February and March, 1878.

SHELLEY.

CHAPTER 1.

BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD.

It is worse than useless to deplore the irremediable; yet no man,
probably, has failed to mourn the fate of mighty poets, whose dawning
gave the promise of a glorious day, but who passed from earth while yet
the light that shone in them was crescent. That the world should know
Marlowe and Giorgione, Raphael and Mozart, only by the products of their
early manhood, is indeed a cause for lamentation, when we remember what
the long lives of a Bach and Titian, a Michelangelo and Goethe, held in
reserve for their maturity and age. It is of no use to persuade
ourselves, as some have done, that we possess the best work of men
untimely slain. Had Sophocles been cut off in his prime, before the
composition of "Oedipus"; had Handel never merged the fame of his
forgotten operas in the immortal music of his oratorios; had Milton been
known only by the poems of his youth, we might with equal plausibility
have laid that flattering unction to our heart. And yet how shallow
would have been our optimism, how fallacious our attempt at consolation.
There is no denying the fact that when a young Marcellus is shown by
fate for one brief moment, and withdrawn before his springtime has
bought forth the fruits of summer, we must bow in silence to the law of
waste that rules inscrutably in nature.

Such reflections are forced upon us by the lives of three great English
poets of this century. Byron died when he was thirty-six, Keats when he
was twenty-five, and Shelley when he was on the point of completing his
thirtieth year. Of the three, Keats enjoyed the briefest space for the
development of his extraordinary powers. His achievement, perfect as it
is in some poetic qualities, remains so immature and incomplete that no
conjecture can be hazarded about his future. Byron lived longer, and
produced more than his brother poets. Yet he was extinguished when his
genius was still ascendant, when his "swift and fair creations" were
issuing like worlds from an archangel's hands. In his case we have
perhaps only to deplore the loss of masterpieces that might have
equalled, but could scarcely have surpassed, what we possess. Shelley's
early death is more to be regretted. Unlike Keats and Byron, he died by
a mere accident. His faculties were far more complex, and his aims were
more ambitious than theirs. He therefore needed length of years for
their co-ordination; and