nd self-cloistered without
self-sufficingness, deposed from a world which he had not abdicated,
pierced with thorns which formed no crown, a poet hopeless of the bays
and a martyr hopeless of the palm, a land cursed against the dews of
love, an exile banned and proscribed even from the innocent arms of
childhood--he were burning helpless at the stake of his unquenchable
heart, then he might have been inconsolable, then might he have cast the
gorge at life, then have cowered in the darkening chamber of his being,
tapestried with mouldering hopes, and hearkened to the winds that swept
across the illimitable wastes of death. But no such hapless lot was
Shelley's as that of his own contemporaries--Keats, half chewed in the
jaws of London and spit dying on to Italy; de Quincey, who, if he
escaped, escaped rent and maimed from those cruel jaws; Coleridge, whom
they dully mumbled for the major portion of his life. Shelley had
competence, poetry, love; yet he wailed that he could lie down like a
tired child and weep away his life of care. Is it ever so with you, sad
brother; is it ever so with me? and is there no drinking of pearls except
they be dissolved in biting tears? "Which of us has his desire, or
having it is satisfied?"

It is true that he shared the fate of nearly all the great poets
contemporary with him, in being unappreciated. Like them, he suffered
from critics who were for ever shearing the wild tresses of poetry
between rusty rules, who could never see a literary bough project beyond
the trim level of its day but they must lop it with a crooked criticism,
who kept indomitably planting in the defile of fame the "established
canons" that had been spiked by poet after poet. But we decline to
believe that a singer of Shelley's calibre could be seriously grieved by
want of vogue. Not that we suppose him to have found consolation in that
senseless superstition, "the applause of posterity." Posterity!
posterity which goes to Rome, weeps large-sized tears, carves beautiful
inscriptions over the tomb of Keats; and the worm must wriggle her
curtsey to it all, since the dead boy, wherever he be, has quite other
gear to tend. Never a bone less dry for all the tears!

A poet must to some extent be a chameleon and feed on air. But it need
not be the musty breath of the multitude. He can find his needful
support in the judgement of those whose judgement he knows valuable, and
such support Shelley had:

L