The very illness that oppressed, and the aspect of death which had
approached so near Shelley, appear to have kindled to yet keener life
the Spirit of Poetry in his heart. The restless thoughts kept awake by
pain clothed themselves in verse. Much was composed during this year.
The "Revolt of Islam", written and printed, was a great
effort--"Rosalind and Helen" was begun--and the fragments and poems I
can trace to the same period show how full of passion and reflection
were his solitary hours.
In addition to such poems as have an intelligible aim and shape, many a
stray idea and transitory emotion found imperfect and abrupt expression,
and then again lost themselves in silence. As he never wandered without
a book and without implements of writing, I find many such, in his
manuscript books, that scarcely bear record; while some of them, broken
and vague as they are, will appear valuable to those who love Shelley's
mind, and desire to trace its workings.
He projected also translating the "Hymns" of Homer; his version of
several of the shorter ones remains, as well as that to Mercury already
published in the "Posthumous Poems". His readings this year were chiefly
Greek. Besides the "Hymns" of Homer and the "Iliad", he read the dramas
of Aeschylus and Sophocles, the "Symposium" of Plato, and Arrian's
"Historia Indica". In Latin, Apuleius alone is named. In English, the
Bible was his constant study; he read a great portion of it aloud in the
evening. Among these evening readings I find also mentioned the "Faerie
Queen"; and other modern works, the production of his contemporaries,
Coleridge, Wordsworth, Moore and Byron.
His life was now spent more in thought than action--he had lost the
eager spirit which believed it could achieve what it projected for the
benefit of mankind. And yet in the converse of daily life Shelley was
far from being a melancholy man. He was eloquent when philosophy or
politics or taste were the subjects of conversation. He was playful; and
indulged in the wild spirit that mocked itself and others--not in
bitterness, but in sport. The author of "Nightmare Abbey" seized on some
points of his character and some habits of his life when he painted
Scythrop. He was not addicted to 'port or madeira,' but in youth he had
read of 'Illuminati and Eleutherarchs,' and believed that he possessed
the power of operating an immediate change in the minds of men and the
state of society. These wild dreams had faded; sorrow and adversity had
struck home; but he struggled with despondency as he did with physical
pain. There are few who remember him sailing paper boats, and watching
the navigation of his tiny craft with eagerness--or repeating with wild
energy "The Ancient Mariner", and Southey's "Old Woman of Berkeley"; but
those who do will recollect that it was in such, and in the creations of
his own fancy when that was most daring and ideal, that he sheltered
himself from the storms and disappointments, the pain and sorrow, that
beset his life.
No words can express the anguish he felt when his elder children were
torn from him. In his first resentment against the Chancellor, on the
passing of the decree, he had written a curse, in which there breathes,
besides haughty indignation, all the tenderness of a father's love,
which could imagine and fondly dwell upon its loss and the consequences.
At one time, while the question was still pending, the Chancellor had
said some words that seemed to intimate that Shelley should not be
permitted the care of any of his children, and for a moment he feared
that our infant son would be torn from us. He did not hesitate to
resolve, if such were menaced, to abandon country, fortune, everything,
and to escape with his child; and I find some unfinished stanzas
addressed to this son, whom afterwards we lost at Rome, written under
the idea that we might suddenly be forced to cross the sea, so to
preserve him. This poem, as well as the one previously quoted, were not
written to exhibit the pangs of distress to the public; they were the
spontaneous outbursts of a man who brooded over his wrongs and woes, and
was impelled to shed the grace of his genius over the uncontrollable
emotions of his heart. I ought to observe that the fourth verse of this
effusion is introduced in "Rosalind and Helen". When afterwards this
child died at Rome, he wrote, a propos of the English burying-ground in
that city: 'This spot is the repository of a sacred loss, of which the
yearnings of a parent's heart are now prophetic; he is rendered immortal
by love, as his memory is by death. My beloved child lies buried here. I
envy death the body far less than the oppressors the minds of those whom
they have torn from me. The one can only kill the body, the other
crushes the affections.'