clined to believe that, for all his noble impulses and aims, he was some way deficient in rational and moral sanity.”—J. C. Shairp. "Follow your instincts,' is his one moral rule, confounding the very lowest animal instincts with those lofty ideas of right which it was the will of Heaven he should retain.". Charles Kingsley. "Shelley's imagination busied itself with fusing together mental and sensuous impressions into symbols of rare beauty. A thin world of distilled loveliness and spontaneous instinct, but containing nothing that could be called the strength of divine love."-R. H. Hutton. "Shelley is probably the most remarkable instance of the purely impulsive character, to comprehend which requires a little detail. We fancy his mind placed in the light of thought, with pure subtle fancies playing to and fro. On a sudden an impulse arises; it is alone, and has nothing to contend with; it cramps the intellect, pushes aside the fancies, constrains the nature; it bolts forward into action. The Epipsychidion' could not have been written by a man who attached a moral value to constancy of mind. The evidence of Shelley's poems confirms this impression of him. The characters which he delineates have all this same kind of pure impulse. The reforming impulse is especially felt. Shelley's political opinions were likewise the effervescence of his peculiar nature. The love of liberty is peculiarly natural to the simple impulsive mind.” — Walter Bagehot. "Shelley had all the merit of generous aspirations and feelings, but he was singularly deficient in self-control. He was guided entirely by his impulses; his impulses were often high and lofty, but they had never been controlled."-Edward Dowden. "His emotional power dominated his intellectual power." -Parke Godwin. "His movements are represented as rapid, hurried, and uncertain. He would appear and disappear suddenly and unexpectedly; forget appointments; burst into wild laughter, heedless of his situation, whenever anything struck him as peculiarly ridiculous."-George MacDonald. ILLUSTRATIONS. "She would have clasped me to her glowing frame ; I might have heard her voice tender and sweet; "See, the mountains kiss high heaven, And the waves clasp one another; And the sunlight clasps the earth, And the moonbeams kiss the sea; If thou kiss not me?"-Love's Philosophy. "Thus to be lost and thus to sink and die Perchance were death indeed! Constantia, turn! In thy dark eyes a power like light doth lie, Even though the sounds which were thy voice which burn, Between thy lips, are laid to sleep; Within thy breath and on thy hair, like odor, it is yet, And from thy touch like fire doth leap. Even while I write, my burning cheeks are wet; Alas that the torn heart can bleed but not forget!" -To Constantia Singing. BYRON, 1788-1824 Biographical Outline.-George Gordon, sixth Lord Byron, born in Hollis Street, London, January 22, 1788; father, "a handsome profligate," who first eloped with a marchioness, then, after her divorce, married her, and after her death married Gordon's mother for her money; Byron was a cripple from his birth, the tendons of one heel being so contracted as to cause a limp; Byron's mother's fortune is soon wasted, all except an income of £150 a year, on which she retires to Aberdeen with the child, and lives in seclusion in Queen Street; for a time the father occupied separate apartments near by, and sometimes petted the child; but he soon obtained money from his wife or his sister and escaped to France, where he died in 1791, possibly by his own hand; soon afterward Mrs. Byron's income is raised to £190, on which she and her son continue to live; as a child Byron is treated by his mother with alternate violence and tenderness, sometimes worshipped and at others called "a lame brat ; he is passionately attached to his nurse, Mary Gray, and learns from Dr. Ewing, of Aberdeen, much of the lore of the English Bible; Byron first attends a private school, then learns some Latin from the son of his shoemaker, and is at the Aberdeen Grammar School from 1794 to 1798; as a schoolboy he is "warm-hearted, pugnacious, and idle;" during the vacations he visits the mountain districts about Ballanter, and dates thence his love of sublime scenery; in his eighth year he falls" violently " in love with a cousin, Mary Driff, and is nearly thrown into convulsions, in his sixteenth year, on hearing of her marriage. In 1794, Byron succeeds to the peerage, and in October, 66 1798, a pension of £300 is given to his mother by the Government; soon afterward she goes with Byron to Newstead, where there was a property belonging to the family worth about £1,500 a year; Mrs. Byron now settles at Nottingham, and sends the boy to the private school of one Rogers; he is tortured by the remedies applied to his foot by a quack named Lavendar, and writes a lampoon on that worthy; in 1799 he is taken by his mother to London, is placed under the care of a skilful surgeon, and is sent to Dr. Glennie's school, near by; Glennie finds him "playful, amiable, and intelligent, illgrounded in scholarship, but familiar with scriptures and a devourer of poetry;" while at Glennie's, Byron reads a pamphlet account of a shipwreck, which he afterward worked up in the plot of his "Don Juan," and here also he writes his first love-poem, addressed to his cousin, Margaret Parker, who died a year or two later; Byron declares that his passion produced its usual effect" in preventing sleep and appetite; by the summer of 1801 Mrs. Byron's temper and her meddling with the discipline of the boy become insupportable to Glennie and to Byron's guardian, Lord Carlisle, and he is sent to Harrow, where he becomes the pupil of Dr. Drury, who wins the boy's affection and respect; Byron detests the "daily drug" of classical lessons, and is always "idle, in mischief, or at play," but reads voraciously by fits, and excels in declamation; he hates Harrow until his last year and a half, when he becomes a leader; in spite of his lameness he is an athlete, and fights Lord Calthorpe for writing" damned atheist "under his name; in March, 1805, he leads the schoolboys in a revolt against the appointment of Dr. Butler, Drury's successor, whom Byron afterward satirized in "Hours of Idleness" under the name of "Pomposus;" he forms warm attachments at Harrow, and once offers to take half the thrashing inflicted by a bully on Sir Robert Peel; during his Harrow days Byron often visits Annesley Hall, the seat of his distant relatives, and there falls desperately in love with his cousin, Mary Anne Chaworth; he is greatly agitated on hearing of her marriage, in 1805, and this passion seems to have left the most permanent traces on his life. In October, 1805, he enters Trinity College as a "nobleman; " he is described by his tutor as "a youth of tumultuous passions," fond of riding, skating, and boxing, the patron of a prize-fighter, and a marvellous swimmer; in August, 1807, he boasts of swimming three miles in the Thames at London; he travels in a two-horse carriage with a groom, a valet, and two dogs; he has frequent and violent quarrels with his mother, one of which ends in her throwing a poker and tongs at his head; he is fond of gambling, and at one time travels with a girl in boy's clothes for a companion, whom he introduces as his younger brother; he admits, in 1808, being in debt nearly £10,000; at one time he brings a bear to college, and insists that the animal sit for a fellowship; his attendance at Cambridge is very irregular, but he takes M.A. July 4, 1808; in 1813 he presents £1,000 to a college friend in financial embarrassment; among his closest friends at Cambridge are John C. Hobhouse, afterward Lord Broughton, whose friendship with Byron lasted during life, and C. A. Matthews, a most decided and outspoken atheist; in his juvenile letters Byron boasts that he has been held up as the "votary of licentiousness and disciple of infidelity" and that he has read or looked through historical books and novels " by the thousand; " his memory is remarkable; in November, 1806, he prints privately a small volume of poems entitled "Fugitive Pieces," but soon destroys all but two copies on the protest of a Southwell clergyman against the license of one poem; in January, 1807, he distributes a hundred copies of the volume, reprinted without the offensive poem, under the title of "Poems on Various Occasions;" this volume attracts some favorable notice, and in the following summer he publishes "Hours of Idleness," a collection of his original poems and translations, including twenty of those before printed |