Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might; To live beneath your more habitual sway: I love the brooks which down their channels fret The clouds that gather round the setting sun 1795 1800 1805 PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY I. LIFE BYRON, Shelley, and Keats, whose names are joined as often as any three in English letters, were with all their differences - alike in one sad respect. You cannot read their biographies without feeling a pity and a wonder that such rare genius should be given to the world so briefly. Too soon, with all three, the shears of the blind Fury slit the thin-spun life. Of the truly great English poets, Byron and Shelley stand almost alone as men of high birth. Though not of the nobility, Percy Bysshe Shelley came of a family both rich and ancient. His father, Timothy Shelley (afterward Sir Timothy), had married the very beautiful Elizabeth Pilfold. Of their four daughters and two sons, the eldest was the poet, who was born August 4, 1792, at Field Place, near Horsham, Sussex. He might have been a changeling; for never before or since did such conventional, worldly people rear a child so unworldly and so ethereal. Lord Chesterfield, with no greater surprise, might have found himself father to Ariel. Shelley passed his boyhood at Field Place, where, his sister Hellen has told us, he "would frequently come into the nursery, and was full of a peculiar kind of pranks. One piece of mischief, for which he was rebuked, was running a stick through the ceiling of a low passage to find some new chamber, which could be made effective for some new flights of imagination." His sister has also left a picture of him as a slight and beautiful figure, with eyes of a "wild fixed beauty," skin like snow, and bright ringlets covering his head; and tells how, while playing at ghosts and alchemists, the children all dressed themselves "in strange costumes to personate spirits or fiends, and Bysshe would take a fire-stove and fill it with some inflammable liquid and carry it flaming into the kitchen and to the back door." The boy was also friends with an "Old Snake" who had lived for several generations in the garden. When ten years old, he was sent away to school, at Sion House, Brentford. Here, while dreaming out at the windows, or wandering in a revery, he absorbed the classic languages as if without an effort. On holidays, when the other boys went to their games, his slight and delicate figure might be seen pacing back and forth under the playground walls, in deep and vague meditation. In 1804 he left Sion House for Eton, where again he was not popular, though he won admiration from the younger boys, of his own age, by leading a rebellion against the custom of fagging. This last, you might guess, is exactly what Shelley would do; for his whole life was a protest against all established customs which had any trace of oppression or tyranny. His schoolmates elected him "The Atheist," a title which, his friend Hogg says, was given to the boy who defied the rules most openly. In studies he was not idle, but irregular, reading Greek and Latin with astonishing swiftness, dabbling with crucibles, microscopes, and Leyden jars, and going about, even on holidays at home, with hands and clothes "constantly, stained and corroded by acids." him, but he did not really study so like any boy who has read about magicians and alchemists. Science fascinated much as play at it, He also wrote a wild and foolish novel called Zastrozzi, which strangely enough got itself published in 1810, and which brought him in £40. He spent the money, or part of it, on a farewell supper with eight other school-boys, and left Eton for Oxford. Hogg, his college friend and biographer, describes him as a freshman, and their life as undergraduates. "He was tall, but he stooped so much that he seemed of a low stature. His clothes were expensive, and made according to the most approved mode, . . . but they were tumbled, rumpled, unbrushed. His gestures were abrupt, and sometimes violent, yet more frequently gentle and graceful. His complexion was almost feminine, of the purest red and white. His features . . . and particularly his head, were ... ... unusually small; yet the last appeared of a remarkable bulk, for his hair was long and bushy, and .. in the agonies . . . of anxious thought, he often rubbed it fiercely with his hands ... singularly wild and rough. so that it was His features . breathed an animation, a fire, an enthusiasm, a vivid SELECTIONS — II |