would have made any other pair eschew the noble poet's society, but which do not seem to have affected the philosophic Shelleys. The story, however, belongs rather to Byron's life than to that of our present subject, whose own misdemeanours are enough for him to carry.

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