was too spiritual and romantic. Hazlitt,
himself a Radical, wrote of Shelley: "He has a fire in his eye, a fever
in his blood, a maggot in his brain, a hectic flutter in his speech,
which mark out the philosophic fanatic. He is sanguine complexioned and
shrill voiced." It was, perhaps, with some recollection of this
last-mentioned trait of Shelley the man, that Carlyle wrote of Shelley
the poet, that "the sound of him was shrieky," and that he had "filled
the earth with an inarticulate wailing."

{258}

His career as a poet began characteristically enough, with the
publication, while at Oxford, of a volume of political rimes, entitled
_Margaret Nicholson's Remains_, Margaret Nicholson being the crazy woman
who tried to stab George III. His boyish poem, _Queen Mab_, was
published in 1813; _Alastor_ in 1816, and the _Revolt of Islam_--his
longest--in 1818, all before he was twenty-one. These were filled with
splendid, though unsubstantial, imagery, but they were abstract in
subject, and had the faults of incoherence and formlessness which make
Shelley's longer poems wearisome and confusing. They sought to embody
his social creed of Perfectionism, as well as a certain vague Pantheistic
system of belief in a spirit of love in nature and man, whose presence is
a constant source of obscurity in Shelley's verse. In 1818 he went to
Italy, where the last four years of his life were passed, and where,
under the influences of Italian art and poetry, his writing became deeper
and stronger. He was fond of yachting, and spent much of his time upon
the Mediterranean. In the summer of 1822, his boat was swamped in a
squall off the Gulf of Spezzia, and Shelley's drowned body was washed
ashore, and burned in the presence of Byron and Leigh Hunt. The ashes
were entombed in the Protestant cemetery at Rome, with the epitaph, _Cor
cordium_.

Shelley's best and maturest work, nearly all of which was done in Italy,
includes his tragedy, _The Cenci_, 1819, and his lyrical drama,
_Prometheus {259} Unbound_, 1821. The first of these has a unity, and a
definiteness of contour unusual with Shelley, and is, with the exception
of some of Robert Browning's, the best English tragedy since Otway.
_Prometheus_ represented to Shelley's mind the human spirit fighting
against divine oppression, and in his portrayal of this figure, he kept
in mind not only the _Prometheus_ of Aeschylus, but the Satan of
_Paradise Lost_. Indeed, in this poem, S