VIII. Kings and their ministers have in every age been distinguished

from other men by a thirst for expenditure and bloodshed. There

existed in this country, until the American war, a check, sufficiently

feeble and pliant indeed, to this desolating propensity. Until America

proclaimed itself a Republic, England was perhaps the freest and most

glorious nation subsisting on the surface of the earth. It was not

what is to the full desirable that a nation should be, but all that

it can be, when it does not govern itself. The consequences, however,

of that fundamental defect soon became evident. The government which

the imperfect constitution of our representative assembly threw into

the hands of a few aristocrats, improved the method of anticipating

the taxes by loans, invented by the ministers of William III., until

an enormous debt had been created. In the war against the Republic of

France, this policy was followed up, until now, the _mere interest_

of the public debt amounts to more than twice as much as the lavish

expenditure of the public treasure, for maintaining the standing army,

and the royal family, and the pensioners, and the placemen. The effect

of this debt is to produce such an unequal distribution of the means

of living, as saps the foundation of social union and civilized life.

It creates a double aristocracy, instead of one which was sufficiently

burthensome before, and gives twice as many people the liberty of

living in luxury and idleness on the produce of the industrious and

the poor. And it does not give them this because they are more wise

and meritorious than the rest, or because their leisure is spent in

schemes of public good, or in those exercises of the intellect and

the imagination, whose creations ennoble or adorn a country. They are

not like the old aristocracy, men of pride and honour, _sans peur et

sans tache_, but petty peddling slaves, who have gained a right to

the title of public creditors, either by gambling in the funds, or

by subserviency to government, or some other villainous trade. They

are not the “Corinthian capital of polished society,” but the petty

and creeping weeds which deface the rich tracery of its sculpture.

The effect of this system is, that the day labourer gains no more

now by working sixteen hours a day than he gained before by working

eight. I put the thing in its simplest and most intelligible shape.

The labourer, he that tills the ground and manufactures cloth, is the

man who has to provide, out of what he would bring home to his wife

and children, for the luxuries and comforts of those whose claims are

represented by an annuity of forty-four millions a year levied upon the

English nation. Before, he supported the army and the pensioners, and

the royal family, and the landholders; and this is a hard necessity

to which it was well that he should submit. Many and various are the

mischiefs flowing from oppression, but this is the representative

of them all--namely, that one man is forced to labour for another

in a degree not only not necessary to the support of the subsisting

distinctions among mankind, but so as by the excess of the injustice to

endanger the very foundations of all that is valuable in social order,

and to provoke that anarchy which is at once the enemy of freedom, and

the child and the chastiser of misrule. The nation, tottering on the

brink of two chasms, began to be weary of a continuance of such dangers

and degradations, and the miseries which are the consequence of them;

the public voice loudly demanded a free representation of the people.

It began to be felt that no other constituted body of men could meet

the difficulties which impend. Nothing but the nation itself dares

to touch the question as to whether there is any remedy or no to the

annual payment of forty-four millions a year, beyond the necessary

expenses of State, for ever and for ever. A nobler spirit also went

abroad, and the love of liberty, and patriotism, and the self-respect

attendant on those glorious emotions, revived in the bosoms of men. The

government had a desperate game to play.

IX. In the manufacturing districts of England discontent and

disaffection had prevailed for many years; this was the consequence

of that system of double aristocracy produced by the causes before

mentioned. The manufacturers, the helots of luxury, are left by this

system famished, without affections, without health, without leisure

or opportunity for such instruction as might counteract those habits

of turbulence and dissipation, produced by the precariousness and

insecurity of poverty. Here was a ready field for any adventurer who

should wish, for whatever purpose, to incite a few ignorant men to acts

of illegal outrage. So soon as it was plainly seen that the demands

of the people for a free representation must be conceded if some

intimidation and prejudice were not conjured up, a conspiracy of the

most horrible atrocity was laid in train. It is impossible to know how

far the higher members of the government are involved in the guilt of

their infernal agents. It is impossible to know how numerous or how

active they have been, or by what false hopes they are yet inflaming

the untutored multitude to put their necks under the axe and into the

halter. But thus much is known, that so soon as the whole nation lifted

up its voice for parliamentary reform, spies were sent forth. These

were selected from the most worthless and infamous of mankind, and

dispersed among the multitude of famished and illiterate labourers. It

was their business if they found no discontent to create it. It was

their business to find victims, no matter whether right or wrong. It

was their business to produce upon the public an impression, that if

any attempt to attain national freedom, or to diminish the burthens of

debt and taxation under which we groan, were successful, the starving

multitude would rush in, and confound all orders and distinctions, and

institutions and laws, in common ruin. The inference with which they

were required to arm the ministers was, that despotic power ought to

be eternal. To produce this salutary impression, they betrayed some

innocent and unsuspecting rustics into a crime whose penalty is a

hideous death. A few hungry and ignorant manufacturers, seduced by the

splendid promises of these remorseless blood-conspirators, collected

together in what is called rebellion against the State. All was

prepared, and the eighteen dragoons assembled in readiness, no doubt,

conducted their astonished victims to that dungeon which they left

only to be mangled by the executioner’s hand. The cruel instigators of

their ruin retired to enjoy the great revenues which they had earned

by a life of villainy. The public voice was overpowered by the timid

and the selfish, who threw the weight of fear into the scale of public

opinion, and Parliament confided anew to the executive government those

extraordinary powers which may never be laid down, or which may be

laid down in blood, or which the regularly constituted assembly of the

nation must wrest out of their hands. Our alternatives are a despotism,

a revolution, or reform.

X. On the 7th of November, Brandreth, Turner, and Ludlam ascended the

scaffold. We feel for Brandreth the less, because it seems he killed a

man. But recollect who instigated him to the proceedings which led to

murder. On the word of a dying man, Brandreth tells us, that “Oliver

_brought him to this_”--that, “_but for_ Oliver _he would not have been

there_.” See, too, Ludlam and Turner, with their sons, and brothers,

and sisters, how they kneel together in a dreadful agony of prayer.

Hell is before their eyes, and they shudder and feel sick with fear,

lest some unrepented or some wilful sin should seal their doom in

everlasting fire. With that dreadful penalty before their eyes--with

that tremendous sanction for the truth of all he spoke, Turner

exclaimed loudly and distinctly, _while the executioner was putting the

rope round his neck_, “this is all Oliver and the Government.” What

more he might have said we know not, because the chaplain prevented

any further observations. Troops of horse, with keen and glittering

swords, hemmed in the multitudes collected to witness this abominable

exhibition. “When the stroke of the axe was heard, there was a burst of

horror from the crowd.[44] The instant the head was exhibited, there

was a tremendous shriek set up, and the multitude ran violently in

all directions, as if under the impulse of sudden frenzy. Those who

resumed their stations, groaned and hooted.” It is a national calamity,

that we endure men to rule over us, who sanction for whatever ends a

conspiracy which is to arrive at its purpose through such a frightful

pouring forth of human blood and agony. But when that purpose is to

trample upon our rights and liberties for ever, to present to us the

alternatives of anarchy and oppression, and triumph when the astonished

nation accepts the latter at their hands, to maintain a vast standing

army, and add year by year to a public debt, which already, they know,

cannot be discharged; and which, when the delusion that supports it

fails, will produce as much misery and confusion through all classes

of society as it has continued to produce of famine and degradation to

the undefended poor; to imprison and calumniate those who may offend

them at will; when this, if not the purpose, is the effect of that

conspiracy, how ought we not to mourn?

XI. Mourn then people of England. Clothe yourselves in solemn black.

Let the bells be tolled. Think of mortality and change. Shroud

yourselves in solitude and the gloom of sacred sorrow. Spare no symbol

of universal grief. Weep--mourn--lament. Fill the great city--fill the

boundless fields with lamentation and the echo of groans. A beautiful

Princess is dead:--she who should have been the Queen of her beloved

nation, and whose posterity should have ruled it for ever. She loved

the domestic affections, and cherished arts which adorn, and valour

which defends. She was amiable and would have become wise, but she was

young, and in the flower of youth the destroyer came. Liberty is dead.

Slave! I charge thee disturb not the depth and solemnity of our grief

by any meaner sorrow. If One has died who was like her that should have

ruled over this land, like Liberty, young, innocent, and lovely, know

that the power through which that one perished was God, and that it was

a private grief. But man has murdered Liberty, and whilst the life was

ebbing from its wound, there descended on the heads and on the hearts

of every human thing, the sympathy of an universal blast and curse.

Fetters heavier than iron weigh upon us, because they bind our souls.

We move about in a dungeon more pestilential than damp and narrow

walls, because the earth is its floor and the heavens are its roof. Let

us follow the corpse of British Liberty slowly and reverentially to its

tomb: and if some glorious Phantom should appear, and make its throne

of broken swords and sceptres and royal crowns trampled in the dust,

let us say that the Spirit of Liberty has arisen from its grave and

left all that was gross and mortal there, and kneel down and worship it

as our Queen.

FOOTNOTES:

[43]

“Your death has eyes in his head--mine is not painted so.” _Cymbeline._

[44] These expressions are taken from _The Examiner_, Sunday, Nov.

9th.--_Author’s Note._

[Decoration]

LETTERS TO LEIGH HUNT.[45]

Letter I.

Lyons, _March 22, 1818_.

My dear Friend,--Why did you not wake me that night before we left

England, you and Marianne? I take this as rather an unkind piece of

kindness in you; but which, in consideration of the six hundred miles

between us, I forgive.

We have journeyed towards the spring that has been hastening to meet

us from the south; and though our weather was at first abominable, we

have now warm sunny days, and soft winds, and a sky of deep azure, the

most serene I ever saw. The heat in this city to-day, is like that of

London in the midst of summer. My spirits and health sympathize in the

change. Indeed, before I left London, my spirits were as feeble as my

health, and I had demands upon them which I found difficult to supply.

I have read _Foliage_:--with most of the poems I was already familiar.

What a delightful poem the “Nymphs” is! especially the second part.

It is truly _poetical_ in the intense and emphatic sense of the word.

If six hundred miles were not between us, I should say what pity that

_glib_ was not omitted, and that the poem is not as faultless as it is

beautiful. But for fear I should _spoil_ your next poem, I will not let

slip a word on the subject. Give my love to Marianne and her sister,

and tell Marianne she defrauded me of a kiss by not waking me when

she went away, and that as I have no better mode of conveying it, I

must take the best, and ask you to pay the debt. When shall I see you

all again? Oh that it might be in Italy! I confess that the thought of

how long we may be divided, makes me very melancholy. Adieu, my dear

friend. Write soon.

Ever most affectionately yours,

P. B. S.

* * * * *

Livorno, _August 15, 1819_.

My dear Friend,--How good of you to write to us so often, and such kind

letters! But it is like lending to a beggar. What can I offer in return?

Though surrounded by suffering and disquietude, and latterly almost

overcome by our strange misfortune, I have not been idle. My Prometheus

is finished, and I am also on the eve of completing another work,

totally different from anything you might conjecture that I should

write, of a more popular kind; and, if anything of mine could deserve

attention, of higher claims. “Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest

chuck, till thou approve the performance.”

I send you a little poem[46] to give to Ollier for publication, but

_without my name_: Peacock will correct the proofs. I wrote it with the

idea of offering it to the Examiner, but I find it is too long. It was

composed last year at Este; two of the characters you will recognize;

the third is also in some degree a painting from nature, but, with

regard to time and place, ideal. You will find the little piece, I

think, in some degree consistent with your own ideas of the manner in

which poetry ought to be written. I have employed a certain familiar

style of language to express the actual way in which people talk with

each other, whom education and a certain refinement of sentiment have

placed above the use of vulgar idioms. I use the word _vulgar_ in its

most extensive sense; the vulgarity of rank and fashion is as gross in

its way, as that of poverty, and its cant terms equally expressive of

base conceptions, and therefore equally unfit for poetry. Not that the

familiar style is to be admitted in the treatment of a subject wholly

ideal, or in that part of any subject which relates to common life,

where the passion, exceeding a certain limit, touches the boundaries

of that which is ideal. Strong passion expresses itself in metaphor,

borrowed from all objects alike remote or near, _and casts over all the

shadow at its own greatness_. But what am I about? if my grandmother

sucks eggs, was it I who taught her?

If _you_ would really correct the proof, I need not trouble Peacock,

who, I suppose has enough. Can you take it as a compliment that I

prefer to trouble you?

I do not particularly wish this poem to be known as mine, but, at all

events, I would not put my name to it. I leave you to judge whether

it is best to throw it into the fire, or to publish it. So much for

self--_self_, that burr will stick to one. Your kind expressions about

my Eclogue[47] gave me great pleasure: indeed, my great stimulus in

writing is to have the approbation of those who feel kindly towards me.

The rest is mere duty. I am also delighted to hear that you think of

us, and form fancies about us. We cannot yet come home.

* * * * *

Most affectionately yours,

P. B. Shelley.

* * * * *

Livorno, _September 3rd, 1819_.

My dear Friend,--At length has arrived Ollier’s parcel, and with it the

portrait. What a delightful present! It is almost yourself, and we sate

talking with it, and of it, all the evening.... It is a great pleasure

to us to possess it, a pleasure in a time of need; coming to us when

there are few others. How we wish it were you, and not your picture!

How I wish we were with you!

This parcel, you know, and all its letters, are now a year old; some

older. There are all kinds of dates, from March to August, 1818, and

“your date,” to use Shakespeare’s expression, “is better in a pie or a

pudding, than in your letter.” “Virginity,” Parolles says,--but letters

are the same thing in another shape.

With it came, too, Lamb’s Works. I have looked at none of the other

books yet. What a lovely thing is his “Rosamond Gray!” how much

knowledge of the sweetest and deepest part of our nature in it! When I

think of such a mind as Lamb’s,--when I see how unnoticed remain things

of such exquisite and complete perfection, what should I hope for

myself, if I had not higher objects in view than fame?

I have seen too little of Italy and of pictures. Perhaps Peacock has

shown you some of my letters to him. But at Rome I was very ill, seldom

able to go out without a carriage; and though I kept horses for two

months there, yet there is so much to see! Perhaps I attended more to

sculpture than painting,--its forms being more easily intelligible

than those of the latter. Yet I saw the famous works of Raphael, whom

I agree with the whole world in thinking the finest painter. Why, I

can tell you another time. With respect to Michael Angelo, I dissent,

and think with astonishment and indignation on the common notion that

he equals, and in some respects exceeds Raphael. He seems to me to

have no sense of moral dignity and loveliness; and the energy for

which he has been so much praised, appears to me to be a certain rude,

external, mechanical quality, in comparison with anything possessed

by Raphael; or even much inferior artists. His famous painting in the

Sistine Chapel, seems to me deficient in beauty and majesty, both in

the conception and the execution. He has been called the Dante of

painting; but if we find some of the gross and strong outlines, which

are employed in the few most distasteful passages of the Inferno, where

shall we find your Francesca,--where, the spirit coming over the sea

in a boat, like Mars rising from the vapours of the horizon,--where,

Matilda gathering flowers, and all the exquisite tenderness, and

sensibility, and ideal beauty, in which Dante excelled all poets except

Shakespeare?

As to Michael Angelo’s _Moses_--but you have seen a cast of that in

England.--I write these things, Heaven knows why!

I have written something and finished it,[48] different from any thing

else, and a new attempt for me; and I mean to dedicate it to you. I

should not have done so without your approbation, but I asked your

picture last night, and it smiled assent. If I did not think it in

some degree worthy of you, I would not make you a public offering of

it. I expect to have to write to you soon about it. If Ollier is not

turned Christian, Jew, or become infected with _the Murrain_, he will

publish it. Don’t let him be frightened, for it is nothing which by any

courtesy of language can be termed either moral or immoral.

Mary has written to Marianne for a parcel, in which I beg you will make

Ollier enclose what you know would most interest me,--your “Calendar”

(a sweet extract from which I saw in the Examiner), and the other poems

belonging to you; and for some friends of mine, my Eclogue. This

parcel, which must be sent instantly, will reach me by October; but

don’t trust letters to it, except just a line or so. When you write,

write by the post.

Ever your affectionate,

P. B. S.

My love to Marianne and Bessy, and Thornton too, and Percy, &c., and if

you could imagine any way in which I could be useful to them here, tell

me. I will inquire about the Italian chalk. You have no idea of the

pleasure this portrait gives us.

* * * * *

Firenze, _Nov. 13, 1819_.

My dear Friend,--Yesterday morning Mary brought me a little boy. She

suffered but two hours’ pain, and is now so well that it seems a wonder

that she stays in bed. The babe is also quite well, and has begun to

suck. You may imagine this is a great relief and a great comfort to me,

amongst all my misfortunes, past, present, and to come.

Since I last wrote to you, some circumstances have occurred, not

necessary to explain by letter, which make my pecuniary condition a

very difficult one. The physicians absolutely forbid my travelling to

England in the winter, but I shall probably pay you a visit in the

spring. With what pleasure, among all the other sources of regret and

discomfort with which England abounds for me, do I _think_ of looking

on the original of that kind and earnest face which is now opposite

Mary’s bed. It will be the only thing which Mary will envy me, or will

need to envy me, in that journey: for I shall come alone. Shaking hands

with you is worth all the trouble; the rest is clear loss.

I will tell you more about myself and my pursuits in my next letter.

Kind love to Marianne, Bessie, and all the children. Poor Mary begins

(for the first time) to look a little consoled. For we have spent, as

you may imagine, a miserable five months.

Good-bye, my dear Hunt,

Your affectionate friend,

P. B. S.

I have had no letter from you for a _month_.

* * * * *

Florence, _Nov. 23rd, 1819_.

My dear Hunt,--_Why_ don’t you write to us? I was preparing to send you

something for your “Indicator,” but I have been a drone instead of a

bee in this business, thinking that perhaps, as you did not acknowledge

any of my late enclosures, it would not be welcome to you, whatever I

might send.

What a state England is in! But you will never write politics. I

don’t wonder;--but I wish, then, that you would write a paper in “The

Examiner,” on the actual state of the country, and what, under all the

circumstances of the conflicting passions and interests of men, we are

to expect. Not what we ought to expect, or what, if so and so were to

happen, we might expect,--but what, as things are, there is reason to

believe will come;--and send it me for my information. Every word a man

has to say is valuable to the public now; and thus you will at once

gratify your friend, nay, instruct, and either exhilarate him or force

him to be resigned,--and awaken the minds of the people.

I have no spirits to write what I do not know whether you will care

much about; I know well, that if I were in great misery, poverty, &c.,

you would think of nothing else but how to amuse and relieve me. You

omit me if I am prosperous.

I could laugh if I found a joke, in order to put you in good humour

with me after my scolding;--in good humour enough to write to us.

* * * * * Affectionate love to and from all. This ought not only to be

the _vale_ of a letter, but a superscription over the gate of life.

Your sincere friend,

P. B. Shelley.

I send you a _sonnet_. I don’t expect you to publish it; but you may

show it to whom you please.

* * * * *

Florence, _November 1819_.

My dear Friend,--Two letters, both bearing date Oct 20, arrive on the

same day:--one is always glad of twins.

We hear of a box arrived at Genoa with books and clothes: it must be

yours. Meanwhile the babe is wrapped in flannel petticoats, and we

get on with him as we can. He is small, healthy, and pretty. Mary is

recovering rapidly. Marianne, I hope, is quite recovered.

You do not tell me whether you have received my lines on the Manchester

affair. They are of the exoteric species, and are meant, not for “The

Indicator,” but “The Examiner.” I would send for the former, if you

like, some letters on such subjects of art as suggest themselves in

Italy. Perhaps I will, at a venture, send you a specimen of what I mean

next post. I enclose you in this a piece for “The Examiner;” or let it

share the fate, whatever that fate may be, of the “Mask of Anarchy.”

I am sorry to hear that you have employed yourself in translating

“Aminta,” though I doubt not it will be a just and beautiful

translation. You ought to write Amintas. You ought to exercise your

fancy in the perpetual creation of new forms of gentleness and beauty.

* * * * *

With respect to translation, even _I_ will not be seduced by it;

although the Greek plays, and some of the ideal dramas of Calderon

(with which I have lately, and with inexpressible wonder and delight,

become acquainted), are perpetually tempting me to throw over their

perfect and glowing forms the grey veil of my own words. And you know

me too well to suspect, that I refrain from the belief that what I

would substitute for them would deserve the regret which yours would,

if suppressed. I have confidence in my moral sense alone; but that is

a kind of originality. I have only translated the Cyclops of Euripides

when I could absolutely do nothing else, and the Symposium of Plato,

which is the delight and astonishment of all who read it:--I mean the

original, or so much of the original as is seen in my translation, not

the translation itself. * * * * *

I think I have an accession of strength since my residence in Italy,

though the disease itself in the side, whatever it may be, is not

subdued. Some day we shall return from Italy. I fear that in England

things will be carried violently by the rulers, and that they will not

have learned to yield in time to the spirit of the age. The great thing

to do is to hold the balance between popular impatience and tyrannical

obstinacy: to inculcate with fervour both the right of resistance and

the duty of forbearance. You know, my principles incite me to take all

I can get in politics, for ever aspiring to something more. I am one of

those whom nothing will fully satisfy, but who am ready to be partially

satisfied, by all that is practicable. We shall see.

Give Bessy a thousand thanks from me for writing out in that pretty

neat hand your kind and powerful defence. Ask what she would like best

from Italian land. We mean to bring you all something; and Mary and I

have been wondering what it shall be. Do you, each of you, choose.

* * * * *

Adieu, my dear friend,

Yours affectionately ever,

P. B. S.

* * * * *

Pisa, _August 26th, 1821_.

My Dearest Friend,--Since I last wrote to you, I have been on a visit

to Lord Byron, at Ravenna. The result of this visit was a determination

on his part to come and live at Pisa, and I have taken the finest

palace on the Lung’ Arno for him. But the material part of my visit

consists in a message which he desires me to give you, and which I

think ought to add to your determination--for such a one I hope you

have formed--of restoring your shattered health and spirits by a

migration to these “regions mild of calm and serene air.”

He proposes that you should come and go shares with him and me, in a

periodical work, to be conducted here; in which each of the contracting

parties should publish all their original compositions, and share the

profits. He proposed it to Moore, but for some reason it was never

brought to bear. There can be no doubt that the _profits_ of any scheme

in which you and Lord Byron engage must, from various yet co-operating

reasons, be very great. As to myself, I am, for the present, only a

sort of link between you and him, until you can know each other and

effectuate the arrangement; since (to entrust you with a secret which,

for your sake, I withhold from Lord Byron) nothing would induce me to

share in the profits, and still less in the borrowed splendour, of such

a partnership. You and he, in different manners, would be equal, and

would bring, in a different manner, but in the same proportion, equal

stocks of reputation and success; do not let my frankness with you, nor

my belief that you deserve it more than Lord Byron, have the effect

of deterring you from assuming a station in modern literature, which

the universal voice of my contemporaries forbids me either to stoop or

aspire to. I am, and I desire to be, nothing.

I did not ask Lord Byron to assist me in sending a remittance for your

journey; because there are men, however excellent, from whom we would

never receive an obligation, in the worldly sense of the word; and I am

as jealous for my friend as for myself. I, as you know, have it not;

but I suppose that at last I shall make up an impudent face, and ask

Horace Smith to add to the many obligations he has conferred on me. I

know I need only ask.

I think I have never told you how very much I like your “Amyntas;” it

almost reconciles me to translations. In another sense I still demur.

You might have written another poem such as the “Nymphs,” with no

great access of effort. I am full of thoughts and plans, and should

do something if the feeble and irritable frame which incloses it was

willing to obey the spirit. I fancy then that I should do great things.

Before this you will have seen “Adonais.” Lord Byron, I suppose from

modesty on account of his being mentioned in it, did not say a word

of “Adonais,” though he was loud in his praise of “Prometheus,” and

what you will not agree with him in, censure of the “Cenci.” Certainly

if “Marino Faliero” is a dream, the “Cenci” is not: but that between

ourselves. Lord Byron is reformed, as far as gallantry goes, and lives

with a beautiful and sentimental Italian lady, who is as much attached

to him as may be. I trust greatly to his intercourse with you, for

his creed to become as pure as he thinks his conduct is. He has many

generous and exalted qualities, but the canker of aristocracy wants to

be cut out.

* * * * *

FOOTNOTES:

[45] Originally printed by Leigh Hunt in his work on _Lord Byron and

some of his Contemporaries_, 1828; afterwards included by Mrs. Shelley

in her collection of Shelley’s _Letters from Abroad_.--Ed.

[46] Julian and Maddalo.

[47] Rosalind and Helen.

[48] The Cenci.

[Decoration]

THE COLISEUM.

A FRAGMENT.[49]

At the hour of noon, on the feast of the Passover, an old man,

accompanied by a girl, apparently his daughter, entered the Coliseum at

Rome. They immediately passed through the Arena, and seeking a solitary

chasm among the arches of the southern part of the ruin, selected a

fallen column for their seat, and clasping each other’s hands, sate as

in silent contemplation of the scene. But the eyes of the girl were

fixed upon her father’s lips, and his countenance, sublime and sweet,

but motionless as some Praxitelean image of the greatest of poets,

filled the silent air with smiles, not reflected from external forms.

It was the great feast of the Resurrection, and the whole native

population of Rome, together with all the foreigners who flock from all

parts of the earth to contemplate its celebration, were assembled round

the Vatican. The most awful religion of the world went forth surrounded

by emblazonry of mortal greatness, and mankind had assembled to wonder

at and worship the creations of their own power. No straggler was to

be met with in the streets and grassy lanes which led to the Coliseum.

The father and daughter had sought this spot immediately on their

arrival.

A figure, only visible at Rome in night or solitude, and then only to

be seen amid the desolated temples of the Forum, or gliding among the

weed-grown galleries of the Coliseum, crossed their path. His form,

which, though emaciated, displayed the elementary outlines of exquisite

grace, was enveloped in an ancient chlamys, which half concealed his

face; his snow-white feet were fitted with ivory sandals, delicately

sculptured in the likeness of two female figures, whose wings met upon

the heel, and whose eager and half-divided lips seemed quivering to

meet. It was a face, once seen, never to be forgotten. The mouth and

the moulding of the chin resembled the eager and impassioned tenderness

of the statues of Antinous; but instead of the effeminate sullenness of

the eye, and the narrow smoothness of the forehead, shone an expression

of profound and piercing thought; the brow was clear and open, and

his eyes deep, like two wells of crystalline water which reflect the

all-beholding heavens. Over all was spread a timid expression of

womanish tenderness and hesitation, which contrasted, yet intermingled

strangely, with the abstracted and fearless character that predominated

in his form and gestures.

He avoided, in an extraordinary degree, all communication with the

Italians, whose language he seemed scarcely to understand, but was

occasionally seen to converse with some accomplished foreigner, whose

gestures and appearance might attract him amid his solemn haunts. He

spoke Latin, and especially Greek, with fluency, and with a peculiar

but sweet accent; he had apparently acquired a knowledge of the

northern languages of Europe. There was no circumstance connected

with him that gave the least intimation of his country, his origin,

or his occupation. His dress was strange, but splendid and solemn. He

was forever alone. The literati of Rome thought him a curiosity, but

there was something in his manner unintelligible but impressive, which

awed their obtrusions into distance and silence. The countrymen, whose

path he rarely crossed, returning by starlight from their market at

Campo Vaccino, called him, with that strange mixture of religious and

historical ideas so common in Italy, _Il Diavolo di Bruto_.

Such was the figure which interrupted the contemplations, if they were

so engaged, of the strangers, by addressing them in the clear, and

exact, but unidiomatic phrases of their native language:--“Strangers,

you are two; behold the third in this great city, to whom alone the

spectacle of these mighty ruins is more delightful than the mockeries

of a superstition which destroyed them.”

“I see nothing,” said the old man.

“What do you here, then?”

“I listen to the sweet singing of the birds, and the sound of my

daughter’s breathing composes me like the soft murmur of water--and I

feel the sun-warm wind--and this is pleasant to me.”

“Wretched old man, know you not that these are the ruins of the

Coliseum?”--

“Alas! stranger,” said the girl, in a voice like mournful music, “speak

not so--he is blind.”--

The stranger’s eyes were suddenly filled with tears, and the lines of

his countenance became relaxed. “Blind!” he exclaimed, in a tone of

suffering, which was more than an apology; and seated himself apart

on a flight of shattered and mossy stairs which wound up among the

labyrinths of the ruin.

“My sweet Helen,” said the old man, “you did not tell me that this was

the Coliseum.”

“How should I tell you, dearest father, what I knew not? I was on

the point of inquiring the way to that building, when we entered this

circle of ruins, and, until the stranger accosted us, I remained

silent, subdued by the greatness of what I see.”

“It is your custom, sweetest child, to describe to me the objects that

gave you delight. You array them in the soft radiance of your words,

and whilst you speak I only feel the infirmity which holds me in such

dear dependence, as a blessing. Why have you been silent now?”

“I know not--first the wonder and pleasure of the sight, then the words

of the stranger, and then thinking on what he had said, and how he had

looked--and now, beloved father, your own words.”

“Well, tell me now, what do you see?”

“I see a great circle of arches built upon arches, and shattered stones

lie around, that once made a part of the solid wall. In the crevices,

and on the vaulted roofs, grow a multitude of shrubs, the wild olive

and the myrtle--and intricate brambles, and entangled weeds and plants

I never saw before. The stones are immensely massive, and they jut out

one from the other. There are terrible rifts in the wall, and broad

windows through which you see the blue heaven. There seems to be more

than a thousand arches, some ruined, some entire, and they are all

immensely high and wide. Some are shattered, and stand forth in great

heaps, and the underwood is tufted on their crumbling summits. Around

us lie enormous columns, shattered and shapeless--and fragments of

capitals and cornice, fretted with delicate sculptures.”--

“It is opened to the blue sky?” said the old man.

“Yes. We see the liquid depth of heaven above through the rifts and the

windows; and the flowers, and the weeds, and the grass and creeping

moss, are nourished by its unforbidden rain. The blue sky is above--the

wide, bright, blue sky--it flows through the great rents on high, and

through the bare boughs of the marble rooted fig-tree, and through the

leaves and flowers of the weeds, even to the dark arcades beneath.

I see--I feel its clear and piercing beams fill the universe, and

impregnate the joy-inspiring wind with life and light, and casting the

veil of its splendour over all things--even me. Yes, and through the

highest rift the noonday waning moon is hanging, as it were, out of the

solid sky, and this shows that the atmosphere has all the clearness

which it rejoices me that you feel.”

“What else see you?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Only the bright-green mossy ground, speckled by tufts of dewy

clover-grass that run into the interstices of the shattered arches, and

round the isolated pinnacles of the ruin.”

“Like the lawny dells of soft short grass which wind among the pine

forests and precipices in the Alps of Savoy?”

“Indeed, father, your eye has a vision more serene than mine.”

“And the great wrecked arches, the shattered masses of precipitous

ruin, overgrown with the younglings of the forest, and more like chasms

rent by an earthquake among the mountains, than like the vestige of

what was human workmanship--what are they?”

“Things awe-inspiring and wonderful.”

“Are they not caverns such as the untamed elephant might choose, amid

the Indian wilderness, wherein to hide her cubs; such as, were the sea

to overflow the earth, the mightiest monsters of the deep would change

into their spacious chambers?”

“Father, your words image forth what I would have expressed, but, alas!

could not.”

“I hear the rustling of leaves, and the sound of waters--but it does

not rain,--like the fast drops of a fountain among woods.”

“It falls from among the heaps of ruin over our heads--it is, I

suppose, the water collected in the rifts by the showers.”

“A nursling of man’s art, abandoned by his care, and transformed by

the enchantment of Nature into a likeness of her own creations, and

destined to partake their immortality! Changed into a mountain cloven

with woody dells, which overhang its labyrinthine glades, and shattered

into toppling precipices. Even the clouds, intercepted by its craggy

summit, feed its eternal fountains with their rain. By the column on

which I sit, I should judge that it had once been crowned by a temple

or a theatre, and that on sacred days the multitude wound up its craggy

path to spectacle or the sacrifice----It was such itself![50] Helen,

what sound of wings is that?”

“It is the wild pigeons returning to their young. Do you not hear the

murmur of those that are brooding in their nests?”

“Ay, it is the language of their happiness. They are as happy as we

are, child, but in a different manner. They know not the sensations

which this ruin excites within us. Yet it is pleasure to them to

inhabit it; and the succession of its forms as they pass, is connected

with associations in their minds, sacred to them, as these to us. The

internal nature of each being is surrounded by a circle, not to be

surmounted by his fellows; and it is this repulsion which constitutes

the misfortune of the condition of life. But there is a circle which

comprehends, as well as one which mutually excludes all things which

feel. And, with respect to man, his public and his private happiness

consists in diminishing the circumference which includes those

resembling himself, until they become one with him, and he with them.

It is because we enter into the meditations, designs and destinies of

something beyond ourselves, that the contemplation of the ruins of

human power excites an elevating sense of awfulness and beauty. It is

therefore, that the ocean, the glacier, the cataract, the tempest,

the volcano, have each a spirit which animates the extremities of our

frame with tingling joy. It is therefore, that the singing of birds,

and the motion of leaves, the sensation of the odorous earth beneath,

and the freshness of the living wind around, is sweet. And this is

Love. This is the religion of eternity, whose votaries have been exiled

from among the multitude of mankind. O, Power!” cried the old man,

lifting his sightless eyes towards the undazzling sun, “thou which

interpenetratest all things, and without which this glorious world were

a blind and formless chaos, Love, Author of Good, God, King, Father!

Friend of these thy worshippers! Two solitary hearts invoke thee, may

they be divided never! If the contentions of mankind have been their

misery; if to give and seek that happiness which thou art, has been

their choice and destiny; if, in the contemplation of these majestic

records of the power of their kind, they see the shadow and the

prophecy of that which thou mayst have decreed that he should become;

if the justice, the liberty, the loveliness, the truth, which are thy

footsteps, have been sought by them, divide them not! It is thine to

unite, to eternize; to make outlive the limits of the grave those who

have left among the living, memorials of thee. When this frame shall be

senseless dust, may the hopes, and the desires, and the delights which

animate it now, never be extinguished in my child; even as, if she were

borne into the tomb, my memory would be the written monument of all her

nameless excellencies!”

The old man’s countenance and gestures, radiant with the inspiration of

his words, sunk, as he ceased, into more than its accustomed calmness,

for he heard his daughter’s sobs, and remembered that he had spoken of

death,--“My father, how can I outlive you?” said Helen.

“Do not let us talk of death,” said the old man, suddenly changing

his tone. “Heraclitus, indeed, died at my age, and if I had so sour

a disposition, there might be some danger. But Democritus reached a

hundred and twenty, by the mere dint of a joyous and unconquerable

mind. He only died at last, because he had no gentle and beloved

ministering spirit, like my Helen, for whom it would have been his

delight to live. You remember his gay old sister requested him to put

off starving himself to death until she had returned from the festival

of Ceres; alleging, that it would spoil her holiday if he refused to

comply, as it was not permitted to appear in the procession immediately

after the death of a relation; and how good-temperedly the sage acceded

to her request.”

The old man could not see his daughter’s grateful smile, but he felt

the pressure of her hand by which it was expressed.--“In truth,”

he continued, “that mystery, death, is a change which neither for

ourselves nor for others is the just object of hope or fear. We know

not if it be good or evil, we only know, it is. The old, the young,

may alike die; no time, no place, no age, no foresight exempts us from

death, and the chance of death. We have no knowledge, if death be a

state of sensation, of any precaution that can make those sensations

fortunate, if the existing series of events shall not produce that

effect. Think not of death, or think of it as something common to us

all. It has happened,” said he, with a deep and suffering voice, “that

men have buried their children.”

“Alas! then, dearest father, how I pity you. Let us speak no more.”

They rose to depart from the Coliseum, but the figure which had first

accosted them interposed itself:--“Lady,” he said, “if grief be an

expiation of error, I have grieved deeply for the words which I spoke

to your companion. The men who anciently inhabited this spot, and those

from whom they learned their wisdom, respected infirmity and age.

If I have rashly violated that venerable form, at once majestic and

defenceless, may I be forgiven?”

“It gives me pain to see how much your mistake afflicts you,” she said;

“if you can forget, doubt not that we forgive.”

“You thought me one of those who are blind in spirit,” said the old

man, “and who deserve, if any human being can deserve, contempt and

blame. Assuredly, contemplating this monument as I do, though in

the mirror of my daughter’s mind, I am filled with astonishment and

delight; the spirit of departed generations seems to animate my limbs,

and circulate through all the fibres of my frame. Stranger, if I have

expressed what you have ever felt, let us know each other more.”

“The sound of your voice, and the harmony of your thoughts, are

delightful to me,” said the youth, “and it is a pleasure to see any

form which expresses so much beauty and goodness as your daughter’s;

if you reward me for my rudeness, by allowing me to know you, my error

is already expiated, and you remember my ill words no more. I live a

solitary life, and it is rare that I encounter any stranger with whom

it is pleasant to talk; besides, their meditations, even though they

be learned, do not always agree with mine; and, though I can pardon

this difference, they cannot. Nor have I ever explained the cause

of the dress I wear, and the difference which I perceive between my

language and manners, and those with whom I have intercourse. Not but

that it is painful to me to live without communion with intelligent and

affectionate beings. You are such, I feel.”

FOOTNOTES:

[49] Imperfectly printed in _The Shelley Papers_, 1833: first printed

correctly and completely in the two-volume edition of Shelley’s Essays

and Letters, edited by Mrs. Shelley.

[50] Nor does a recollection of the use to which it may have been

destined interfere with these emotions. Time has thrown its purple

shadow athwart this scene, and no more is visible than the broad and

everlasting character of human strength and genius, that pledge of all

that is to be admirable and lovely in ages yet to come. Solemn temples,

where the senate of the world assembled, palaces, triumphal arches, and

cloud-surrounded columns, loaded with the sculptured annals of conquest

and domination--what actions and deliberations have they been destined

to enclose and commemorate? Superstitious rites, which in their mildest

form, outrage reason, and obscure the moral sense of mankind; schemes

for wide-extended murder, and devastation, and misrule, and servitude;

and, lastly, these schemes brought to their tremendous consummations,

and a human being returning in the midst of festival and solemn joy,

with thousands and thousands of his enslaved and desolated species

chained behind his chariot, exhibiting, as titles to renown, the labour

of ages, and the admired creations of genius, overthrown by the brutal

force, which was placed as a sword within his hand, and,--contemplation

fearful and abhorred!--he himself a being capable of the gentlest and

best emotions, inspired with the persuasion that he has done a virtuous

deed! We do not forget these things....

CRITICAL NOTICES OF THE SCULPTURE IN THE FLORENCE GALLERY.[51]

On the Niobe.

Of all that remains to us of Greek antiquity, this figure is perhaps

the most consummate personification of loveliness, with regard to its

countenance, as that of the Venus of the Tribune is with regard to

its entire form of woman. It is colossal; the size adds to its value;

because it allows to the spectator the choice of a greater number of

points of view, and affords him a more analytical one, in which to

catch a greater number of the infinite modes of expression, of which

any form approaching ideal beauty is necessarily composed. It is the

figure of a mother in the act of sheltering, from some divine and

inevitable peril, the last, we may imagine, of her surviving children.

The little creature, terrified, as we may conceive, at the strange

destruction of all its kindred, has fled to its mother and is hiding

its head in the folds of her robe, and casting back one arm, as in a

passionate appeal for defence, where it never before could have been

sought in vain. She is clothed in a thin tunic of delicate woof; and

her hair is fastened on her head into a knot, probably by that mother

whose care will never fasten it again. Niobe is enveloped in profuse

drapery, a portion of which the left hand has gathered up, and is in

the act of extending it over the child in the instinct of shielding her

from what reason knows to be inevitable. The right (as the restorer has

properly imagined,) is drawing up her daughter to her: and with that

instinctive gesture, and by its gentle pressure, is encouraging the

child to believe that it can give security. The countenance of Niobe is

the consummation of feminine majesty and loveliness, beyond which the

imagination scarcely doubts that it can conceive anything.

That masterpiece of the poetic harmony of marble expresses other

feelings. There is embodied a sense of the inevitable and rapid

destiny which is consummating around her, as if it were already over.

It seems as if despair and beauty had combined, and produced nothing

but the sublimity of grief. As the motions of the form expressed the

instinctive sense of the possibility of protecting the child, and the

accustomed and affectionate assurance that she would find an asylum

within her arms, so reason and imagination speak in the countenance

the certainty that no mortal defence is of avail. There is no terror

in the countenance, only grief--deep, remediless grief. There is no

anger:--of what avail is indignation against what is known to be

omnipotent? There is no selfish shrinking from personal pain--there is

no panic at supernatural agency--there is no adverting to herself as

herself: the calamity is mightier than to leave scope for such emotions.

Everything is swallowed up in sorrow: she is all tears; her

countenance, in assured expectation of the arrow piercing its last

victim in her embrace, is fixed on her omnipotent enemy. The pathetic

beauty of the expression of her tender, and inexhaustible, and

unquenchable despair, is beyond the effect of sculpture. As soon as

the arrow shall pierce her last tie upon earth, the fable that she was

turned into stone, or dissolved into a fountain of tears, will be but a

feeble emblem of the sadness of hopelessness, in which the few and evil

years of her remaining life, we feel, must flow away.

It is difficult to speak of the beauty of the countenance, or to make

intelligible in words, from what such astonishing loveliness results.

The head, resting somewhat backward upon the full and flowing contour

of the neck, is as in the act of watching an event momently to arrive.

The hair is delicately divided on the forehead, and a gentle beauty

gleams from the broad and clear forehead, over which its strings are

drawn. The face is of an oval fulness, and the features conceived

with the daring of a sense of power. In this respect it resembles the

careless majesty which Nature stamps upon the rare masterpieces of her

creation, harmonising them as it were from the harmony of the spirit

within. Yet all this not only consists with, but is the cause of the

subtlest delicacy of clear and tender beauty--the expression at once of

innocence and sublimity of soul--of purity and strength--of all that

which touches the most removed and divine of the chords that make

music in our thoughts--of that which shakes with astonishment even the

most superficial.

The Minerva.

The head is of the highest beauty. It has a close helmet, from which

the hair delicately parted on the forehead, half escapes. The attitude

gives entire effect to the perfect form of the neck, and to that full

and beautiful moulding of the lower part of the face and mouth, which

is in living beings the seat of the expression of a simplicity and

integrity of nature. Her face, upraised to heaven, is animated with

a profound, sweet, and impassioned melancholy, with an earnest, and

fervid, and disinterested pleading against some vast and inevitable

wrong. It is the joy and poetry of sorrow making grief beautiful,

and giving it that nameless feeling which, from the imperfection of

language, we call pain, but which is not all pain, though a feeling

which makes not only its possessor, but the spectator of it, prefer

it to what is called pleasure, in which all is not pleasure. It

is difficult to think that this head, though of the highest ideal

beauty, is the head of Minerva, although the attributes and attitude

of the lower part of the statue certainly suggest that idea. The

Greeks rarely, in their representations of the characters of their

gods,--unless we call the poetic enthusiasm of Apollo a mortal

passion,--expressed the disturbance of human feeling; and here is deep

and impassioned grief animating a divine countenance. It is, indeed,

divine. Wisdom (which Minerva may be supposed to emblem,) is pleading

earnestly with Power,--and invested with the expression of that grief,

because it must ever plead so vainly. The drapery of the statue, the

gentle beauty of the feet, and the grace of the attitude, are what may

be seen in many other statues belonging to that astonishing era which

produced it; such a countenance is seen in few.

This statue happens to be placed on a pedestal, the subject of whose

relief is in a spirit wholly the reverse. It was probably an altar

to Bacchus--possibly a funeral urn. Under the festoons of fruits and

flowers that grace the pedestal, the corners of which are ornamented

with the skulls of goats, are sculptured some figures of Mænads under

the inspiration of the god. Nothing can be conceived more wild and

terrible than their gestures, touching, as they do, the verge of

distortion, into which their fine limbs and lovely forms are thrown.

There is nothing, however, that exceeds the possibility of nature,

though it borders on its utmost line.

The tremendous spirit of superstition, aided by drunkenness, producing

something beyond insanity, seems to have caught them in its whirlwinds,

and to bear them over the earth, as the rapid volutions of a tempest

have the ever-changing trunk of a waterspout, or as the torrent of a

mountain river whirls the autumnal leaves resistlessly along in its

full eddies. The hair, loose and floating, seems caught in the tempest

of their own tumultuous motion; their heads are thrown back, leaning

with a strange delirium upon their necks, and looking up to heaven

whilst they totter and stumble even in the energy of their tempestuous

dance.

One represents Agave with the head of Pentheus in one hand, and in the

other a great knife; a second has a spear with its pine cone, which

was the Thyrsus; another dances with mad voluptuousness; the fourth is

beating a kind of tambourine.

This was indeed a monstrous superstition, even in Greece, where it

was alone capable of combining ideal beauty and poetical and abstract

enthusiasm with the wild errors from which it sprung. In Rome it had

a more familiar, wicked, and dry appearance; it was not suited to the

severe and exact apprehensions of the Romans, and their strict morals

were violated by it, and sustained a deep injury, little analogous

to its effects upon the Greeks, who turned all things--superstition,

prejudice, murder, madness--to beauty.

On the Venus called Anadyomine.

She has just issued from the bath, and yet is animated with the

enjoyment of it.

She seems all soft and mild enjoyment, and the curved lines of

her fine limbs flow into each other with a never-ending sinuosity

of sweetness. Her face expresses a breathless, yet passive and

innocent voluptuousness, free from affectation. Her lips, without the

sublimity of lofty and impetuous passion, the grandeur of enthusiastic

imagination of the Apollo of the Capitol, or the union of both, like

the Apollo Belvidere, have the tenderness of arch, yet pure and

affectionate desire, and the mode of which the ends of the mouth are

drawn in, yet lifted or half-opened, with the smile that for ever

circles round them, and the tremulous curve into which they are wrought

by inextinguishable desire, and the tongue lying against the lower lip,

as in the listlessness of passive joy, express love, still love.

Her eyes seem heavy and swimming with pleasure, and her small forehead

fades on both sides into that sweet swelling and thin declension of

the bone over the eye, in the mode which expresses simple and tender

feelings.

The neck is full, and panting as with the aspiration of delight, and

flows with gentle curves into her perfect form.

Her form is indeed perfect. She is half-sitting and half-rising from

a shell, and the fulness of her limbs, and their complete roundness

and perfection, do not diminish the vital energy with which they seem

to be animated. The position of the arms, which are lovely beyond

imagination, is natural, unaffected, and easy. This, perhaps, is the

finest personification of Venus, the deity of superficial desire, in

all antique statuary. Her pointed and pear-like person, ever virgin,

and her attitude modesty itself.

A Bas-relief.

_Probably the sides of a Sarcophagus._

The lady is lying on a couch, supported by a young woman, and looking

extremely exhausted; her dishevelled hair is floating about her

shoulder, and she is half-covered with drapery that falls on the couch.

Her tunic is exactly like a chemise, only the sleeves are longer,

coming half way down the upper part of the arm. An old wrinkled

woman, with a cloak over her head, and an enormously sagacious look,

has a most _professional_ appearance, and is taking hold of her arm

gently with one hand, and with the other is supporting it. I think

she is feeling her pulse. At the side of the couch sits a woman as

in grief, holding her head in her hands. At the bottom of the bed is

another matron tearing her hair, and in the act of screaming out most

violently, which she seems, however, by the rest of her gestures, to do

with the utmost deliberation, as having come to the resolution, that

it was a correct thing to do so. Behind her is a gossip of the most

ludicrous ugliness, crying, I suppose, or praying, for her arms are

crossed upon her neck. There is also a fifth setting up a wail. To the

left of the couch a nurse is sitting on the ground dangling the child

in her arms, and wholly occupied in so doing. The infant is swaddled.

Behind her is a female who appears to be in the act of rushing in with

dishevelled hair and violent gesture, and in one hand brandishing a

whip or a thunderbolt. This is probably some emblematic person, the

messenger of death, or a fury, whose personification would be a key to

the whole. What they are all wailing at, I know not; whether the lady

is dying, or the father has directed the child to be exposed; but if

the mother be not dead, such a tumult would kill a woman in the straw

in these days.

The other compartment, in the second scene of the drama, tells the

story of the presentation of the child to its father. An old man has

it in his arms, and with professional and mysterious officiousness

is holding it out to the father. The father, a middle-aged and very

respectable-looking man, perhaps not long married, is looking with the

admiration of a bachelor on his first child, and perhaps thinking,

that he was once such a strange little creature himself. His hands

are clasped, and he is gathering up between his arms the folds of his

cloak, an emblem of his gathering up all his faculties to understand

the tale the gossip is bringing.

An old man is standing beside him, probably his father, with some

curiosity, and much tenderness in his looks. Around are collected a

host of his relations, of whom the youngest, a handsome girl, seems

the least concerned. It is altogether an admirable piece, quite in the

spirit of the comedies of Terence.[52]

Michael Angelo’s Bacchus.

The countenance of this figure is a most revolting mistake of the

spirit and meaning of Bacchus. It looks drunken, brutal, narrow-minded,

and has an expression of dissoluteness the most revolting. The lower

part of the figure is stiff, and the manner in which the shoulders

are united to the breast, and the neck to the head, abundantly

inharmonious. It is altogether without unity, as was the idea of the

deity of Bacchus in the conception of a Catholic. On the other hand,

considered only as a piece of workmanship, it has many merits. The

arms are executed in a style of the most perfect and manly beauty.

The body is conceived with great energy, and the manner in which the

lines mingle into each other, of the highest boldness and truth. It

wants unity as a work of art--as a representation of Bacchus it wants

everything.

A Juno.

A statue of great merit. The countenance expresses a stern and

unquestioned severity of dominion, with a certain sadness. The lips are

beautiful--susceptible of expressing scorn--but not without sweetness.

With fine lips a person is never wholly bad, and they never belong

to the expression of emotions wholly selfish--lips being the seat of

imagination. The drapery is finely conceived, and the manner in which

the act of throwing back one leg is expressed, in the diverging folds

of the drapery of the left breast fading in bold yet graduated lines

into a skirt, as it descends from the left shoulder, is admirably

imagined.

An Apollo,

with serpents twining round a wreath of laurel on which the quiver is

suspended. It probably was, when complete, magnificently beautiful. The

restorer of the head and arms, following the indication of the muscles

of the right side, has lifted the arm, as in triumph, at the success

of an arrow, imagining to imitate the Lycian Apollo in that, so finely

described by Apollonius Rhodius, when the dazzling radiance of his

beautiful limbs shone over the dark Euxine. The action, energy, and

godlike animation of these limbs speak a spirit which seems as if it

could not be consumed.

FOOTNOTES:

[51] From _The Shelley Papers_, 1833. A facsimile of the title-page of

this little volume, edited by Captain Medwin, has already been given in

the third volume of Shelley’s Poetical Works--Ed.

[52] This bas-relief is not antique. It is of the Cinquecento.

ARCH OF TITUS.[53]

On the inner compartment of the Arch of Titus, is sculptured in deep

relief, the desolation of a city. On one side, the walls of the Temple,

split by the fury of conflagration, hang tottering in the act of ruin.

The accompaniments of a town taken by assault, matrons and virgins and

children and old men gathered into groups, and the rapine and licence

of a barbarous and enraged soldiery, are imaged in the distance. The

foreground is occupied by a procession of the victors, bearing in

their profane hands the holy candlesticks and the tables of shewbread,

and the sacred instruments of the eternal worship of the Jews. On the

opposite side, the reverse of this sad picture, Titus is represented

standing in a chariot drawn by four horses, crowned with laurel, and

surrounded by the tumultuous numbers of his triumphant army, and the

magistrates, and priests, and generals, and philosophers, dragged in

chains beside his wheels. Behind him stands a Victory eagle-winged.

The arch is now mouldering into ruins, and the imagery almost erased by

the lapse of fifty generations. Beyond this obscure monument of Hebrew

desolation, is seen the tomb of the Destroyer’s family, now a mountain

of ruins.

The Flavian amphitheatre has become a habitation for owls and dragons.

The power, of whose possession it was once the type, and of whose

departure it is now the emblem, is become a dream and a memory. Rome is

no more than Jerusalem.

[53] From _The Shelley Papers_, 1833.

REMARKS ON “MANDEVILLE” AND MR. GODWIN.[54]

The author of “Mandeville” is one of the most illustrious examples of

intellectual power of the present age. He has exhibited that variety

and universality of talent which distinguishes him who is destined to

inherit lasting renown, from the possessors of temporary celebrity. If

his claims were to be measured solely by the accuracy of his researches

into ethical and political science, still it would be difficult to name

a contemporary competitor. Let us make a deduction of all those parts

of his moral system which are liable to any possible controversy, and

consider simply those which only to allege is to establish, and which

belong to that most important class of truths which he that announces

to mankind seems less to teach than to recall.

“Political Justice” is the first moral system explicitly founded upon

the doctrine of the negativeness of rights and the positiveness of

duties,--an obscure feeling of which has been the basis of all the

political liberty and private virtue in the world. But he is also the

author of “Caleb Williams”; and if we had no record of a mind, but

simply some fragment containing the conception of the character of

Falkland, doubtless we should say, “This is an extraordinary mind, and

undoubtedly was capable of the very sublimest enterprises of thought.”

St. Leon and Fleetwood are moulded with somewhat inferior distinctness,

in the same character of a union of delicacy and power. The Essay on

Sepulchres has all the solemnity and depth of passion which belong to

a mind that sympathises, as one man with his friend in the interest of

future ages, in the concerns of the vanished generations of mankind.

It may be said with truth, that Godwin has been treated unjustly

by those of his countrymen, upon whose favour temporary distinction

depends. If he had devoted his high accomplishments to flatter the

selfishness of the rich, or enforced those doctrines on which the

powerful depend for power, they would, no doubt, have rewarded him

with their countenance, and he might have been more fortunate in that

sunshine than Mr. Malthus or Dr. Paley. But the difference would have

been as wide as that which must for ever divide notoriety from fame.

Godwin has been to the present age in moral philosophy what Wordsworth

is in poetry. The personal interest of the latter would probably have

suffered from his pursuit of the true principles of taste in poetry, as

much as all that is temporary in the fame of Godwin has suffered from

his daring to announce the true foundations of minds, if servility, and

dependence, and superstition, had not been too easily reconcileable

with his species of dissent from the opinions of the great and the

prevailing. It is singular that the other nations of Europe should have

anticipated, in this respect, the judgment of posterity; and that the

name of Godwin and that of his late illustrious and admirable wife,

should be pronounced, even by those who know but little of English

literature, with reverence and admiration; and that the writings of

Mary Wollstonecraft should have been translated, and universally read,

in France and Germany, long after the bigotry of faction has stifled

them in our own country.

“Mandeville” is Godwin’s last production. In interest it is perhaps

inferior to “Caleb Williams.” There is no character like Falkland,

whom the author, with that sublime casuistry which is the parent of

toleration and forbearance, persuades us personally to love, whilst

his actions must for ever remain the theme of our astonishment and

abhorrence. Mandeville challenges our compassion, and no more. His

errors arise from an immutable necessity of internal nature, and from

much constitutional antipathy and suspicion, which soon spring up

into hatred and contempt, and barren misanthropy, which, as it has no

root in genius or virtue, produces no fruit uncongenial with the soil

wherein it grew. Those of Falkland sprang from a high, though perverted

conception of human nature, from a powerful sympathy with his species,

and from a temper which led him to believe that the very reputation of

excellence should walk among mankind unquestioned and unassailed. So

far as it was a defect to link the interest of the tale with anything

inferior to Falkland, so is Mandeville defective. But the varieties

of human character, the depth and complexity of human motive,--those

sources of the union of strength and weakness--those powerful

sources of pleading for universal kindness and toleration,--are just

subjects for illustration and development in a work of fiction; as

such, “Mandeville” yields in interest and importance to none of the

productions of the author. The events of the tale flow like the stream

of fate, regular and irresistible, growing at once darker and swifter

in their progress: there is no surprise, no shock: we are prepared

for the worst from the very opening of the scene, though we wonder

whence the author drew the shadows which render the moral darkness,

every instant more fearful, at last so appalling and so complete. The

interest is awfully deep and rapid. To struggle with it, would be the

gossamer attempting to bear up against the tempest. In this respect

it is more powerful than “Caleb Williams”; the interest of “Caleb

Williams” being as rapid, but not so profound, as that of “Mandeville.”

It is a wind that tears up the deepest waters of the ocean of mind.

The language is more rich and various, and the expressions more

eloquently sweet, without losing that energy and distinctness which

characterize “Political Justice” and “Caleb Williams.” The moral

speculations have a strength, and consistency, and boldness, which has

been less clearly aimed at in his other works of fiction. The pleadings

of Henrietta to Mandeville, after his recovery from madness, in favour

of virtue and of benevolent energy, compose, in every respect, the

most perfect and beautiful piece of writing of modern times. It is the

genuine doctrine of “Political Justice,” presented in one perspicacious

and impressive river, and clothed in such enchanting melody of

language, as seems, not less than the writings of Plato, to realize

those lines of Milton:

How charming is divine philosophy--

Not harsh and crabbed--

But musical as is Apollo’s lute!

Clifford’s talk, too, about wealth, has a beautiful, and readily to be

disentangled intermixture of truth and error. Clifford is a person,

who, without those characteristics which usually constitute the

sublime, is sublime from the mere excess of loveliness and innocence.

Henrietta’s first appearance to Mandeville, at Mandeville House, is

an occurrence resplendent with the sunrise of life; it recalls to

the memory many a vision--or perhaps but one--which the delusive

exhalations of unbaffled hope have invested with a rose-like lustre as

of morning, yet unlike morning--a light which, once extinguished, never

can return. Henrietta seems at first to be all that a susceptible heart

imagines in the object of its earliest passion. We scarcely can see

her, she is so beautiful. There is a mist of dazzling loveliness which

encircles her, and shuts out from the sight all that is mortal in her

transcendent charms. But the veil is gradually undrawn, and she “fades

into the light of common day.” Her actions, and even her sentiments,

do not correspond to the elevation of her speculative opinions, and

the fearless sincerity which should be the accompaniment of truth

and virtue. But she has a divided affection, and she is faithful

there only where infidelity would have been self-sacrifice. Could the

spotless Henrietta have subjected her love to Clifford, to the vain

and insulting accident of wealth and reputation, and the babbling of a

miserable old woman, and yet have proceeded unshrinking to her nuptial

feast from the expostulations of Mandeville’s impassioned and pathetic

madness? It might be well in the author to show the foundations of

human hope thus overthrown, for his picture might otherwise have been

illumined with one gleam of light. It was his skill to enforce the

moral, “that all things are vanity,” and “that the house of mourning

is better than the house of feasting”; and we are indebted to those

who make us feel the instability of our nature, that we may lay the

knowledge (which is its foundation) deep, and make the affections

(which are its cement) strong. But one regrets that Henrietta,--who

soared far beyond her contemporaries in her opinions, who was so

beautiful that she seemed a spirit among mankind,--should act and feel

no otherwise than the least exalted of her sex; and still more, that

the author, capable of conceiving something so admirable and lovely,

should have been withheld, by the tenour of the fiction which he chose,

from executing it in its full extent. It almost seems in the original

conception of the character of Henrietta, that something was imagined

too vast and too uncommon to be realized; and the feeling weighs like

disappointment on the mind. But these objections, considered with

reference to the close of the story, are extrinsical.

The reader’s mind is hurried on as he approaches the end with

breathless and accelerated impulse. The noun _smorfia_ comes at last,

and touches some nerve which jars the inmost soul, and grates, as it

were, along the blood; and we can scarcely believe that that grin which

must accompany Mandeville to his grave, is not stamped upon our own

visage.

[54] From _The Shelley Papers_, 1833.

ON “FRANKENSTEIN.”[55]

The novel of “Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus,” is undoubtedly,

as a mere story, one of the most original and complete productions of

the day. We debate with ourselves in wonder, as we read it, what could

have been the series of thoughts--what could have been the peculiar

experiences that awakened them--which conduced, in the author’s mind,

to the astonishing combinations of motives and incidents, and the

startling catastrophe, which compose this tale. There are, perhaps,

some points of subordinate importance, which prove that it is the

author’s first attempt. But in this judgment, which requires a very

nice discrimination, we may be mistaken; for it is conducted throughout

with a firm and steady hand. The interest gradually accumulates and

advances towards the conclusion with the accelerated rapidity of a

rock rolled down a mountain. We are led breathless with suspense and

sympathy, and the heaping up of incident on incident, and the working

of passion out of passion. We cry “hold, hold! enough!”--but there is

yet something to come; and, like the victim whose history it relates,

we think we can bear no more, and yet more is to be borne. Pelion is

heaped on Ossa, and Ossa on Olympus. We climb Alp after Alp, until the

horizon is seen blank, vacant, and limitless; and the head turns giddy,

and the ground seems to fail under our feet.

This novel rests its claim on being a source of powerful and profound

emotion. The elementary feelings of the human mind are exposed to

view; and those who are accustomed to reason deeply on their origin

and tendency will, perhaps, be the only persons who can sympathize,

to the full extent, in the interest of the actions which are their

result. But, founded on nature as they are, there is perhaps no reader,

who can endure anything beside a new love-story, who will not feel

a responsive string touched in his inmost soul. The sentiments are

so affectionate and so innocent--the characters of the subordinate

agents in this strange drama are clothed in the light of such a mild

and gentle mind--the pictures of domestic manners are of the most

simple and attaching character: the father’s is irresistible and deep.

Nor are the crimes and malevolence of the single Being, though indeed

withering and tremendous, the offspring of any unaccountable propensity

to evil, but flow irresistibly from certain causes fully adequate to

their production. They are the children, as it were, of Necessity and

Human Nature. In this the direct moral of the book consists; and it is

perhaps the most important, and of the most universal application, of

any moral that can be enforced by example. Treat a person ill, and he

will become wicked. Requite affection with scorn;--let one being be

selected, for whatever cause, as the refuse of his kind--divide him, a

social being, from society, and you impose upon him the irresistible

obligations--malevolence and selfishness. It is thus that, too often

in society, those who are best qualified to be its benefactors and its

ornaments, are branded by some accident with scorn, and changed, by

neglect and solitude of heart, into a scourge and a curse.

The Being in “Frankenstein” is, no doubt, a tremendous creature. It was

impossible that he should not have received among men that treatment

which led to the consequences of his being a social nature. He was an

abortion and an anomaly; and though his mind was such as its first

impressions framed it, affectionate and full of moral sensibility,

yet the circumstances of his existence are so monstrous and uncommon,

that, when the consequences of them became developed in action,

his original goodness was gradually turned into inextinguishable

misanthropy and revenge. The scene between the Being and the blind De

Lacey in the cottage, is one of the most profound and extraordinary

instances of pathos that we ever recollect. It is impossible to

read this dialogue,--and indeed many others of a somewhat similar

character,--without feeling the heart suspend its pulsations with

wonder, and the “tears stream down the cheeks.” The encounter and

argument between Frankenstein and the Being on the sea of ice, almost

approaches, in effect, to the expostulation of Caleb Williams with

Falkland. It reminds us, indeed, somewhat of the style and character of

that admirable writer, to whom the author has dedicated his work, and

whose productions he seems to have studied.

There is only one instance, however, in which we detect the least

approach to imitation; and that is the conduct of the incident of

Frankenstein’s landing in Ireland. The general character of the tale,

indeed, resembles nothing that ever preceded it. After the death of

Elizabeth, the story, like a stream which grows at once more rapid and

profound as it proceeds, assumes an irresistible solemnity, and the

magnificent energy and swiftness of a tempest.

The churchyard scene, in which Frankenstein visits the tombs of his

family, his quitting Geneva, and his journey through Tartary to the

shores of the Frozen Ocean, resemble at once the terrible reanimation

of a corpse and the supernatural career of a spirit. The scene in the

cabin of Walton’s ship--the more than mortal enthusiasm and grandeur of

the Being’s speech over the dead body of his victim--is an exhibition

of intellectual and imaginative power, which we think the reader will

acknowledge has seldom been surpassed.

[55] From _The Shelley Papers_, 1833.

ON THE REVIVAL OF LITERATURE.[56]

In the fifteenth century of the Christian era, a new and extraordinary

event roused Europe from her lethargic state, and paved the way to

her present greatness. The writings of Dante in the thirteenth,

and of Petrarch in the fourteenth, were the bright luminaries

which had afforded glimmerings of literary knowledge to the almost

benighted traveller toiling up the hill of Fame. But on the taking of

Constantinople, a new and sudden light appeared: the dark clouds of

ignorance rolled into distance, and Europe was inundated by learned

monks, and still more by the quantity of learned manuscripts which they

brought with them from the scene of devastation. The Turks settled

themselves in Constantinople, where they adopted nothing but the

vicious habits of the Greeks: they neglected even the small remains

of its ancient learning, which, filtered and degenerated as it was by

the absurd mixture of Pagan and Christian philosophy, proved, on its

retirement to Europe, the spark which spread gradually and successfully

the light of knowledge over the world.

Italy, France, and England,--for Germany still remained many centuries

less civilized than the surrounding countries,--swarmed with monks and

cloisters. Superstition, of whatever kind, whether earthly or divine,

has hitherto been the weight which clogged man to earth, and prevented

his genius from soaring aloft amid its native skies. The enterprises,

and the effects of the human mind, are something more than stupendous:

the works of nature are material and tangible: we have a half insight

into their kind, and in many instances we predict their effects with

certainty. But mind seems to govern the world without visible or

substantial means. Its birth is unknown; its action and influence

unperceived; and its being seems eternal. To the mind both humane and

philosophical, there cannot exist a greater subject of grief, than

the reflection of how much superstition has retarded the progress of

intellect, and consequently the happiness of man.

The monks in their cloisters were engaged in trifling and ridiculous

disputes: they contented themselves with teaching the dogmas of their

religion, and rushed impatiently forth to the colleges and halls,

where they disputed with an acrimony and meanness little befitting the

resemblance of their pretended holiness. But the situation of a monk is

a situation the most unnatural that bigotry, proud in the invention of

cruelty, could conceive; and their vices may be pardoned as resulting

from the wills and devices of a few proud and selfish bishops, who

enslaved the world that they might live at ease.

The disputes of the schools were mostly scholastical; it was the

discussion of words, and had no relation to morality. Morality,--the

great means and end of man,--was contained, as they affirmed, in the

extent of a few hundred pages of a certain book, which others have

since contended were but scraps of martyrs’ last dying words, collected

together and imposed on the world. In the refinements of the scholastic

philosophy, the world seemed in danger of losing the little real wisdom

that still remained as her portion; and the only valuable part of their

disputes was such as tended to develop the system of the Peripatetic

Philosophers. Plato, the wisest, the profoundest, and Epicurus, the

most humane and gentle among the ancients, were entirely neglected by

them. Plato interfered with their peculiar mode of thinking concerning

heavenly matters; and Epicurus, maintaining the rights of man to

pleasure and happiness, would have afforded a seducing contrast to

their dark and miserable code of morals. It has been asserted, that

these holy men solaced their lighter moments in a contraband worship

of Epicurus and profaned the philosophy which maintained the rights

of all by a selfish indulgence of the rights of a few. Thus it is: the

laws of nature are invariable, and man sets them aside that he may have

the pleasure of travelling through a labyrinth in search of them again.

Pleasure, in an open and innocent garb, by some strange process of

reasoning, is called vice; yet man (so closely is he linked to the

chains of necessity--so irresistibly is he impelled to fulfil the end

of his being,) must seek her at whatever price: he becomes a hypocrite,

and braves damnation with all its pains.

Grecian literature,--the finest the world has ever produced,--was at

length restored: its form and mode we obtained from the manuscripts

which the ravages of time, of the Goths, and of the still more savage

Turks, had spared. The burning of the library at Alexandria was an evil

of importance. This library is said to have contained volumes of the

choicest Greek authors.

[56] From _The Shelley Papers_, 1833.

A SYSTEM OF GOVERNMENT BY JURIES.

A FRAGMENT.[57]

Government, as it now subsists, is perhaps an engine at once the most

expensive and inartificial that could have been devised as a remedy

for the imperfections of society. Immense masses of the product of

labour are committed to the discretion of certain individuals for the

purpose of executing its intentions, or interpreting its meaning. These

have not been consumed, but wasted, in the principal part of the past

history of political society.

Government may be distributed into two parts:--First, the

fundamental--that is, the permanent forms, which regulate the

deliberation or the action of the whole; from which it results that

a state is democratical, or aristocratical, or despotic, or a

combination of all these principles.

And Secondly--the necessary or accidental--that is, those that

determine, _not_ the forms according to which the deliberation or

the action of the mass of the community is to be regulated, but the

opinions or moral principles which are to govern the particular

instances of such action or deliberation. These may be called,

with little violence to the popular acceptation of those terms,

Constitution, and Law: understanding by the former, the collection

of those written institutions or traditions which determine the

individuals who are to exercise, in a nation, the discretionary right

of peace and war, of death or imprisonment, fines and penalties, and

the imposition and collection of taxes, and their application, thus

vested in a king, or an hereditary senate, or in a representative

assembly, or in a combination of all; and by the latter, the mode

of determining those opinions, according to which the constituted

authorities are to decide on any action; for law is either a collection

of opinions expressed by individuals without constitutional authority,

or the decision of a constitutional body of men, the opinion of some or

all of whom it expresses--and no more.

To the former, or constitutional topics, this treatise has no direct

reference. Law may be considered, simply--an opinion regulating

political power. It may be divided into two parts--General Law, or

that which relates to the external and integral concerns of a nation,

and decides on the competency of a particular person or collection of

persons to discretion in matters of war and peace--the assembling of

the representative body--the time, place, manner, form, of holding

judicial courts, and other concerns enumerated before, and in reference

to which this community is considered as a whole;--and Particular

Law, or that which decides upon contested claims of property, which

punishes or restrains violence and fraud, which enforces compacts,

and preserves to every man that degree of liberty and security, the

enjoyment of which is judged not to be inconsistent with the liberty

and security of another.

To the former, or what is here called general law, this treatise has no

direct reference. How far law, in its general form or constitution, as

it at present exists in the greater part of the nations of Europe, may

be affected by inferences from the ensuing reasonings, it is foreign

to the present purpose to inquire--let us confine our attention to

particular law, or law strictly so termed.

The only defensible intention of law, like that of every other human

institution, is very simple and clear--the good of the whole. If law

is found to accomplish this object very imperfectly, that imperfection

makes no part of the design with which men submit to its institution.

Any reasonings which tend to throw light on a subject hitherto so dark

and intricate, cannot fail, if distinctly stated, to impress mankind

very deeply, because it is a question in which the life and property

and liberty and reputation of every man are vitally involved.

For the sake of intelligible method, let us assume the ordinary

distinctions of law, those of civil and criminal law, and of the

objects of it, private and public wrongs. The author of these pages

ought not to suppress his conviction, that the principles on which

punishment is usually inflicted are essentially erroneous; and that,

in general, ten times more is apportioned to the victims of law, than

is demanded by the welfare of society, under the shape of reformation

or example. He believes that, although universally disowned, the

execrable passion of vengeance, exasperated by fear, exists as a chief

source among the secret causes of this exercise of criminal justice. He

believes also, that in questions of property, there is a vague but most

effective favouritism in courts of law and among lawyers, against the

poor to the advantage of the rich--against the tenant in favour of the

landlord--against the creditor in favour of the debtor; thus enforcing

and illustrating that celebrated maxim, against which moral science

is a perpetual effort: _To whom much is given, of him shall much be

required; and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the

more._

But the present purpose is, not the exposure of such mistakes as

actually exist in public opinion, but an attempt to give to public

opinion its legitimate dominion, and an uniform and unimpeded influence

to each particular case which is its object.

When law is once understood to be no more than the recorded opinion of

men, no more than the apprehensions of individuals on the reasoning of

a particular case, we may expect that the sanguinary or stupid mistakes

which disgrace the civil and criminal jurisprudence of civilized

nations will speedily disappear. How long, under its present sanctions,

do not the most exploded violations of humanity maintain their

ground in courts of law, after public opinion has branded them with

reprobation; sometimes even until by constantly maintaining their post

under the shelter of venerable names, they out-weary the very scorn and

abhorrence of mankind, or subsist unrepealed and silent, until some

check, in the progress of human improvement, awakens them, and that

public opinion, from which they should have received their reversal,

is infected by their influence. Public opinion would never long

stagnate in error, were it not fenced about and frozen over by forms

and superstitions. If men were accustomed to reason, and to hear the

arguments of others, upon each particular case that concerned the life,

or liberty, or property, or reputation of their peers, those mistakes,

which at present render these possessions so insecure to all but those

who enjoy enormous wealth, never could subsist. If the administration

of law ceased to appeal from the common sense, or the enlightened minds

of twelve contemporary _good and true men_, who should be the peers of

the accused, or, in cases of property, of the claimant, to the obscure

records of dark and barbarous epochs, or the precedents of what venal

and enslaved judges might have decreed to please their tyrants, or the

opinion of any man or set of men who lived when bigotry was virtue,

and passive obedience that discretion which is the better part of

valour,--all those mistakes now fastened in the public opinion, would

be brought at each new case to the * * * * *

[57] From _The Shelley Papers_, 1833.

ON LOVE.[58]

What is Love? Ask him who lives what is life; ask him who adores what

is God.

I know not the internal constitution of other men, nor even of thine

whom I now address. I see that in some external attributes they

resemble me, but when, misled by that appearance, I have thought to

appeal to something in common and unburthen my inmost soul to them, I

have found my language misunderstood, like one in a distant and savage

land. The more opportunities they have afforded me for experience, the

wider has appeared the interval between us, and to a greater distance

have the points of sympathy been withdrawn. With a spirit ill-fitted to

sustain such proof, trembling and feeble through its tenderness, I have

everywhere sought, and have found only repulse and disappointment.

_Thou_ demandest what is Love. It is that powerful attraction towards

all we conceive, or fear, or hope beyond ourselves, when we find

within our own thoughts the chasm of an insufficient void, and seek

to awaken in all things that are, a community with what we experience

within ourselves. If we reason we would be understood; if we imagine

we would that the airy children of our brain were born anew within

another’s; if we feel we would that another’s nerves should vibrate to

our own, that the beams of their eyes should kindle at once and mix

and melt into our own; that lips of motionless ice should not reply

to lips quivering and burning with the heart’s best blood:--this is

Love. This is the bond and the sanction which connects not only man

with man, but with every thing which exists. We are born into the

world, and there is something within us, which from the instant that

we live, more and more thirsts after its likeness. It is probably in

correspondence with this law that the infant drains milk from the bosom

of its mother; this propensity develops itself with the development of

our nature. We dimly see within our intellectual nature, a miniature

as it were of our entire self, yet deprived of all that we condemn

or despise, the ideal prototype of every thing excellent and lovely

that we are capable of conceiving as belonging to the nature of man.

Not only the portrait of our external being, but an assemblage of the

minutest particles of which our nature is composed[59]: a mirror whose

surface reflects only the forms of purity and brightness: a soul within

our own soul that describes a circle around its proper Paradise, which

pain and sorrow and evil dare not overleap. To this we eagerly refer

all sensations, thirsting that they should resemble and correspond with

it. The discovery of its antitype; the meeting with an understanding

capable of clearly estimating our own; an imagination which should

enter into and seize upon the subtle and delicate peculiarities which

we have delighted to cherish and unfold in secret, with a frame,

whose nerves, like the chords of two exquisite lyres, strung to the

accompaniment of one delightful voice, vibrate with the vibrations of

our own; and a combination of all these in such proportion as the type

within demands: this is the invisible and unattainable point to which

Love tends; and to attain which, it urges forth the powers of man to

arrest the faintest shadow of that, without the possession of which,

there is no rest nor respite to the heart over which it rules. Hence in

solitude, or that deserted state when we are surrounded by human beings

and yet they sympathize not with us, we love the flowers, the grass,

the waters, and the sky. In the motion of the very leaves of spring,

in the blue air, there is then found a secret correspondence with our

heart. There is eloquence in the tongueless wind, and a melody in the

flowing brooks and the rustling of the reeds beside them, which by

their inconceivable relation to something within the soul awaken the

spirits to dance of breathless rapture, and bring tears of mysterious

tenderness to the eyes, like the enthusiasm of patriotic success, or

the voice of one beloved singing to you alone. Sterne says that if he

were in a desert he would love some cypress. So soon as this want or

power is dead, man becomes a living sepulchre of himself, and what yet

survives is the mere husk of what once he was.

FOOTNOTES:

[58] Printed in The Keepsake, Lond. 1829.

[59] These words are ineffectual and metaphorical. Most words are

so,--no help!

INDEX.

Addison, his _Cato_, ii. 16

Æschylus, quoted, ii. 340

Alfieri, ii. 390

Alps, the, i. 119, 120, 348

Anacreon’s swallow, ii. 359

_Anastasius_, ii. 341

Annual Parliaments, i. 364, 365

Apollodorus, a pupil of Socrates, ii. 49

Apollonius Rhodius, i. 410

Ariosto, tomb of, ii. 245;

his arm-chair, 246;

handwriting of, 247

Aristotle, ii. 49

Aspasia, ii. 134, 135

Bacon, quoted, ii. 4;

a poet, 8, 49

Barthélemi, ii. 44

Bisham wood, ii. 278

Blackstone, quoted, i. 254

Boccaccio, ii. 294, 295

Buffon, his sublime but gloomy theory respecting the future of this

globe, i. 352

Byron, Lord, his _Hours of Idleness_, quotations or plagiarisms from?

i. 132, 174;

visit to, at Ravenna, 390, 391;

his meeting with “Monk” Lewis, ii. 208;

at Venice, 226;

a gondoliere’s opinion of, 236;

Shelley’s visit to, at Venice, 237;

his _Don Juan_, 241;

his _Childe Harold_, 259;

his low debauchery, _ib._;

a great poet, 260;

visit to, at Ravenna, 332-345;

his Letter to Bowles, 342;

his _Cain_, 355;

at Leghorn, 362, 364

Calderon, i. 388, ii. 14, 305, 306;

his _Magico Prodigioso_, 353, 354

Calvin and Servetus, i. 229

Castlereagh, ii. 268

Catholic emancipation, i. 242 _sqq._

Charlotte, Princess, death of, i. 369

Chaucer, ii. 27

Chesterfield, Lord, his distinction between simulation and

dissimulation, ii. 394

Chillon, castle of, i. 340

Cicero, ii. 8, 49

Clarens, i. 341

Cobbett, William, on Annual Parliaments, i. 365; ii. 276, 289

Coleridge, S. T., his tragedy of _Remorse_, ii. 292, 353, 354

Coliseum, the, i. 394; ii. 260

Como, ii. 223-225

Comyns, Lord Chief Baron, his definition of libel, i. 254

Constantine, the first Christian Emperor, atrocities of, i. 306;

arch of, ii. 261, 280, 281

Correggio, two pictures of, ii. 249, 250

Dante, i. 385; ii. 24;

the first religious reformer, 27, 40;

tomb of, 344

Danube, the, i. 15, 32

Democritus, i. 400

Diotima, the prophetess, ii. 88, 89

Dowden, Professor, ii. 387

Drummond, Sir William, his _Academical Questions_, i. 327; ii. 176

Eaton, Daniel Isaac, sentence on, for publishing Paine’s _Age of

Reason_, ii. 369-386

Ellenborough, Lord, Shelley’s letter to, ii. 369-386

Epicurus, i. 421

Evian, town of, i. 335, 336

Finnerty, Mr. Peter, i. 255; ii. 399

Fitzwilliam, Lord, recall of, ii. 303

Fletcher, John, his _Two Noble Kinsmen_, ii. 255

Forsyth’s Travels in Italy, ii. 285

Fox, Charles James, i. 238

Franceschini, pictures of, ii. 251, 252

Fust, specimens of his press, ii. 344

Genoa, i. 153

George III., i. 237

George IV., i. 238

Gibbon, his house at Lausanne, i. 343

Gisborne, Mr. and Mrs., letters to, ii. 229-231, 290-291, 296-299,

301-309, 312-319, 326-330, 350-356

Gisborne, Mrs., ii. 228, 229

Godwin, William, his novels, i. 412-416;

letter to, ii. 231-233, 317;

his answer to Malthus, 352;

his law-suit and pecuniary embarrassments, 360, 361

Goethe, his _Faust_, ii. 353

Guercino, pictures by, ii. 253

Guiccioli, Contessa, Byron’s liaison with, ii. 333, 337, 340;

her letter to Shelley, 343, 350, 351

Guido, his picture of the Rape of Proserpine, ii. 249;

his Samson, 250;

his Murder of the Innocents, 250, 251;

his “Fortune,” 251;

his “Madonna Lattante,” _ib._;

his picture of Beatrice Cenci, 293

Heraclitus, i. 400

Hermance, village of, described, i. 333

Hesiod, quoted, ii. 61

Heyne, on the opinions entertained of the Jews by ancient poets and

philosophers, i. 301

Hogg, Thomas Jefferson, his _Memoirs of Prince Alexy Haimatoff_, ii.

387-396

Homer, quoted, ii. 56, 62;

on Calamity, 80, 81;

the most admirable of all poets, 115;

quoted, 124, 126, 127

Horace, quoted, i. 105; ii. 275

Hume, on causation, i. 327

Hunt, Leigh, letters to, i. 381-391;

invited by Lord Byron to Italy, ii. 268;

letter to, 294-296, 317, 362, 364

Kean, Edmund, ii. 293

Keats, John, his _Endymion_, ii. 322-324;

his sufferings, 323;

death of, 327

Lafayette, words of, i. 262

Lamb, Charles, i. 384; ii. 295

Laplace, demonstration of, i. 319

Lausanne, i. 343

Lear, King, ii. 14

Lewis, M. G., his ghost stories, ii. 208-212

Livy, ii. 9;

description by, 256

Lloyd, Charles, ii. 295

Locke, on sensation, i. 327

Lucretius, quoted, i. 296

Luther, ii. 27

Lyttelton, Lord, ii. 210, 211, 212

_Macbeth_, quoted, i. 47, 93, 273; ii. 21, 31, 375

Macchiavelli, on political institutions, ii. 17

Malthus, i. 280, 281;

Godwin’s answer to, ii. 232, 352;

a very clever man, 243

Marlow, ii. 223;

Shelley’s house at, 226

Marsyas, ii. 106, 107

Mellerie, i. 336, 337

Michael Angelo, i. 384, 385;

his Bacchus, 409

Milan Cathedral, ii. 225

Milton, death of, i. 370

Milton, his _Paradise Lost_ quoted, i. 146, 415;

stood alone, ii. 16;

his _Paradise Lost_, 25, 33;

quoted, 35

Mirabaud’s _Système de la Nature_, i. 326

Mont Blanc, i. 348

Moore, Thomas, ii. 339, 357, 358, 361

Music, ii. 70, 71

Nerni, village of, described, i. 334

Newton, Sir Isaac, ii. 374

Obscenity, blasphemy against the divine beauty in life, ii. 17

O’Neill, Miss, part of Beatrice Cenci fitted for, ii. 293

Oxford, reminiscence of, ii. 193

Paine, Thomas, i. 278

Peacock, Thomas Love, letters to, ii. 221-229, 241-290, 291-293

Petrarch, ii. 40

Petronius, poetical description of, ii. 265

Plato, i. 421;

essentially a poet, ii. 7, 22, 24;

the greatest among the Greek philosophers, 48;

his Symposium, 232

Pliny quoted, i. 294

Pompeii, ii. 270-275

_Queen Mab_, piratical republication of, ii. 328, 350

Raphael, i. 384;

his St. Cecilia, ii. 252, 253

Ravenna, ii. 338

Reveley, Henry, letters to, ii. 299-301, 309-312, 325, 326

Richardson, Samuel, his _Grandison_ quoted, ii. 237

Rome, a city of the dead, ii. 261;

English burying-place at, 262

Rousseau, his _Julie_, i. 333, 337, 339-341, 343;

essentially a poet, ii. 30

Schiller, his _Jungfrau von Orleans_, ii. 352

Scott’s _Lay of the Last Minstrel_ quoted, i. 47, 212;

_Marmion_ quoted, 100

Shakespeare, quoted, i. 384;

the greatest individual mind, ii. 40;

attribution to him of part of _The Two Noble Kinsmen_, 255

Shelley, Mrs., her _Frankenstein_, i. 417-419

Socrates, ii. 53-135, 381

Sophocles, ii. 317

Southey, Robert, Shelley’s visit to, at Keswick, ii. 295

Spinosa, quoted, i. 328

St. Gingoux, village of, i. 338

St. Peter’s, Rome, ii. 282, 283

Suetonius, quoted, i. 294

Tasso, bold and true words of, ii. 35, 175;

manuscripts of, 246, 247

Terence, i. 409

Theocritus, ii. 19;

quoted, 291

Thomson, quoted, i. 77

Translation, vanity of, ii. 7

Tuberose, odour of the, ii. 17

Vallière, Madame de la, ii. 214

Velino, cataract of the, ii. 257

Venice, i. 87, 88; ii. 241

Vesuvius, ii. 263, 265-267

Vevai, i. 343

Virgil, quoted, ii. 25;

his Sixth Æneid, 264

Wellesley, Marquis, quotation from a speech of, ii. 369

Wieland, his novels, ii. 44

Wollstonecraft, Mary, her writings, i. 413

Wordsworth, i. 413;

quoted, ii. 206, 263, 353

Yvoire, village of, i. 335

END OF VOL. I.

_Printed by_ Ballantyne, Hanson & Co.

_Edinburgh and London_

Transcriber’s Notes

A number of typographical errors were corrected silently.

Cover image is in the public domain.

The chapter number jump from VIII(8) to X(10) in the Zastrossi

section is in the original text.

Index was copied from Vol II of this work.