hich Hogg
encountered it; then, bursting at once from its cyst and the university,
it swam into a world not illegitimately perplexed by such a whim of the
gods. It was, of course, only the completeness and duration of this
seclusion--lasting from the gate of boyhood to the threshold of
youth--which was peculiar to Shelley. Most poets, probably, like most
saints, are prepared for their mission by an initial segregation, as the
seed is buried to germinate: before they can utter the oracle of poetry,
they must first be divided from the body of men. It is the severed head
that makes the seraph.

Shelley's life frequently exhibits in him the magnified child. It is
seen in his fondness for apparently futile amusements, such as the
sailing of paper boats. This was, in the truest sense of the word, child-
like; not, as it is frequently called and considered, childish. That is
to say, it was not a mindless triviality, but the genuine child's power
of investing little things with imaginative interest; the same power,
though differently devoted, which produced much of his poetry. Very
possibly in the paper boat he saw the magic bark of Laon and Cythna, or

That thinnest boat
In which the mother of the months is borne
By ebbing night into her western cave.

In fact, if you mark how favourite an idea, under varying forms, is this
in his verse, you will perceive that all the charmed boats which glide
down the stream of his poetry are but glorified resurrections of the
little paper argosies which trembled down the Isis.

And the child appeared no less often in Shelley the philosopher than in
Shelley the idler. It is seen in his repellent no less than in his
amiable weaknesses; in the unteachable folly of a love that made its goal
its starting-point, and firmly expected spiritual rest from each new
divinity, though it had found none from the divinities antecedent. For
we are clear that this was no mere straying of sensual appetite, but a
straying, strange and deplorable, of the spirit; that (contrary to what
Mr. Coventry Patmore has said) he left a woman not because he was tired
of her arms, but because he was tired of her soul. When he found Mary
Shelley wanting, he seems to have fallen into the mistake of Wordsworth,
who complained in a charming piece of unreasonableness that his wife's
love, which had been a fountain, was now only a well:

Such change, and at the very door
Of my fond heart, ha