;







.-,:




POEM.

LIBRARY'
SHELLEY

SELECTED AND ARRANGED BY

STOPFORD A. BROOKE











r /*+t4




Printed by R. & R. CLARK, Edinburgh.



AH, DID YOU ONCE SEE SHELLEY PLAIN,
AND DID HE STOP AND SPEAK TO YOU,

AND DID YOU SPEAK TO HIM AGAIN?
HOW STRANGE IT SEEMS, AND NEW !



BUT YOU WERE LIVING BEFORE THAT,

AND ALSO YOU ARB LIVING AFTER;
AND THE MEMORY I STARTED AT

MY STARTING MOVES YOUR LAUGHTER!

III.

I CROSSED A MOOR, WITH A NAME OF ITS OWN,
AND A CERTAIN USE IN THE WORLD, NO DOUBT,

YET A HAND'S-BREADTH OF IT SHINES ALONE
'MlD THE BLANK MILES ROUND ABOUT :



FOR THERE I PICKED UP ON THE HEATHER,

AND THERE I PUT INSIDE MY BREAST,
A MOULTED FEATHER, AN EAGLE FEATHER !

WELL, I FORGET THE REST.

ROBERT BROWNING.



PREFACE.



SHELLEY, from whose poetry this book of Selections
is made, can only, like all other poets, be judged justly,
or fitly loved, when everything he wished to be pub-
lished has been carefully studied. We can no more
comprehend him in the right way by reading only
his finest poems, supposing we could choose them,
than we can receive a true impression of the character
of the scenery of a country by visiting a selection of
its most beautiful places. Through his weakness we
know part of his strength ; nor is it only for his power
we love him. This necessity of reading all a poet's
work, if we wish to know him truly, or to receive from
him his special gift of pleasure, is the main objection
to Selections; but its weight is lessened when the in-
tention of a book of this kind is not to represent
Shelley fully, but to present, in a brief compass,
enough of his poetry to induce those who are igno-
rant of it to read the whole. That is the only valid
reason and excuse for Selections from a poet, and it
is the object of this book. If the excuse be accepted,
we may say that Shelley is more open to selection



viii PREFACE.

than many of the other poets. ' His ^ whole work is
short, and a great deal of it can be included in
a small book. It is especially lyrical, and lyrics
are the best material for selections. Some, too, of
the longer poems, such as Alastor and Adonais, in
which we can study his steadier and more ambitious
effort, are brief enough to be inserted entire, and they
break the lyrics _ pleasantly, and offer a more varied
enjoyment to the reader. There is also one spirit in
Shelley's work which fills and brings into unity all
his poems. It is the spirit of youth. We are not
troubled in reading these Selections, by such a
change in the whole nature of the poet as age made
in Wordsworth. Owing to this unity of spirit, I have
been able to place together, without fear of their jar-
ring with one another, poems written at different
periods of Shelley's life on the same or kindred themes.
To group such poems together is the method followed
in this book, and its fitness seems to be supported
by the fact that Shelley, being very fond of his ideas,
and also of the forms he gave them, repeated them
continually. The impression made by one poem is
therefore strengthened by another on the same subject.
Shelley is his own best illustrator.

When Selections from any poet appear rapidly, it
may be said that he has taken his place, that time
and its verdict have distinguished him in his own
country. And Shelley is now at home with us, and
his praise becomes greater day by day. Some of that



PREFACE. ix

praise, especially when it exalts him, without distinc-
tiveness of criticism, above his brother poets, seems
undeserved, but there is no longer any doubt, among
those worthy to judge, that Shelley has assumed his own
separate throne among the greater poets of England.
It is then somewhat strange to look back nearly
sixty years, and to think that when Shelley died,
scarcely fifty people cared to read his poetry, and
even these did not understand it. Seven years after
his death opinion began to change. He had so far in-
fluenced the young men of Cambridge, that its Union 1
sent a deputation in November 1829 to the Oxford I
Union, to maintain Shelley's superiority over Byron. I
"At that time," said Lord Houghton speaking in
1866 "we, the Cambridge undergraduates, were all
very full of Mr. Shelley. We had printed his Adonais
for the first time in England, and a friend of ours sug-
gested that, as he had been expelled from Oxford, and
very badly treated in that University, it would be a
grand thing for us to defend him there." The young
men, Arthur Hallam, Monckton Milnes, and Sunder-
land, were received by Gladstone, Francis Doyle,
and Milnes Gaskell. Wilberforce of Oriel was in the
Chair. Sir Francis Doyle, (Christ Church) moved
that Shelley was a greater poet than Lord Byron. He
was supported by the three Cambridge men, and by
Mr. Oldham of Oriel. The negative was defended by .
Mr. Manning; and on division Byron was declared the V
greater poet by a majority of fifty-seven. This inter- I f



x PREFACE.

esting story proves that some young men at Oxford
and Cambridge were now awakened to Shelley's
genius. They felt and loved him as the most ideal of
the poets, and year by year he has increased the number
of those who give him that special place and honour.

About 1832 his power over the minds of men
increased. At that time fresh political and theo-
logical elements began to excite England, and then
the other side of Shelley's work began to tell. The
poems he had written as the prophet of liberty,
equality, fraternity, and a Golden Age, were eagerly
read by the more intelligent among the working
classes, and by many who felt that the ideas of the
French Revolution were again arising into activity
after their winter sleep. It is a part of his work
which still continues to do good.

Again, within the last few years, the sad, re-
gretful, unsatisfied, self-considering, indefinite ele-
ments in the mind of educated English society have
found food and expression in a certain number of
Shelley's poems, and this has increased the extent
of his influence. That which has been called the
" lyrical cry " belongs now to a whole section of
society, lincf " Shelley often echoes its regret and in-
i definiteness with great beauty.

Moreover, a great number of persons who care for
Nature as Art cares for her, that is, as alive and not
dead, being revolted by the materialistic aspect in
which some scientific theories now present her, have






PREFACE. xi

turned with new pleasure to the spiritual representa-
tions given of her by such poets as Wordsworth and
Shelley. That also has added a fresh impulse to the
study of Shelley.

It may also be said that the forms, and especially
the ideal forms of passionate love, have been, of late,
more minutely dwelt on in poetry, and with greater
curiosity, than they have been since the Elizabethan
period. It is natural, then, that a poet like Shelley,
who made ideal love his study, and the subject of so
much of his work, should now receive and claim
greater attention.

Shelley, reflecting and embodying these various
phases, is then a much more comprehensive poet than
the common judgment supposes. And he is all the more
comprehensive because his nature and his work were
twofold. The first thing to say of him is, that he I
lived in two worlds, thought in two worlds, and in I
both of these did work which was atonfe" varied
and distinct. One was the world of Mankind and
its hopes, the other was the world of his own heart.

His poetic life was an alternate changing from
one of these worlds to the other. He passed from :
poetry written for the sake of mankind, to poetry
written for his own sake and to express himself; j
from the Shelley who was inspired by moral aims
and wrote in the hope of a regeneration of the
world, to that other Shelley who, inspired only by his
own ideas and regrets, wrote without any ethical end,



xii PREFACE.

and absolutely apart from humanity. The passionate
lover of man crosses over the stage, singing of man-
kind, and disappears. The passionate poet succeeds,
singing of himself, and disappears in turn. The
interchange continues, but both the figures are the
same man.

Shelley began as the prophet of the ideas of the
French Revolution. Queen Mab, written with the
enthusiasm of a youth for the overthrow of the evils
that he thought oppressed mankind, and in hope of
its deliverance into a world of love and peace, is not,
as a poem, so " absolutely worthless " as he imagined
it to be. The verse is musical ; there are two direct
pictures of nature, both of the sky ; the journey
through the stars has some of the imaginative power
which realised the flight of Asia and the Hours in
the Prometheus, but all the polemical part is very
prosaic. It is like a sermon in verse, and it has just
the poetical quality we expect in a sermon. The latter
portion is naturally the best. The most remarkable
element Queen Mab possesses is didactic force. But,
owing to its uncultivated rhetoric, that force is likely
to tell most on very young persons, and on uneducated
but intelligent working men, who may sympathise
with its opinions. The poem had such an influence,
and that influence was widely extended.

Two years later, in 1815, all was changed. The
circumstances of his life, illness, expectation of death,
made him lose, in losing all vigour and joy, his in-



PREFACE. xiii

terest in man, and Alastor, his next long poem, is
entirely occupied with his own solitary thought and
life. The preface he wrote explains the meaning of
the poem, and, contrasted with the poem, reveals that
double nature in Shelley of which I write. He repu-
diates in it, with all the sternness of a moralist, yet
with self-pity, the life described in Alastor; and the
lines with which he closes the poem itself " It is a
woe too deep for tears," etc., are a cry of sorrow and
reproach against one who desired to work for man,
but who wasted life in pursuit of that unattainable
beauty his soul could dream of, but not realize.

Of all Shelley's longer poems, Alastor leaves on
the general reader the easiest impression of an artis-
tic whole. The subject is one, and never varies from
itself: it is closely clung to from beginning to end,
and is deeply felt throughout. The poetry and
its art, both imaginative and technical, are of course
less great than they became in after work, but so_far
as unity of conception and steadiness of expression
ancTTorm are concerned, even Adonais is less artistic
than Alastor. Shelley's personality absorbs the poem.
The extreme ideality of the treatment alone relieves the
intensity of this personal revelation, and makes it not
too overwhelming to give pleasure. The natural de-
scriptions prove how deeply Shelley had felt some of
the larger aspects of Nature, and the melody of their
verse is at times like the harmonies we seem to hear
among waters and woods ; but Nature in this poem



xiv PREFACE.

is never described for herself alone, never for pure
joy in her. She is made to reflect the thoughts and
passion of the wandering poet until the very last,
when his life and that of the moon ebb away to-
gether. This is deliberately done, and nowhere in a
finer way than in the description of the long walk
down the glen. We follow step by step the inter-
penetration of the poet's dying soul and of the vari-
ous changes of the scene. As the brook flows to the
precipice, so does his life ; as the valley alters its
landscape, so does the landscape in his heart. The
skill and intensity with which this is wrought out is
the cause of the fascination that passage has for all
who read it.

In the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty and to Mont
Blanc, written &Kef'~%7ast0r, Shelley, though writing
orfly^as the artist of his own thought, has recovered

some of his hopes for Man. He tries to connect his

( ,,_, ,, I,-

worship of Beauty with the redemption of the race ;
he spealcs of the PoweFliidden in the great mountain
to "repeal large codes of fraud and woe." His Con-
tinental journey had brought him new health, and his
life, new happiness, and with them came back the old
longing and the old interest to play his part in the
movement of the world. The result was the Revolt
of Islam. Its genesis and its aim are explained in
tfie preface with which he accompanied the poem.
It seemed to Shelley that the age of despair that
followed the end of the French Revolution was over,



PREFACE. xv

and that now, when the reaction from that trance of
failure had begun, the time had arrived for him to
speak. In that belief he composed this poem. It
strove to kindle afresh the flame of liberty, but it had
no effect on the exhausted Englishmen of 1 8 1 8. Nor,
as poefry7"did ifTlesefve to have a great effect. It is
the most unbalanced of all his works. The interest
is human, but it is too frequently taken out of the
world of actual human life to awaken practical emotion.
Were the scenery of the poem all ideal, or all real, we
should not be so troubled while we read. Were the
poem supremely ethical or supremely emotional, had
it any unity at all, it might keep its power over us.
But it has no unity, not even in feeling. Its emotion
is unequal ; we are continually changing the atmo-
sphere, and are overchilled or overheated. There is no
artistic fusion of the poetry which aims at giving a
hi^li pUTisure with that which aims at awakening- TiTaYi
to his duties. That fusion was made in the Prome-
theus' Unbound, but here it was not made.

And now another of these changes took place.
Shelley fell ill again, the threatened loss of his
children preyed upon him, and n ^jftE,ngland for
ever in 1 8 1 8. He lost again for a time his enthusiasm
for man,' and the characteristic of the work of this
year is sadness deepening into misery. With very
few exceptions the poems are personal. One, how-
ever, differs from all that preceded it. Julian and
Maddalo, composed at the end of the year, is personal,



xvi PREFACE.

but still not so much so as to prevent Shelley from
painting, with a firm hand, another character than

I his own. It is the first instance of that power of
losing himself in the creation of distinct personages
which enabled him to write the drama of the Cen& } .
Julian and Maddalo has unity, and the materials are
carefully woven together. The style is subdued to a
quiet level, and the imagination, which ran riot in
the Revolt of Islam, is curbed to do its work, and only
its special work, by the will of the poet. Reading it,
we should predict that if again the enthusiasm for
man should awaken in Shelley's heart, the work he
would do on the subject would be more worthy of
his power. It did awaken, and in how different a form
it came ! It was no longer hampered by his notion
that he must directly attack evil. It rose at once
and easily, taking with it all the subjects of the Revolt
of Islam, into the region of pure art, and there, in the
world of passion and beauty and fire, he wrote the
Prometheus Unbound. That poem is the marriage of
Shelley's double nature, the fusion for creative work of
trreTover of man and the poet. He reaches in it that
culminating point at which the thinker on man gives

I his best-loved materials to the artist, and the artist
breathes into them life and beauty.

The same vivid interest in humanity was then made
1 special in the Cenci, a tragedy wrought out with so
much temperance of imagination, directness of emo-
tion, and closeness of thought, that it is the strangest



PREFACE. xvii

contrast to the Prometheus. The range of power
implied in the production of these two dramas |
within twelve months, each so great, and so unlike,
is rarely to be paralleled among the poets below
those of the highest order. It is all the more
wonderful when we think that about the same time
such poems were also created as the Sensitive Plant, (
the Skylark, the Cloud, Arethusa, and the Ode to the
West Wind. The last alone is enough to place ;
Shelley apart from the other lyrical poets of England.
In it, as in the Prometheus, and still more splendidly,
all his powers and his poetic subjects are wrought into
a whole. The emotion awakened by the approaching
storm sets on fire other sleeping emotions in his
heart, and the whole of his being bursts into flame
around the first emotion. This is the manner of the
genesis of all the noblest lyrics. He passes from
magnificent union of himself with Nature and mag-
nificent realisation of her storm arid peace, to equally
great self-description, and then mingles all nature
and all himself together, that he may sing of the resto-
ration of mankind. There is no song in the whole
of our literature more passionate, more penetrative,
more full of the force by which the idea and its form
are united into one creation.

This time, during which Shelley's twofold being
was married for creative work, did not last long. The
two elements always tended to separate, and now the
special Shelley element, which fled from man into



xviii PREFACE.

the recesses of his own heart, or communed with the
ideal Nature which he made for himself out of the
apparent world, began to absorb him, and finally
drove out the other.

At the beginning of this reaction he was still gay,
often bright ; and the Letter to Maria Gisborne is
one of the rare poems in which Shelley is at peace.
An air of home and happiness flows through its
familiar and melodious verse. The Witch of Atlas
also belongs to this time ; a poem m which he sent
his imagination out, like a child into a meadow, with-
out any aim save to enjoy itself. Now and again
Shelley himself, as it were from a distance, alters or
arranges the manner of the sport, as if with some in-
tention, but never so much as to spoil the natural
wildness of the Imagination's play. Enough is done
to suggest that there may be a meaning in it all, but
not enough to tell that meaning. " I mean nothing,"
Shelley would have said ; " I did not write the poem.
My imagination made it of her own accord." Nor was
he so self-absorbed at first as wholly to neglect the
cause of man. The Ode to Liberty, the Odt to Xaples,
belong to this summer and autumn of 1820.

We pass into the isolated poet with the Sensitive
Plant, the companionless flower ; and from this time
forth the old Shelley, who loved Mankind, is dead.
The only exception is the choral drama of Hellas,
written in a transient enthusiasm for the cause of
Greece. " I try to be what I might have been,"



PREFACE. xix

he says, "but am not successful. It was written
without much care, and in one of those few moments
of enthusiasm which now seldom visit me, and which
make me pay dear for their visits." Two poems, how-
ever, preceded Hellas ; Epipsychidion and Adonais.
Both are written by the lonely arYisTT^'ot'Ts^ereany
trace in them of the Shelley who prophesied for Man.
Of Epipsychidion I have spoken in the notes of
this book. The ideal passion, in which it originated,
hid him in the light of thought, far away from
humanity, and he never quite got back again.

Adonais, awakened in him not only by his sym-
pathy with Keats, but also by the resemblance of the
fate of Keats to his own, is almost as much concerned
with Shelley as with its subject. There is nothing
in English poetry so steeped in passionate personality
as the description of himself in stanzas xxxi-iv. It
is almost too~"clOse, too unveiled,^i6lo^irrr?nse to have
been written. The only other poet for Byron's self-
description is written with a view to effect who has
approached the wild self-sorrow of it, is Cowper,
and he uses the same simile of the stricken stag.
The poem is, as Shelley said, "a highly wrought
piece of art." Its abstract spirituality, and its philo-
sophy, remove it from the ordinary apprehension,
and are the cause why it is less read than Alastor,
But, in truth, Shelley himself, and the scenery and
personages he creates in this abstract realm, are
more real in this poem than in others which have to



xx PREFACE.

do with the actual world. It suited him to write
about a spirit, and he wrote as he were himself a
spirit. The Dreams which hover round Adonais, the
Splendours and Glooms, Morning with the tears
in her hair, Spring wild with grief, Echo singing in
the hills, Urania flying to mourn beside the bier
Shelley has succeeded in giving them all being.
While we read, we believe in the" reality of this
world as we believe in our dreams while we dream.
The power of doing this is unique, and is due not
only to imagination at its height, but also to keenness
of abstract intellect. His grip of these impalpable
personages is quite certain. He creates them, and
then he sees and hears them. Owing to this the
conduct of the poem is clear. The unremitting
beauty of the lines so engages attention as at first to
forbid an analysis of the arrangement, but when that
analysis is made, the pleasure Adonais gives is not
disturbed, but doubled. And how passionate it is
throughout, more passionate than most of his love
poems ! It is unceasingly strange, and the strange-
ness adds, from outside, to the charm of Shelley's
poetry, to find him writing with a far greater in-
tensity of feeling about the sorrow of Urania and
the Dreams, about the Spirit of Love in the Universe,
about Keats in the spiritual world, and about his
own wearied and solitary heart, than he ever writes
about men or women, about human love, or about the
personal suffering of others.



PREFACE. xxi

A new element of isolation, that created by a
passion which circumstances forbade him to pursue,
separated him now, at the close of his life, still more
from Mankind, and in that temper he died. But
there are some proofs, to which I shall afterwards
draw attention, that he would, as before, have passed
out of this lonely inner life, and found himself again
in sympathy with the external. Had he lived, he
would have once more appeared as the Singer of
Man, and in the cause of men. But the swift wind
and the mysterious sea, the things he loved, slew
their lover a common fate and we hear no more
his singing. His work was done, and its twofold
nature may well be imaged by the Sea that received
into its uninhabited breast his uncompanioned spirit ;
for, while its central depths know only solitude, over
its surface are always passing to and fro the life and
fortunes of humanity.

But the sea gave up its dead, and all of Shelley's '
body that was rescued from flood and fire lies now j
where the rise of the ground ends, in a dark nook /
of the Aurelian wall. So deep is that resting-place
in shadow that the violets blossom later there than
on " the slope of green access " where, seen from
ShelleyT'grave, the flowers grow over the dust of
Adonais. We may be glad that both were buried
in Italy rather than in England, for, though no
Italian could have written their poetry, yet it was,
in all things else different, of that spirit which
c



xxii PREFACE.

Italy awakens in Englishmen who love her, rather
than of the purely English spirit. The Italian air,
the sentiment of Italy, fled and dreamed through
their poems, but most through those of Shelley. It
was but fitting, then, that Shelley, whose fame was
England's, should be buried in the city which is the
heart of Italy. But he was born far away from this
peaceful and melancholy spot, and grew up to man-
hood under the grey skies of England, until its
Universities, its Church, its Society, its Law and its
dominant policy became inhospitable to him, nay, even
his own father cast him out. They all had, in the
opinion of sober men of that time, good cause to make
him a stranger, for he attacked them all, and it would
be neither wise or true, nor grateful to Shelley himself,
were he to be put forward as a genius unjustly treated,
or as one who deserved or asked for pity. Those who
separate themselves from society, and war against its
dearest maxims, if they are as resolute in their choice,
and as firm in their beliefs as Shelley, count the cost,
and do not or rarely complain when the penalty is
exacted. He was exiled, and it was no wonder. The
opinion of the world did not trouble him, nor was that
a wonder. But as this exile is the most prominent fact
of his life, its influence is sure to underlie his work.
The second question that any one who writes of Shelley
has to ask, is, How did this exile from the Education,
Law, Religion, and Society of his country, and from
the soil of his country itself, affect his poetry ?



PREFACE. xxiii

It had a very great influence, partly for good and
partly for evil. The good it did is clear. It deepened
his individuality and the power which issued from