ing public opinion against Shelley. He had already published a good deal of poetry that was undeniably intended to show his hatred and contempt for the ordinary religion and government of his own day-poetry the wildness of which is only to be excused by its own brilliance and the poet's youth. And besides, he had again eloped, this time with Mary Godwin, another sixteen year old girl, daughter of a philosopher and novelist well known in those days, though now forgotten. It was at this time that he was denied the right to bring up or even to see the children of his first marriage. Soon after, in anger and disgust with England, he fled abroad, and never afterwards returned. Practically all his great poetry was written in the next five years. He wandered over Italy, stopping here and there, in Florence, Rome, or Pisa, as his fancy chose, for weeks or months at a time. He met Byron, whose fame as a poet was at that time far greater than Shelley's own; in fact Shelley himself firmly believed Byron to be much the abler man; but the two poets had an excellent influence on each other, Byron learning grace from Shelley, and Shelley perhaps clearness from Byron. At first he was in bad health; later, however, he grew stronger than he had ever been. Most of the time he was happy in spite of his exile, and even in spite of the death of the two children of his second marriage. He was wedded to a woman who passionately loved him and who brought out the best that was in him; he was surrounded by few, but those very dear, friends-and above all he was conscious of being able to do better and nobler work every year. He wrote constantly, sometimes very rapidly-seven or eight long poems, many lyrics, and even a play, which has been called by many critics the finest poetic drama in English since Shakespeare. His verses gradually lost their wildness and vagueness, and became at the same time more musical and easier to understand. Perhaps the best known of all, the Adonais, was written the year before Shelley died. It is an elegy, or lament upon the death of John Keats, his fellow-poet. Little if any poetry of the sort has ever surpassed it. The last stanza of the Adonais is as follows: "The breath whose might I have invoked in song Whilst, burning through the inmost veil of heaven, Beacons from the abode where the eternal are." To call this a prophecy of Shelley's own death would be absurd. Yet in the light of what happened the lines have a strange interest. In the spring and summer of 1822, Shelley was living on the Gulf of Spezzia on the coast of Italy. Hearing that a friend from England, Leigh Hunt, had arrived at Leghorn, fifty miles away, Shelley and a young friend named Williams sailed over to see him. They spent a week at Leghorn, and on July 8, 1822, set out for home. The weather for weeks had been dry and fine; but hardly had they left port when a sudden storm drove down from the hills. A watcher in the lighthouse on shore counted seven sails before the storm struck; half an hour later, when the sun came out again, he saw only six. Shelley's vessel had gone down. Afterwards divers found her sunk so quietly in sixty feet of water that not even the cushions of the seats were gone. More than a week later the bodies of both Shelley and Williams were cast on shore miles away. By order of the government both were burned; but Shelley's ashes and his heart were saved, and buried in the little Roman cemetery near to Keats. Concerning many of Shelley's longer poems there is much dispute. They are rightly called vague, obscure; they have been thought, in their passionate protest against society and the accepted order of things, very wrong. But a hundred years has helped them; what in its own day was wild seems less wild now, and their beauty has not dulled. As for the lyrics, each successive generation has united to praise them. The Skylark, the Ode to the West Wind, The Cloud, and many others, have a music magical, a delicacy almost supernatural, a feeling as strong as it is pure. They sound not as if a man had written them, but as if a bird had sung them. "Ethereal spirit, pilgrim of the sky!"-so Wordsworth described the skylark, and it is Shelley's best description. . The material of these lyrics, it may be noted, is almost all tinged with melancholy.. In such a poem, for example, as The Indian Serenade, where the lover is addressing his mistress, and where we might expect therefore a certain happiness to express itself-even there, melancholy reigns. The Stanzas Written in Dejection are among the saddest in English poetry; the Dirge is as mournful as the cry of a lost child; even The Cloud and The Skylark have an undercurrent of depression. The fact is, Shelley was too finely strung ever to be happy. He saw, as we all see, that this world is full of suffering-men, women, and little children dying of hunger all around us, and sinking into wretchedness of spirit worse than death. He saw it, as we all see it; but most of us can forget it in other interests, and Shelley could never forget it. So his most beautiful songs are sad songs. For gaiety, for lightness of spirit, we most turn to Scott, to Moore, to Keats even. But for sheer and sincere pathos, unblunted by sentimentality, these shorter verses of Shelley stand supreme. V JOHN KEATS Life and Works JOHN KEATS, latest born of the group of poets that distinguished the early years of the nineteenth century, died so young that he may be said hardly to have had a history. He lived less than twenty-six years. It is interesting to compare his career with that of Thomas Carlyle, who was born in the same year with Keats, 1795. Carlyle, by 1860, was perhaps the most famous person in the English literature of his day; even now he would probably be voted by most critics the ablest prose writer of his century. Yet if Carlyle had died when Keats died, in 1821, he would have died unknown. We should not have had even a paragraph in the biographical dictionaries to tell us that he once existed. His only epitaph, his only monument would have been a line on some crude headstone in a forgotten Scottish cemetery. Of course writers of prose do as a rule develop later than poets do. But if Wordsworth had died at twenty-five, or Coleridge, or Scott, or Tennyson, or Browning, the world to-day would remember nothing of them. Shelley was drowned at thirty; but he did all his great work in his last five years. Byron per ished in the swamps of Missolonghi at thirty-six, but at twenty-five Byron was still a passionate boy, with little or nothing written that hinted definitely of immortality. Perhaps no other writer of English ever achieved such poetic triumph in his first quarter century as Keats did. His early death was for this reason one of the most mournful things that the history of English poetry has known. Keats was a cockney. He was born over a stable in London, of an undistinguished though not a povertystricken family. It is said that like many other Londoners of his rank he had difficulty in pronouncing his h's correctly. He was from the first a boy of a strong temper, with a love of fighting that amounted to a passion,-a short, broad-shouldered, fiery lad, quick to resent and quick to forgive. All his short life he was on terms of the closest intimacy with his two younger brothers-George, born two years after John, but bigger and more powerful, and Tom, two years younger still, a frail boy who died of consumption at eighteen. But George Keats has said of John-"we fought fiercely ... we loved, jangled and fought alternately." Another schoolmate wrote: "Keats . . . would fight anyone-morning, noon and night. It was meat and drink to him." In 1818, Keats himself writes-"went to the theater here the other night . . . and got insulted, which I ought to remember to forget to tell anybody; for I did not fight and as yet have had no redress." About the same time he discovered a stalwart young butcher tormenting a cat, and in a stand-up fight, by rounds, thrashed him soundly. But the testimony to his pugnacity is far exceeded in amount by the evidence of his charm. "The generosity and daring of his character, with the extreme beauty and animation of his face . . . captivated the boys." "He was not |