plunging across the Channel to Ireland. The next thing we hear of them is that they are mooning about Killarney, and enjoying themselves according to their fashion, after this astounding incident. No further inquiries, it appears, have thrown any light on this bewildering mystification, if mystification it was. Mr. Hogg, it is evident, did not believe a word of it, and smiles at the breathless prayer for a little breathing-time and twenty pounds, to enable him to get over it, which the poet, still panting with his flight, makes to several of his friends. The whole story is tragically ridiculous, though it is evident that, whether false or true, Shelley believed in it, and attributed even some of the fluctuations of his own health to its results. This occurred in the beginning of March, 1813. In April they were again in London, where, or in its neighborhood, they continued until the next scene in the wild drama began. 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: "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, the most juvenile and unremarkable section of it is the ideal one. The part which has some considerable amount of promise, and even of positive merit at times, is the declamatory partthe passages of flexible and sonorous blank verse, in which Shelley boils over against kings or priests, or the present misery of the world of man, and in acclaiming augury of an era of regeneration. Those passages, with all their obvious literary crudities and imperfections, are, in their way, of real mark, and not easily to be overmatched by other poetic writing of that least readable sort, the didactic-declamatory." 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 his deification of that secondary mental quality, resistance, and absolute incapacity to understand the much loftier sentiment of harmony, obedience, and subordination-qualities quite indispensable to any lofty ideal. "Queen Mab" reveals anoth er tendency equally strange. No one, we believe, ever has glanced at this audacious production, without an involuntary sense of incongruity, a jar of something contradictory, which at the first moment it is difficult to give a reason for. On further examination, it will be seen that this involuntary jar arises from the extraordinary choice at once of the name and preliminary machinery of the poem. The name 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. This 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 cricketbone, 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 queen go off together in a state chariot of a very different form from that original one. It is a "pearly and pellucid car," with "celestial coursers," endowed with "filmy pennons" and "reins of light." Such in its turgid grandeur is the machinery of the poem. And where do the voyagers go? To investigate the miseries of earth, the horrors of tyranny and religion, the falsehood of revelation, the cruel fiction of Christianity! Never was a more strange contradiction to all poetic anticipations and all rules of art and nature. 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 escape from the ruling tendency of his own spirit into the nature of any other. The succession of tableaux which, after grave and long preparation, Milton permits Raphael to show to Adam, is utterly exceeded in horror and melancholy by the fierce scenes unfolded by Mab to Ianthe without any preparation or any purpose at all. The same curious want of perception recurs constantly in all Shelley's works; every thing seems to have been twisted to him out of naturalness, out of harmony his sweet bells are always jangled. He turns to darkness, and mystery, and despair, and horror wantonly, when all the sweeter secrets of nature are open to him; and without knowing, with the most curious obtuseness in the midst of his genius, unfolds all this horror and misery to us by the most unfit interpreters-by the intervention of a fairy, and the dreams of a sleeping girl. We need not add any thing about the opinions expressed in this poem. It is these only, thanks to the clamor 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 favorite 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 a tradition of life, in. Had it not filled hosts of people who never read it with this visionary fright and hatred, "Queen Mab" would, we do not doubt, have been dead and forgotten long ago. In June of the year 1814, another new personage becomes visible in Shelley's wild story. His friend Hogg had gone with him to Godwin's shop, and into an inner room, where, however, the philosopher was not to be found. While the poet paced about in impatience, "the door was partially and softly opened. A thrilling voice called Shelley! A thrilling voice answered 'Mary' and he darted out of the room." This is the first time that the second partner of Shelley's existence becomes apparent to us. In this same month were written some verses addressed to her, which breathe all the troublous passion of a soul perhaps still trembling and doubting what its next step was to be. That they had by this time betrayed their mutual love to each other is evident. According to Lady Shelley, this betrayal occurred in a very strange scene, in St. Pancras' churchyard, by the grave of Mary Godwin's mother, the famous Mary Wolstoncraft, where the two had met, whether accidentally or not we are not told; but where Shelley, "in burning words, poured out the tale of his wild past-how he had suffered, how he had been misled, and how, if supported by her love, he hoped in future years to enrol his name with the wise and good who had done battle for their fellow-men, and been true, through all adverse storms, to the cause of humanity." This sentimental nonsense, which is very like Mary Shelley's own outpourings, and no doubt came from her, is very much less calculated to modify and touch the reader over the story of this strange transaction, than are the following tremulous verses, in which the reflection of a certain struggle and effort at self-restraint seems evident: "Upon my heart thy accents sweet Of peace and pity fell like dew Reserve or censure come not near Gentle and good and mild thou art, This ominous poem indicates with sufficient distinctness what was coming; and about the middle of June Shelley left the cottage at Bracknell, where he had been living with his wife, and which for some time had been growing more and more uncongenial to him as a home, and went to London. He does not seem ever to have seen Harriet again, nor his child, the baby Ianthe, who had been born a short time before; but whether he deserted her cruelly, or separated from her politely and amicably, is a matter which between them the biographers have not yet decided. He did part from her, however, absolutely and for ever, and some six weeks after started for the Continent with his Mary, and began an altogether new period of his life. This event is treated with such philosophic calm by every body concerned that it would be a kind of anachronism to pause and discuss it, as if it bore any relation to morals or the abstract standard of right and wrong. "Nought was done in hate, but all in honor." Harriet, if abandoned, was still thought of with perfect friendliness, it would appear. Poor soul! she was not far off the birth of her second child! an aggravation of her position which no one seems to have taken into account; but it is to be hoped that the fact that "Mary also continued on amicable terms with her," was some consolation to the young mother not yet twenty. She went to Bath, to her father, while the other pair went off to Switzerland. On their return from their trip in autumn, Mr. Rossetti informs us that Shelley "consulted a legal friend with a view to re-introducing Harriet into his household as a permanent inmate-it is to be presumed, strictly and solely as a friend of the connubial pair, Mary and himself; and it required some little cogency of demonstration on the part of the lawyer to convince the primeval intellect of Shelley" that this arrangement was an impracticable one. But notwithstanding these amiable intentions, the unfortunate young woman drowned herself a little more than two years after, and there was an end of her young life and of 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. Shelley's life thus divides itself into two epochs, the reign of Harriet and that of Mary; the latter being, so far as poetry is concerned, much the richer of the two. Whether, however, this was Mary's influ ence, or merely the natural development of his mind, it would be difficult to say. He had scarcely reached man's estate even at the period when he formed this second connection, being but twenty-two years old, though for so many years he had had no guidance but that of his own perverse and most wayward will, and no code but that of inclination. The newly-united pair went to Switzerland, as we have said; then returned, and-in consequence of the favorable change in his fortune produced by the death of Shelley's grandfather, which made him the immediate heir of a considerable entailed estate-they took a handsome house at Bishopgate, 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 far as a boat could go, spending about a fortnight in the excursion; and with characteristic stubborness struggling all the way against the current, instead of adopting the easier expedient generally preferred by aquatic persons, of coming down and floating with the stream. This, however, is a remark by the way; and it is more interesting to note a much stronger instance of poetic perverseness: which is the total absence of any influence either from the glorious Windsor woods or the Thames in the poem of "Alastor." There is a voyage but it is a wild voyage, in which a boat unguided is driven "through the white ridges' of the chafed sea." There is a river, but it is a "boiling torrent" flowing through a cavern, and making its way through crags which "closed around with black and jagged arms," (by the way, the boat in this case too continues its course up the stream;) and there is a forest, but it has not the daylight breadth of English woods. From all the sweet 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 gray precipices and rock-rooted solemn pines. There is a wild and melancholy cadence about the poem, and many beau tiful lines; but the weird strangeness of every detail, and the absolute want of human features in the vague hero, make it hard to hold fast the strain, a peculiarity common to many of Shelley's works. "In Alastor,'" says Mr. Rossetti, "we at last have the genuine, the immortal Shelley," and he designates the poem as "fullcharged with meaning." This may be; but the meaning is one which most readers will strive in vain to grasp, and which, for our own part, we do not think worth the pains. Shelley, however, has certainly struck here the key-note of that melodious flow of word-music which is his undoubted possession. ed to have had any warm paternal feeling for the child. And we can not see, the question being once raised, how any judge could have decided differently. On one side was the grandfather Westbrook, who had maintained and sheltered the hapless babies, and had settled, we are told, £2000 upon them, securing their livelihood, and who was, it is to be supposed, a person of ordinary decency and morality; on the other, the father who had deserted them while one was still unborn, who had taken no notice of them up to this moment, who had lived for years in what the English law frankly calls (an ugly word, unpleasant to write) adultery, who had entertained from his youth, and still ostentatiously professed, sentiments not only contrary to all religion, but broadly opposed to every thing which the majority of mankind considers morality. What could any Chancellor have done? Fortunately or unfortunately, genius does not counterbalance morals in the eyes of English law; and so far as we can see, genius was Shelley's only claim upon the consideration of his country. To say that he did what most people think wrong, on principle, is, if you will, an excuse for himself personally to himself and a limited circle of congenial souls; but it is no excuse, rather an aggravation, to mankind, which depends for its very existence upon the maintenance of moral law. In short, it is extremely difficult to perceive what the ground is for that infinite indignation which, from Lady Shelley to Mr. Rossetti, every biographer of the poet has expressed on this subject. Shelley's only possible claim upon his children was that lowest right of nature which is conferred by the simple fact that he was their father; and the man whose latest imagination had been that of a pair of lovers, born brother and sister, could not be supposed to attach much importance to that merely accidental circumstance. Had they been torn from his affectionate arms, taken out of his kindly house, even on account of his immorality, the complaints of his champions would have been reasonable. But when it is understood that he never saw them, did not know them, and had to all appearance expressed no interest whatever in them, we confess we are utterly bewildered to know what the commotion is about. "Logical minds, which accept saving faith' as a principle, are entitled, In 1816 the pair went again to Switzerland, and met with Lord Byron, in whose constant company they seem to have 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 misdemeanors are enough for him to carry. In Switzerland, Mrs. Shelley (so-called) produced that extraordinary romance of "Frankenstein," which affected the mind of the time, as it must affect every individual reader, like a horrible nightmare. They then returned and settled for a time in Great Marlow on the Thames, and in the year 1818 finally left England for Italy. In the interval occurred Harriet's death; the marriage which legalized the tie between Shelley and Mary; the composition of the "Revolt of Islam," and the Chancery suit which deprived Shelley of the charge of Harriet's children, and which every man and woman who has yet written on the subject has denounced with more vehemence and heat, we think, than reason. According to all that we can gleam from the various biographies, Shelley had never seen these children of his repudiated marriage, and he does not even mention them, so far as we are aware, with any kind of affection. They are mere names as they stand in all the multitudinous pages which rhapsodize over the misery of the "outraged father." The poor little boy had been born after the separation; and the impetuous poet, who had not even the patience to wait until this infant saw the light before he left its mother, can not certainly be suppos in the ratio of their logicality, to accept Lord Eldon's judgment as righteous," Mr. Rossetti says, with a sneer. We are quite unable, however, to see what "saving faith" has to do with the subject; nor can we treat as any thing but extravagant nonsense the wild talk about the "monstrous injustice" of this decree, the wickedness of the man who "robbed" the poet" of his offspring," or the crushing effect of this blow upon the young father, who never, till this moment, had troubled himself in the smallest degree about his offspring. It seems to have been one of his wild fancies -gravely recorded in all these books, as if the poor child's illegitimacy had not made such a proceeding absolutely impossible that Shelley feared some similar attempt to tear from him his baby son, the first child of Mary, and that this most fantastic and groundless fear hastened his final departure for Italy. The state of his health is also given as a reason for this; and as we have no longer the outspoken and candid guidance of Mr. Hogg in respect to these particulars, we have no right to doubt what is said. Hogg is, however, very skeptical about Shelley's delicacy of health in the earlier portion of his career, and laughs at it with his usual somewhat coarse and patronizing superiority, as a pretense always at hand to justify any new restlessness. This view of the subject seems to have been practically confirmed by the Italian physician Vacca, who recommended Shelley to give up medical help and to live quietly, as the best means of keeping himself in health-an advice not likely to have been given had there been any thing of a serious character in his ailments. However, whether it was for health, or for fear, or for the love of change, the family left Marlow, and went finally to Italy. The life in Marlow forms a pleasant episode in their restless existence. We think of the poet rowing up to the sweet shade of the Bischam woods, and allowing his boat to drift down under those pleasant shadows, among the tangled waterlilies, through lights and shades which are never more delicious than on a river-with a softened sentiment. His aspect is symbolical, and brings a sympathetic tenderness, half pity, half wondering sadness, into the spectator's eyes. It is no man of independent soul and action upon whom we look as he glides in dreamy motion along the green and pleasant shore. Rather it is the fantastic little bark with a light in it, such as Hindoo girls send down the sacred river to divine their fate by. How long will it go on burning, that fitful earth-star? How long, chance and wind and the gentle currents favoring, will it float, till the inevitable moment comes, and the darkened water quenches its fateful glimmer? So does this wild soul float on, half-conscious, subject to every breath of capricious air and every unnoted eddy, with wild locks lifted by the breeze, and wild eyes that see nothing-eyes full of inward contemplation, unmoved by the sweet reality of nature round him, yet soothed by it, seeing not as men see. Probably the dullest gentle soul that has floated after him over those soft waters has carried away as much actual impression from them as Shelley did. Those wealthy murmurous woods, those silvery reaches, the sunshiny haze of supreme summer, the ripple of the soft water gurgling against his boat,-none of those enchanted sights or sounds find any echo in the poet's verse; but they lulled him while he dreamed of other things, to him more splendid: "The homely nurse does all she can To make her foster-child, her inmate man, Forget the splendor he has known, And that celestial palace whence he came." It is very difficult to take up for the purpose of criticism such a poem as the "Revolt of Islam." Its extreme length, its attenuated thread of story, its absence of human character, and even its bewildering melodiousness and beauty of diction, confuse the critical faculties. We are expected to learn a great deal from it; indeed Shelley himself puts it upon a certain solemn footing: "Much of what the volume contains was written with the same feeling, as real, though not so prophetic," he says, "as the communications of a dying man ;" but what it is that we are to learn it is extremely difficult to say, except that tyranny is hateful, and some other broad principles of a similar kind. The length of the poem, however, and its sweet monotony of music, baffle the attempts of any but a diligent reader. Indeed we should be disposed to say that no reader above twenty could at the present day give a sufficiently long strain of time and attention to master this word-sonata - this flood of linked sweetness and musical discord. The ordinary mass of humanity, for whom all truly |