of Spinoza, that branded atheist, who so deeply impressed him with his religious fervor, I believe, was equally true of Shelley. He was "God-intoxicated." To know truth and fearlessly to use it, had grown into an enthusiasm; and that very act which called down on him such wrathful lightnings, was one of its unmistakable signs. To none would an appreciative sympathy have been more welcome; upon none would it have wrought greater good. That his -life had been singularly pure, even his bitterest enemies durst not deny. Being still very young, only eighteen, of slight experience, with an immature judgment, with no fixed habits of thought, radical changes might readily have been wrought in his beliefs. Nothing but excessive fright could have induced these learned men of Oxford to let slip this golden opportunity. They must have adjudged him smitten with incurable leprosy, to have thrust him out with such cruel haste, branding him with all the ignominy that lay within the bestowal of one of the most powerful corporations of learning in the world. A German University would have taken up the gauntlet which Shelley thus threw down, and not have suffered his belief in the impregnability of his position to become confirmed by so cowardly an answer as he here received.

The boy, thus rudely rebuffed, sought an asylum in his father's house, and should have found one. But the cold formalist, mainly interested in keeping the outside of the platter clean, sternly rebuked him, giving him to understand that unless he conformed to the religious usages of the family he must never again step foot on his threshold. Shelley, loyal to his convictions, promptly refused, although he knew that disgrace and poverty would join him company. If the doctors blundered, the father surely fell into crime. Granting that the boy was the most impracticable of dreamers, and that had his dreams come true, the moral world would have passed into eclipse, yet the fact that he was a mere boy, and nobly aimed at benefiting his age, should have summoned to his side the kindliest influences of home. Yet he was left upon the streets of London, to battle single-handed as best he could. It was a sad sight.

Shelley's individualism, already strongly marked, now passed at once into blind frenzy. Indeed, it would seem that he never afterward fully recovered his right reason. Queen Mab, begun a year and a half before as a purely imaginative poem on dreams, he at once converted into a systematic attack on society, doubling its

length and appending to it elaborate notes, in which whatever law or custom tended in the least to restrain the fullest personal freedom, was passionately condemned as tyrannical. This delicatelynerved dream-creature, thus trampled on by professing Christians, tortured but not tamed, learns to regard Christianity as the fostermother of crime, an organized oppression drenching the earth with the blood of innocency. Obedience to God he pronounces the servility a trembling slave pays a tyrant. As all religions threaten punishment for disbelief, a purely involuntary act, they, he claims, should all alike pass under condemnation. There is no personal Creator. Vulgar minds had mistaken a metaphor for a real being, a word for a thing. There is at best but an impersonal, pervading spirit, coeternal with the universe. Necessity is mother of the world, true liberty a mere shadow, a myth, a fable. Crime is madness, madness a disease, disease the sole result of meat diet. Prometheus chained to Caucasus personates mankind, who having applied fire to culinary purposes, or, in other words, having changed the character of their food, have become the helpless victims of the vulture of disease. Wealth is a power usurped by the few to compel the many to labor for their benefit. The rent-rolls of landed proprietors are pension lists, signs of sinecures, which reformers should no longer suffer to exist. Laws which support this system are the result of the conspiracy of a few, and would be swept from the statute book were not the masses ignorant and credulous. Law even pretends to control the intercourse of the sexes, in face of the fact that the very essence of love is liberty. Marriage is utterly unworthy of toleration. As well bind friends together by statute as man and wife. The present system of constraint makes hypocrites or open foes out of the majority of those thus bound. "In fact, religion and morality, as they now stand, compose a practical code of misery and servitude; the genius of human happiness must tear every leaf from the accursed Book of God, ere man can read the inscription on his heart. How would morality, dressed up in stiff stays and finery, start from her own disgusting image, should she look in the mirror of nature."

Thus we see Shelley pouring out invectives against every form of religious faith, against every safeguard to property or pure morals; an indiscriminate iconoclast, an agrarian, a free-lover, a fierce foe to all present forms of social order.

His mind cooled somewhat in after years, as his life grew more tranquil. Some of his views he modified; some, totally changed; some, however, he carried into practice and tenaciously maintained until death. He lived to advance as far as the Unitarian creed, and to be a firm believer in immortality. Such was the drift of his thought, such his increasing study of the Scriptures and unfeigned love for them, his natural candor, his tireless search for truth, his profound respect for the character of Christ, it is by no means improbable that had a few more years been spared him, and they warmed and lighted by sympathizing hearts, his respect would have turned to love, perhaps to adoration.

His opinion of marriage underwent little change. Had he followed his own inclinations, he would have lived with both Harriet and Mary without its sanction, utterly regardless of the world's opinion. He consented to its rites, not because he quailed before the approaching storm of calumny, but because principally upon them, being the weaker party, it would spend its violence. Even as it was, he and Mary lived together a full year without it, before Harriet's suicide secured him the divorce refused by English law. Shelley's idealism and individualism, originally given in such large measure, now almost preternaturally developed, render it possible, in my judgment, for Shelley to have been prompted by the purest motives in both the advocacy and practice of principles which, if generally adopted, would have corrupted and finally overturned society.

I now pass to his third most noticeable trait,-his enthusiasm. In this, too, from the first he stood preeminent; and in this, I regret to add, there soon appeared symptoms of disease.

The instances in his life, which I have already given under other heads, equally illustrate the intensity of his temperament; and so intimately is it also associated with his capacities to love and hope, it will again appear when I treat those divisions of my theme. But there are certain phases demanding a more special notice, and to them I now briefly direct attention.

His passion for boating was very remarkable. It was as impelling and as indestructible as any instinct of which a bee or a beaver becomes possessed. It appeared first in the making and floating of paper boats. Whenever he approached any little pond in his rambles, he would linger about its margin by the hour, held as by the

spell of enchantment. The keen wind sweeping across the common would cut his delicate face and hands, and cause his frail body to tremble with the cold; but with thoughts undiverted he would keep on twisting his bits of paper into tiny crafts. These as fast as finished he would launch, watching them with absorbing interest as they drifted away until they either capsized, or sank water-soaked, or safely landed on the opposite shore, his imagination meantime transforming the pond into a rough rolling sea, and his bits of paper into stately ships wrestling with tempests or dashing upon rocks, or safely riding at anchor at last in the offing of some foreign port. He always had one or more books in his pocket; and however expensive the volume, its fly-leaves, although he never disturbed the text, were prized only as excellent ship-timber; and it was utterly impossible to entice him from the spot so long as there was an available scrap of paper about his person. While residing at Bracknell he found a whimsical gratification for this mania for navigation, secretly setting sail on a stream near by in one of the tubs of his hostess. Its bottom falling out, he launched a second, but this meeting a similar fate, a third was launched from its ways in drydock, until there was not a single one left. Washing-day came. A search was made for the missing tubs, but in vain, for this strange mischief-maker had disappeared as well as his strange fleet.

A large portion of his life he spent on the water. There he found health, and freedom, and lightness of heart, and mental exaltation. His poems abound in river scenes, and scenes on the sea; some of exceeding wildness, as in "Alastor;" some, as in the "Witch of Atlas," bathed in a beauty so ethereal it would seem the artist, in some privileged hour of inspiration, had dipped his brush in the light of other worlds. The "Revolt of Islam," one of the most elaborate of his poems, he composed as he floated a half-year alone in his skiff on the Thames, reclining under alder and willow-fringed banks, or taking refuge at noonday in some of the little islands that had until then nestled unnoticed in the lap of the river. Frequently he would spend whole nights in his boat. This passion, however, proved

fatal at last; for Shelley having set sail from Leghorn for Lerici on his way to welcome Leigh Hunt to Italy, accompanied only by a single friend and a sailor boy, was overtaken by a sudden squall which whipped the waters into fury, and the little skiff so preciously freighted soon fell an easy prey to the hungry sea.

In conversation he was remarked for his impetuosity.

There was

a sort of contagious eagerness, an animation, at times a wild rapture in his talk. Among congenial friends he knew no reserve. His inmost life lay bare before them. Indeed, had his soul been cased in clear crystal it could not have been less concealed. His brain seemed on fire, for his blue eyes would flash, his cheeks crimson, his whole body tremble with pent-up emotions struggling impatiently for outlet, although his thoughts at the time were flowing in headlong torrent from his tongue. I speak without exaggeration. It is said that man is a microcosm. If nature's volcanic eruptions, with their earthquakes and hot, steaming lava, ever found their human analogies, it was in some of these impassioned outbursts of Shelley. His readiness of speech was equaled only by its finish and fullness. He spoke with ease and precision on the most abstruse themes. His ordinary conversation had a poetic flavor about it, for nothing seemed to appear to him except in some singular and pleasing light, and his extremely mobile face glassed his thoughts as perfectly as does the lake the woods that border it, or the clouds and birds that float and fly above its surface. Had he written as he talked, he would never have lacked readers. To all this there were added a frankness, a fearlessness and a forgetfulness of self rarely met with in social life, and these are each important avenues of communication. Such large capacity for utterance no doubt greatly helped the combustion of his thought. Smothered flames die. To live they must be granted access to the oxygen of the outer air.

When in conversation, so lost was he to all surroundings, so under the sway of his enthusiasm, his tea, of which he was very fond and drank largely, would go dripping from his shaking hand down his bosom upon his knees, into his shoes, on the carpet, and thus cup would follow cup in almost endless succession. It is recorded of him that he would frequently hold his auditors spell-bound through the entire night. Those thus charmed by him would at daybreak start up in perfect wonderment at the unconscious passage of the hours; and what is mysterious about it is, there would be left in their memories, after the strange fascination was ended, little else than a vague sense of extreme delight, the whole scene having vanished like the fabric of a dream. There was at times something wild and unearthly in his talk, a startling abruptness in its commencement and ending; so much so that Mr. Maddocks tells us that he was impressed by him as by the coming and going of a spirit.