be ascertained by a plebiscite under the care of a voluntary association. Towards the expenses of such a plan Shelley offered a subscription of £100. The moderation and good sense of the pamphlets are remarkable when we consider the ardor of Shelley's feelings. "Nothing," he says, "can less consist with reason or afford smaller hopes of any beneficial issue than the plan which should abolish the regal or aristocratical branches of our constitution before the public mind, through many gradations of improvement, shall have arrived at the maturity which can disregard these symbols of its childhood." Again: "Political institution is undoubtedly susceptible of such improvement as no rational person can consider possible as long as the present degraded condition to which the vital imperfections in the existing system of government has reduced the vast multitude of men shall subsist. The securest method of arriving at such beneficial innovations is to proceed gradually and with caution."

For various reasons, Shelley had for some time been contemplating a visit to Italy; thither he set out on March 11, 1818, accompanied by his family. There the remaining years of his short life, the years of his best poetic work, were spent. In Italy, as in England, he continually changed his place of abode. At first, the Shelleys were drawn to Leghorn by the presence of a Mrs. Gisborne. This lady had been the friend both of Mary's father and of her mother. She attracted Shelley by various qualities. "Mrs. Gisborne," he writes in 1819, “is a sufficiently amiable and very accomplished woman; she is nμoкpatɩkŋ and abeŋ — how far she may be pλav@pwn I don't know, for she is the antipodes of enthusiasm. Her husband, a man with little thin lips, receding forehead, and a prodigious nose, is an excessive bore. His nose is something quite Slawkenbergian weighs on the imagination to look at it. . . . It is a nose

once seen never to be forgotten, and which requires the utmost strength of Christian charity to forgive. I, you know, have a little turn-up nose; Hogg has a large hook one; but add them both together, square them, cube them, you will have but a faint idea of the nose to which I refer." The son of Mrs. Gisborne by a former marriage, Henry Reveley, was an engineer and inventor. Shelley became interested in the construction of a steamboat which Reveley was engaged in working out, and furnished some of the needful money.

In August he visited Byron at Venice. Byron offered him the use of his villa at Este. Shelley accepted, and was joined by Mary and her two children. But no sooner had the latter arrived in Venice than the infant daughter died; hence sadness hung over them during their stay at Este, a sadness which is apparent in Lines Written among the Euganean Hills. The poet's creative activity, which had been dormant during the first months in Italy, revived. He wrote Julian and Maddalo, which contains idealized portraits of Byron and himself, a veiled account of some of his personal experiences, and reminiscences of Venetian scenes. Here, also, he began the Prometheus Unbound, and completed the first

act.

Winter and spring were spent in southern Italy, in Naples, and in Rome. In the former city he suffered much from depression of spirits, partly the result of ill health and isolation; partly, perhaps, arising from a connection with a certain mysterious lady which is vaguely hinted at but cannot now be elucidated.1 In March he took up his residence in Rome. He read classical writers and diligently visited the galleries and antiquities. "You know not," he writes to Peacock, "how delicate the imagination becomes by dieting with antiquity day after day." Most of all he delighted in 1 See note on Stanzas Written in Dejection.

those massive ruins where, in his day, art and nature were inextricably blended, the Palatine, the Colosseum, and the Baths of Caracalla. In a letter to Peacock, he gives a description of the last mentioned, which is interesting as exhibiting points of resemblance with the imaginary scenery of some of his own poetry.

The next most considerable relic of antiquity, considered as a ruin, is the Thermæ of Caracalla. These consist of six enormous chambers above two hundred feet in height, and each enclosing a vast space 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 was any desolation more sublime and 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 aerial 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. . . . These walls surround green and level spaces of lawn, on which some elms have grown, and which are interspersed towards their skirts by masses of the fallen ruin overtwined with the broad leaves of the creeping weeds. The blue sky canopies it, and is as the everlasting roof of these enormous halls. But the most interesting effect remains. In one of the buttresses that supports an immense and lofty arch which "bridges the very winds of heaven" are the crumbling remains of an antique 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 laurustinus, whose white blossoms are just developed, the wild 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 this immense labyrinth. From the midst rise those pinnacles and masses, themselves like immense mountains, which have been seen

from below. . . . Come to Rome. It is a scene by which expression is overpowered, which words cannot convey. Still farther, winding up one-half of the shattered pyramids by the path through the blooming copse-wood, you come to a little mossy lawn surrounded by wild shrubs; it is overgrown with anemones, wallflowers, and violets, whose stalks pierce the starry moss, and with radiant blue flowers whose names I know not, and which scatter through the air the divinest odour, which, as you recline under the shade of the ruin, produces sensations of voluptuous faintness like the combinations of sweet music. The paths still wind on, threading the perplexed windings, other lawns, and deep dells of wood and lofty rocks and terrific chasms. When I tell you that these ruins cover several acres, and that the paths above penetrate at least half their extent, your imagination will fill up all that I am unable to express of this astonishing scene.

Amidst such scenes the poet wandered while he composed the second and third acts of the Prometheus. Nature and art, however, were not enough. He felt keenly the contempt of the world for him as a man, its neglect of him as a poet. "I am regarded by all who know or hear me, except, I think, on the whole, five individuals, as a prodigy of crime and pollution whose look even might infect. . . . Such is the spirit of the English abroad as well as at home." In June another sorrow befell Shelley and his wife, their remaining child died. Shelley wrote to Peacock: "Yesterday, after an illness of only a few days, my little William died. There was no hope from the moment of the attack. You will be kind enough to tell all my friends, so that I need not write to them. It is a great exertion to me to write this, and it seems to me as if, hunted by calamity as I have been, that I should never recover my cheerfulness again.”

The summer of 1819 was spent in Leghorn and its neighborhood. Its chief literary outcome was The Cenci. The inspiration had come from the story and picture of Beatrice, with both of which he had become acquainted at Rome. A

visit to Florence gave him an opportunity of enjoying the splendid works of art gathered there. "All worldly thoughts and cares," he wrote, "seem to vanish from before the sublime emotions such spectacles create; and I am deeply impressed with the great difference of happiness enjoyed by those who live at a distance from these incarnations of all that the finest minds have conceived of beauty, and those who can resort to their company at pleasure. What should we think if we were forbidden to read the great writers who have left us their works? And yet to be forbidden to live at Florence or Rome is an evil of the same kind and hardly of less magnitude." But his sympathies were not lacking for more mundane matters; he considered poetry, he said about this time, very subordinate to moral and political science. It was this summer that a great Reform meeting at Manchester had been dispersed by military force at the expense of several lives. The event led Shelley to write a series of political poems, The Masque of Anarchy, Song to the Men of England, etc. Whatever the bitterness of these poems, their author was always opposed to violence. true patriot," he writes, "will endeavor to enlighten and to unite the nation and animate it with enthusiasm and confidence. . . Lastly, if circumstances had collected a considerable number, as at Manchester on the memorable 16th of August, if the tyrants send their troops to fire upon them or cut them down unless they disperse, he will exhort them peaceably to defy the danger, and to expect without resistance the onset of the cavalry, and wait with folded arms the event of the fire of the artillery, and receive with unshrinking bosoms the bayonets of charging battalions. . . And this not because active resistance is not justifiable, but because in this instance temperance and courage would produce greater advantages than the most decisive victory."

"The

Shelley's works were almost unread in his own lifetime.