An instinct call it, a blind sense; Coming one knows not how, nor whence, If stately passions in me burn, And one chance look to Thee should turn, I drink out of an humbler urn A lowlier pleasure; The homely sympathy that heeds Of hearts at leisure.' 1 1 Wordsworth: To the Daisy' (1802), st. 9 and 7. PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY.1 AFTER the long biography of Moore, it is half a comfort to think of a poet as to whom our information is but scanty. The few intimates of Shelley seem inclined to go to their graves without telling in accurate detail the curious circumstances of his life. We are left to be content with vain 'prefaces' and the circumstantial details of a remarkable blunderer. We know something, however ;-we know enough to check our inferences from his writings; in some moods it is pleasant not to have them disturbed by long volumes of memoirs and anecdotes. One peculiarity of Shelley's writing makes it natural that at times we should not care to have, that at times we should wish for, a full biography. No writer has left so clear an image of himself in his writings; when we remember them as a whole, we seem to want no more. No writer, on the other hand, has left so many little allusions which we should be glad to have explained, which the patient patriarch would not perhaps have endured that any one should comprehend while he did not. The reason is that Shelley has combined the use of the 1 The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Edited by Mrs. Shelley. 1853. Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations, and Fragments. By Percy Bysshe Shelley. Edited by Mrs. Shelley. 1854. The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley. By Captain Thomas Medwin. 1847. 102 two great modes by which writers leave with their readers the image of themselves. Some authors There is the art of self-delineation. try in imagination to get outside themselves— to contemplate their character as a fact, and to describe it and the movement of their own actions as external forms and images. Scarcely any one has done this as often as Shelley. There is hardly one of his longer works which does not contain a finished picture of himself in some point or under some circumstances. Again, some writers, almost or quite unconsciously, by a special instinct of style, give an idea of themselves. This is not peculiar to literary men; it is quite as remarkable among men of action. There are people in the world who cannot write the commonest letter on the commonest affair of business without giving a just idea of themselves. The Duke of Wellington is an example which at once occurs of this. You may read a despatch of his about bullocks and horseshoe-nails, and yet you will feel an interest-a great interest, because somehow among the words seems to lurk the mind of a great general. Shelley has this peculiarity also. Every line of his has a personal impress, an unconscious inimitable manner. And the two modes in which he gives an idea of himself concur. In every delineation we see the same simple intense being. As mythology found a Naiad in the course of every liquid [?limpid] stream, so through each eager line our fancy sees the same panting image of sculptured purity. Shelley is probably the most remarkable instance of the pure impulsive character,-to comprehend which requires a little detail. Some men are born under the law; their whole life is a continued struggle between the lower principles of their nature and the higher. These are what are called men of principle; each of their best actions is a distinct choice between conflicting motives. One propension would bear them here; another there; a third would hold them still into the midst the living will goes forth in its power, and selects whichever it holds to be best. The habitual supremacy of conscience in such men gives them an idea that they only exert their will when they do right; when they do wrong they seem to 'let their nature go;' they say that they are hurried away' but, in fact, there is commonly an act of will in both cases;-only it is weaker when they act ill, because in passably good men, if the better principles are reasonably strong, they conquer; it is only when very faint that they are vanquished. Yet the case is evidently not always so; sometimes the wrong principle is of itself and of set purpose definitely chosen the better one is consciously put down. The very existence of divided natures is a conflict. This is no new description of human nature. For eighteen hundred years Christendom has been amazed at the description in St. Paul of the law of his members warring against the law of his mind. Expressions most unlike in language, but not dissimilar in meaning, are to be found in some of the most familiar passages of Aristotle. In extreme contrast to this is the nature which has no struggle. It is possible to conceive a character in which but one impulse is ever felt-in which the whole being, as with a single breeze, is carried in a single direction. The only exercise of the will in such a being is in aiding and carrying out the dictates of the single propensity. And this is something. There are many of our powers and faculties only in a subordinate degree under the control of the emotions; the intellect itself in many moments requires to be bent to defined attention by com pulsion of the will; no mere intensity of desire will thrust it on its tasks. But of what in most men is the characteristic action of the will-namely, self-control-such natures are hardly in want. An ultimate case could be imagined in which they would not need it at all. They have no lower desires to pull down, for they have no higher ones which come into collision with them; the very words 'lower' and 'higher,' involving the contemporaneous action and collision of two impulses, are inapplicable to them; there is no strife; all their souls impel them in a single line. This may be a quality of the highest character indeed, in the highest character it will certainly be found; no one will question that the whole nature of the holiest being tends to what is holy without let, struggle, or strife-it would be impiety to doubt it. Yet this same quality may certainly be found in a lower-a much lower-mind than the highest. A level may be of any elevation; the absence of intestine commotion may arise from a sluggish dullness to eager aspirations; the one impulse which is felt may be any impulse whatever. If the idea were completely exemplified, one would instinctively say that a being with so single a mind could hardly belong to human nature. Temptation is the mark of our life; we can hardly divest ourselves of the idea that it is indivisible from our character. As it was said of solitude, so it may be said of the sole dominion of a single impulse: 'Whoso is devoted to it would seem to be either a beast or a god.' 1 1'Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god,'-Bacon's rendering (Essays: Of Friendship') of a passage in Aristotle's Politics (Bk. 1. chap. 2), which is literally translated as follows: 'If an individual is not in himself sufficient to compose a perfect government, he is to a city as other parts are to a whole but he that is incapable of society, or so complete in |