essay form, impelled thereto by one
commanding reason. Shelley's life and his poetry are indissolubly
connected. He acted what he thought and felt, with a directness rare
among his brethren of the poet's craft; while his verse, with the
exception of "The Cenci", expressed little but the animating thoughts
and aspirations of his life. That life, moreover, was "a miracle of
thirty years," so crowded with striking incident and varied experience
that, as he said himself, he had already lived longer than his father,
and ought to be reckoned with the men of ninety. Through all
vicissitudes he preserved his youth inviolate, and died, like one whom
the gods love, or like a hero of Hellenic story, young, despite grey
hairs and suffering. His life has, therefore, to be told, in order that
his life-work may be rightly valued: for, great as that was, he, the
man, was somehow greater; and noble as it truly is, the memory of him is
nobler.

To the world he presented the rare spectacle of a man passionate for
truth, and unreservedly obedient to the right as he discerned it. The
anomaly which made his practical career a failure, lay just here. The
right he followed was too often the antithesis of ordinary morality: in
his desire to cast away the false and grasp the true, he overshot the
mark of prudence. The blending in him of a pure and earnest purpose with
moral and social theories that could not but have proved pernicious to
mankind at large, produced at times an almost grotesque mixture in his
actions no less than in his verse. We cannot, therefore, wonder that
society, while he lived, felt the necessity of asserting itself against
him. But now that he has passed into the company of the great dead, and
time has softened down the asperities of popular judgment, we are able
to learn the real lesson of his life and writings. That is not to be
sought in any of his doctrines, but rather in his fearless bearing, his
resolute loyalty to an unselfish and in the simplest sense benevolent
ideal. It is this which constitutes his supreme importance for us
English at the present time. Ours is an age in which ideals are rare,
and we belong to a race in which men who follow them so single-heartedly
are not common.

As a poet, Shelley contributed a new quality to English literature--a
quality of ideality, freedom, and spiritual audacity, which severe
critics of other nations think we lack. Byron's daring is in a different
region: his elemental w