day and fire by night, which sometimes illumined or cast its dark shadow over the sea.

Here, with the exception of an excursion to Vesuvius, to Pompeii, and one or two other of the remarkable places that lie in the vicinity of Naples, he lived with his wife and family in utter solitude, which truly "is often not the nurse of cheerfulness."

His painful secret preyed upon his health, and he became rapidly worse, while constant and poignant physical suffering exhausted his frame; "and though," says Mrs. Shelley, "he preserved the appearance of cheerfulness, and often greatly enjoyed our wanderings in the environs of Naples, and our excursions on its sunny sea, yet many hours were passed when his thoughts, shadowed by illness, became gloomy, and then he escaped to solitude-and in verses, which he hid from fear of wounding me, poured forth morbid but too natural bursts of discontent and sadness.

"One looks back," she adds, "with unspeakable regret and gnawing remorse to such periods; fancying that had one been more alive to the nature of his feelings, and more attentive to soothe them, such would not have existed; and

yet enjoying, as he appeared to enjoy, every sight or influence of earth or sky, it was difficult to imagine that any melancholy he showed, was aught but the effect of the constant pain to which he was a martyr."*

The verses which Mrs. Shelley here alludes to seem to be the "Invocation to Misery," the "Lines Written in Dejection near Naples," the sonnet commencing,

"Lift not the painted veil which those who live
Call life;"

and, perhaps, that sweet little effusion, "On a Faded Violet," and the "Song of Tasso," in which latter poem he seems to give utterance to his own feelings, no less than Tasso's, when he

says

66

I loved!-alas! our life is love!

But when we cease to breathe and move,

I do suppose love ceases too!

I thought, but not as now I do.”

These poems must have been written under feelings of the greatest depression; and there

* Editorial notes to Shelley's Works.

can scarcely be found anything more sad, or more beautiful than the fragment to Misery, and the "Stanzas Written in Dejection, near Naples." The first is the low, gloomy wail from the abode of despair, which threatens with darkness the mind that trembles on its brink; the second is the sweet, sad utterance of a heart subdued by an all-conquering melancholy.

In these the poet seems to have found relief from the cankering sorrow that lay gnawing at heart; sorrow which he otherwise concealed for fear of wounding his wife.

In Shelley's correspondence of this period, which is remarkably free from the tone exhibited in his poetry of the same period, he has described, in his usual rich and glowing language, the places he visited while at Naples.

The varied character of the surrounding scenery, the rugged and sublime grandeur of Vesuvius, or the stately ruins of Pompeii, are presented in all the vivid hues which give reality. to the scenes he describes. This correspondence is, indeed, not only interesting as a record of the poet himself, but highly valuable as specimens of English art in epistolary compositions.

Having passed the winter at Naples, according to his original plan, he returned to Rome early in March (1819), and again fixed his abode amidst the ruins of the ancient capital of the world.

Here he enjoyed some short surcease from sorrow; and a combination of circumstances seems materially to have improved his health.

During his former brief stay in this city, the Coliseum and the Forum had been his favourite haunts; and, near the latter, he had now taken up his residence. Every lover of Shelley's writings must have read with delight his beautiful description of the Coliseum in the fragment bearing its name; but the equally gigantic ruin of the Baths of Caracalla now became his principal attraction, filling him, as it did, with enthusiastic admiration; nor is his description. of this less graphic or brilliant.

This ruin consists of six enormous chambers, above 200 feet in height, each enclosing a vast area like that of a field. There are, in addition, a number of towers and labyrinthine recesses, hidden and woven over by the wild growth of weeds and ivy.

"Never," he says, "was any desolation more sublime or lovely. The perpendicular wall of ruin is cloven into steep ravines filled up with flowering shrubs, whose thick, twisted roots are knotted in the rifts of the stones. At every step the aërial pinnacles of shattered stone group into new combinations of effect; and tower above the lofty, yet level walls, as the distant mountains change their aspect to one travelling rapidly along the plain.

"In one of the buttresses," he continues, "that supports an immense and lofty arch, which bridges the very winds of heaven, are the crumbling remains of a winding staircase, whose sides are open in many places to the precipice. This you ascend, and arrive on the summit of these piles. There grow on every side thick, entangled wildernesses of myrtle, and the myrletus, and bay, and the flowering laurestinus, the white fig, and a thousand nameless plants sown by the wandering winds.

"These woods are intersected, on every side by paths like sheep-tracks through the copse-wood of steep mountains, which wind to every part of the steep labyrinth. From the midst rise those