We spent the summer of 1820 at the Baths of San Giuliano, four miles
from Pisa. These baths were of great use to Shelley in soothing his
nervous irritability. We made several excursions in the neighbourhood.
The country around is fertile, and diversified and rendered picturesque
by ranges of near hills and more distant mountains. The peasantry are a
handsome intelligent race; and there was a gladsome sunny heaven spread
over us, that rendered home and every scene we visited cheerful and
bright. During some of the hottest days of August, Shelley made a
solitary journey on foot to the summit of Monte San Pellegrino--a
mountain of some height, on the top of which there is a chapel, the
object, during certain days of the year, of many pilgrimages. The
excursion delighted him while it lasted; though he exerted himself too
much, and the effect was considerable lassitude and weakness on his
return. During the expedition he conceived the idea, and wrote, in the
three days immediately succeeding to his return, the "Witch of Atlas".
This poem is peculiarly characteristic of his tastes--wildly fanciful,
full of brilliant imagery, and discarding human interest and passion, to
revel in the fantastic ideas that his imagination suggested.
The surpassing excellence of "The Cenci" had made me greatly desire that
Shelley should increase his popularity by adopting subjects that would
more suit the popular taste than a poem conceived in the abstract and
dreamy spirit of the "Witch of Atlas". It was not only that I wished him
to acquire popularity as redounding to his fame; but I believed that he
would obtain a greater mastery over his own powers, and greater
happiness in his mind, if public applause crowned his endeavours. The
few stanzas that precede the poem were addressed to me on my
representing these ideas to him. Even now I believe that I was in the
right. Shelley did not expect sympathy and approbation from the public;
but the want of it took away a portion of the ardour that ought to have
sustained him while writing. He was thrown on his own resources, and on
the inspiration of his own soul; and wrote because his mind overflowed,
without the hope of being appreciated. I had not the most distant wish
that he should truckle in opinion, or submit his lofty aspirations for
the human race to the low ambition and pride of the many; but I felt
sure that, if his poems were more addressed to the common feelings of
men, his proper rank among the writers of the day would be acknowledged,
and that popularity as a poet would enable his countrymen to do justice
to his character and virtues, which in those days it was the mode to
attack with the most flagitious calumnies and insulting abuse. That he
felt these things deeply cannot be doubted, though he armed himself with
the consciousness of acting from a lofty and heroic sense of right. The
truth burst from his heart sometimes in solitude, and he would write a
few unfinished verses that showed that he felt the sting; among such I
find the following:--
'Alas! this is not what I thought Life was.
I knew that there were crimes and evil men,
Misery and hate; nor did I hope to pass
Untouched by suffering through the rugged glen.
In mine own heart I saw as in a glass
The hearts of others...And, when
I went among my kind, with triple brass
Of calm endurance my weak breast I armed,
To bear scorn, fear, and hate--a woful mass!'
I believed that all this morbid feeling would vanish if the chord of
sympathy between him and his countrymen were touched. But my persuasions
were vain, the mind could not be bent from its natural inclination.
Shelley shrunk instinctively from portraying human passion, with its
mixture of good and evil, of disappointment and disquiet. Such opened
again the wounds of his own heart; and he loved to shelter himself
rather in the airiest flights of fancy, forgetting love and hate, and
regret and lost hope, in such imaginations as borrowed their hues from
sunrise or sunset, from the yellow moonshine or paly twilight, from the
aspect of the far ocean or the shadows of the woods,--which celebrated
the singing of the winds among the pines, the flow of a murmuring
stream, and the thousand harmonious sounds which Nature creates in her
solitudes. These are the materials which form the "Witch of Atlas": it
is a brilliant congregation of ideas such as his senses gathered, and
his fancy coloured, during his rambles in the sunny land he so much
loved.