six lines are a peerless Elegy on himself by the great poet, a self-portraiture touching and powerful. This is the last of the four stanzas:

XXXIV.

"All stood aloof, and at his partial moan

Smiled through their tears; well knew that gentle band
Who in another's fate now wept his own;

As in the accents of an unknown land,
He sung new sorrow; sad Urania scanned

The Stranger's mien, and murmured: 'Who art thou?'

He answered not, but with a sudden hand

Made bare his branded and ensanguined brow,

Which was like Cain's or Christ's Oh! that it should

be so!"

It were easy to go on for pages in this strain of eulogy, for each stanza vibrates with feeling embalmed in the fragrance of the beautiful.

The last stanzas are laden with the weird monitions of the seer. Deep sympathy with man makes the thoughtful poet prophetic.

Shelley loved to dally with Death: he was fond of peering over the fence that separates man from the angels. He could not swim. One day, bathing with Trelawney in the Arno, he got into deep water. Trelawney plunged after him and found him lying on the bottom, making no effort to save himself. When he

recovered his breath, he said: "I always find the bottom of the well, and they say Truth lies there. In another minute I should have found it, and you would have found an empty shell. It is an easy way of getting rid of the body." Trelawney narrates with great vividness what on another occasion occurred in a frail little boat with Jane (Mrs. Williams) and her two children, when a woman's tact and presence of mind turned Shelley away from the thought of "solving the great mystery." The whole narrative too long for this page is strikingly illustrative of Shelley in one of his fearfully inquisitive moods.

In the fifty-second stanza of Adonais he exclaims,

"Die,

If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek!
Follow where all is filed!"

The next three stanzas conclude the poem:

LIII.

"Why linger, why turn back, why shrink, my Heart?
Thy hopes are gone before: from all things here
They have departed; thou shouldst now depart!
A light is past from the revolving year,
And man, and woman; and what still is dear

Attracts to crush, repels to make thee wither.

The soft sky smiles, the low wind whispers near;

'Tis Adonais calls! oh, hasten thither,

No more let Life divide what Death can join together.

LIV.

"That Light whose smile kindles the Universe,
That Beauty in which all things work and move,
That Benediction which the eclipsing Curse
Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love
Which through the web of being blindly wove
By man and beast and earth and air and sea,
Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of
The fire for which all thirst; now beams on me,
Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality.

LV.

"The breath whose might I have invoked in song
Descends on me; my spirit's bark is driven,
Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng
Whose sails were never to the tempest given;
The massy earth and spherèd skies are riven !

I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar;

Whilst burning through the inmost veil of Heaven,
The soul of Adonais, like a star,

Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are."

And now it is time to conclude this Study, so unsatisfactory in its incompleteness, and yet attractive through its loving fullness of Shelley. Is he idealized in these insufficient pages? Who can write faithfully about Shelley without giving into idealization? Happy if he can reach up to him even then, for he was an ideality, a great ideal reality. In

studying and getting intimate with Shelley, while one's mind is delightfully exercised, one's idea of humanity is elevated and deepened. He was a man from whose soul sweetest emanations, loftiest aspirings, were as profusely thrown out as are the spring's blossoms that fail not to issue in savory fruit. To build his core the true, the good, the beautiful, were fragrantly interlinked, the bond among them kept ever willing and flexible by the warmth of love.

In Genevra, a poem of about two hundred lines, written in 1821, the year before Shelley passed from the earth, there seems to me to be more, than in any other of his works, of what is a characteristic of Shelley, at once a mark and source of his greatness, -a rich plenitude of mind, pointing to an infinitude of power. Feeling evokes feeling, thought awakens thought, and they leap forth nimbly as if rejoicing to get out of an overcrowded brain. Out of this copiousness are great poems born, such as are many of Shelley's. Among them all, preeminent in pathos, in poetic lightning, in moral might, is Genevra.

Were not the ocean so wide and deep, refreshing, fructifying rains would fail us. Only

deep, full sensibilities beget poetic deeps, of which, therefore, there are far more in Shelley than in Byron. Byron, talking one day with Shelley and Trelawney, told them that Murray (the publisher) advised him to go back to his "Corsair style to please the ladies." Shelley repelled the advice indignantly, and added: "Write nothing but what your conviction of its truth inspires you to write; you should give counsel to the wise, not take it from the foolish. Time will reverse the judgment of the vulgar. Contemporary criticism only represents the amount of ignorance genius has to contend with."

Besides Hellas, a lyrical drama of thirteen or fourteen hundred lines, Shelley wrote in 1821, including Adonais and Genevra, about twelve hundred lines in minor poems. All of these, like the poems of all his years, are written from within, this is the source of their power; and nearly all were inspired by love, and this gives warmth to their beauty. The Hymn to Intellectual Beauty ends with these lines:

"Thus let thy power, which like the truth

Of nature on my passive youth

Descended, to my onward life supply

Its calm - to one who worships thee,

And every form containing thee,