To love and be beloved with gentleness; And being scorned, what wonder if they die Shelley comforted himself with high studies and works, with the deep love of a few chosen intimates, with doing good to every poor sufferer who came within his reach, with the loftiest ideal philanthropy, and with as intense a communion with nature as ever blessed the soul of a poet. But, with his transcendent capacities of imaginative feeling, he walked ensphered in a mystic loneliness. His words are: I love all waste And solitary places, where we taste The pleasure of believing what we see on During his stay in Rome, himself almost as lonely as the glorious Titan he describes, he wrote his Prometheus Unbound. He composed it, in his own language, the mountainous ruins of the baths of Caracalla, among the flowery glades and thickets of odoriferous blossoming trees which are extended in ever-winding labyrinths upon its immense platforms and dizzy arches suspended in the air." If the objects of nature were ever made the beloved playmates of a mortal, that mortal was Shelley. But it is his great triumph, his profound medicinal lesson for other men, that extreme as was his suffering from wrong and obloquy, and deep as were his resources elsewhere, he never sank to misanthropy, but always continued to love and always sought to bless those who hated and strove to injure him. The scornful Landor, after an eloquent eulogium of the rare virtues of Shelley, adds, "This is the man against whom such clamors have been raised by bigots and cowards, and by those who live and lap under their tables." In contrast with this frank and galling contempt, how divine is the strain in which the outcast poet himself addressed his persecutors: Alas! good friend, what profit can you see Your frowns upon an unresisting smile, Of all the expressions of the mind and heart of Shelley, perhaps the most wonderful and sustained in intensity of richness is his "Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude." In the prose preface to it he explains its purpose to depict a poet of the rarest gifts, who, after a devoted pursuit of the choicest ends of life, thirsts for the sympathy of an intelligence like his own, and, failing to find it, is blasted by the disappointment, and droops into an untimely grave. It is an allegory of the loneliness of genius, describing how "the pure and tender-hearted perish through the intensity and passion of their search after the communities of human sympathy." The lesson that "the self-centred seclusion of genius will be avenged by darkness, decay, and extinction," and that "the selfish, blind, and torpid multitudes constitute, together with their own, the lasting misery and loneliness of the world," is taught in this poem with vivid power by one who In lone and silent hours, When night makes a weird sound of its own stillness, Staking his very life on some dark hope, Had mingled awful talk and asking looks With his most innocent love and his strong tears, until, conqueror of his enemies in the loving conquest of himself, he could say, Serenely now, And moveless as a long-forgotten lyre Of some mysterious and deserted fane, I wait thy breath, Great Parent, that my strain And motions of the forest and the sea, And voice of living beings, and woven hymns Few men, indeed, have either loved solitude better or had keener experience of wrong at the hands of society than Shelley. Yet he knew well, and well teaches others, how profound is the need of a loving fellowship with his kind, for the health, force, and joy of every man, for the highest as well as the lowest. He says, with reference to self-centred seclusion, "The power which strikes the luminaries of the world with sudden extinction by awakening them to too exquisite a perception of its influences, dooms to a slow and poisonous decay the meaner spirits that dare to abjure its dominion. Their destiny is more abject and inglorious, as their delinquency is more contemptible and pernicious. They who, deluded by no generous error, instigated by no sacred thirst of doubtful knowledge, duped by no illustrious superstition, loving nothing on this earth, and cherishing no hopes beyond, yet keep aloof from sympathies with their kind, have their appointed curse. They are morally dead." - The magnificent scorn which Shelley felt for every form of meanness or cruelty breathes throughout his works, especially in the burning wrath with which, in his "Adonais," he blasts the author of the brutal attack in the Quarterly on Keats. But the terrible contempt with which he swooped down on the "miserable calumniators," the "nameless worms," the "viperous murderers," the "carrion-kites" of men, was only a passing ideal anger, never a chronic hatred or personal revengefulness. The comparison of his own extraordinary mind with the dwarfish intellects around him, the perception of the vast superiority of his own power and passions to those of ordinary men, never, as it did in the case of Byron, fed a devouring pride in him; never filled him with disdain for his race or with disgust at the worthlessness of the prizes of life. He nobly practised the precept he so nobly urges : There is one road To peace, and that is TRUTH, which follow ye! And some perverted beings think to find In scorn or hate a medicine for the mind Which scorn or hate hath wounded. O, how vain! No man familiar with the writings of Shelley, who has any appreciation of the scale of ranks in human charac ter, can roam in the haunts wonted to his feet; muse on the landscapes his eyes loved to drink; stand in the halls where he dwelt; pause on the beach of the bay where the sea, with late remorse, gave up the drooping marble of his form; recall the scene of his friends restoring his limbs to dust in fire mixed with wine and frankincense; linger in votive thought, the soul of the dead poet transfusing the conscious soul of the pilgrim, before the grave in Rome holding his heart, and read through tears that tenderest of all inscriptions, cor cordium, heart of hearts, without emotions of pity, reverence, love, and wonder, which words can hardly convey. It is impossible more fitly to end this sketch of one who, in proportion as he is appreciated, will be the darling of gentle and generous hearts, than by quoting the words of his enthusiastic friend, Leigh Hunt: "He was like a spirit that had darted out of its orb and found itself in another world. I used to tell him that he had come from the planet Mercury. When I heard of the catastrophe that overtook him, it seemed as if this spirit, not sufficiently constituted like the rest of the world to obtain their sympathy, yet gifted with a double portion of love for all living things, had been found dead in a solitary corner of the earth, its wings stiffened, its warm heart cold; the relics of a misunderstood nature slain by the ungenial elements." COLERIDGE. THE opinion has been expressed by De Quincey, that the intellect of Coleridge was 66 the subtilest and the most spacious that has yet existed among men." His heart was not inferior to his mind. Yet how profoundly lonely he was! The rich fire of his fancy and the fatal faintness of his will made the world a dream peopled with phantoms. He once characterized himself as "through life chasing chance-started friendships." Among the lines he wrote after spending a night in the house once occupied by the Man of Ross, we read with strong emotion the following: But if, like mine, through life's distressful scene, His dear friend Charles Lamb, who almost idolized him, said "he had a hunger for eternity." No doubt, in the immensity of his spiritual isolation from ordinary minds, when he turned back from baffled efforts after a competent communion, he often felt So lonely 't was that God himself Scarce seemed there to be. Aubrey De Vere, in the fine poem he wrote after the death of the Seer of Highgate, says :— And mighty voices from afar came to him; Spirits of night and noontide bent to woo him He stood the while, lonely and desolate As Adam when he ruled a world yet found no mate. Though it is true that Coleridge had a few dear friends, he appeared to live in a spell, with an enchanted barrier about him. His existence was a long soliloquy of wondrous richness, weirdly remote from contact, which other men seem to overhear as unseen listeners. He said himself: "Perhaps never man whose name has been so often in print for praise or reprobation had so few intimates as myself." When he died at Highgate, after a residence of twenty years, a biographer says "he was a stranger in the parish, and therefore was interred alone!" WORDSWORTH. SOLITUDE is to different persons what their characters, habits, and aims make it. To one and another it is variously a covert, a prison, a sanctuary, a studio, a forge, a throne. To Wordsworth, that grand and peaceful spirit, |