should. May you weep quietly, but not long; and may the calmest and most affectionate spirit that comes out of the contemplation of great things, and the love of all, lay his most blessed hand upon you." When Mary would be much alone Shelley read and thought as rapidly and as eagerly as ever, adventuring through Dante, Boccaccio, and Calderon, and praising the Spanish dramatist with discriminating enthusiasm. Now, too, he finished his own deeply stirring drama, The Cenci, conceived more than a year before, after reading an old MS. at Leghorn, and viewing Guido's supposed portrait of Beatrice in the Colonna Palace at Rome. This production, touched as it is with weaknesses of phrasing and of dramatic "business,”—the dramatist sometimes hinders the poet, is yet comparable, as a study in the spirit of hate and villainy, only with Shakespeare's Richard III and Browning's Guido; while Cordelia, Pompilia, and Beatrice form the triad of great women in English poetry. The fifth act is by far the most powerful, not only because it contains the "tremendous end," but because Shelley raises here a nigh unfettered wing in soul-criticism and dramatic range.

In Florence, where the autumn of 1819 found them settled, Shelley spent many days visiting the great galleries of painting and statuary, though with increasing physical unrest. On November 12 a last child was born to him, christened Percy Florence, who survived both his father and mother, and inherited the baronetcy. The prevailing discontent in England, with which Shelley deeply sympathized, occasioned at this time the writing of his Songs and Poems for the Men of England, and his Masque of Anarchy, -poems of peaceful poise but revolutionary impulse, and a thoughtful treatise, A Philosophical View of Reform. A translation of Euripides' The Cyclops, the creation of an additional act of the Prometheus, and the breathing of the subtly lyric incantation to the spirit of the West Wind, all belong to this great creative year. It is interesting to note the loyal

human interest Shelley took during this winter in his friend Reveley's projected steamship, an interest that did not hesitate to provide ill-to-be-spared money for the advancement of what was almost a foredoomed failure. The extreme cold of early January, 1820, drove him at length to Pisa, where most of his time was thenceforth to be spent. A small group of friends cheered Shelley and Mary here, during the few intervals not given over to study and composition, — friends not unwelcome, since the Gisbornes and Henry Reveley were now leaving for England. Though the poet's health. was responding favourably to the change of climate, Godwin's monotonous embarrassments and demands preyed upon his spirits, and he was obliged to protect Mary from full knowledge of her father's rapacity. There were other sources of perplexity and even anger that greatly disturbed the Shelleys at this time, a grossly unfair attack upon the poet in the Quarterly Review, and a scandal spread abroad by a vicious servant which it took some time to check and refute. With the advent of midsummer the heat grew so intense that a move was made to the proffered home of the absent Gisbornes, Casa Ricci, in Leghorn, where - following the Pisan lyric, The Cloud the Ode to a Skylark was written. Probably the music of the Spenserian Alexandrines, for he had long loved the Faerie Queene, rang in Shelley's ears as he penned this exulting yet regretful cry. Among the other poems of 1820 are the Letter to Maria Gisborne, The Sensitive Plant, The Witch of Atlas, Hymn to Mercury, Ode to Liberty, and Ode to Naples. By August the heat was unbearable, and another change was made to the Baths of San Giuliano di Pisa. Shelley's interest in European political conditions was acute, and he watched with keen solicitude the course of the revolutions in Spain and Naples, greatly regretting the eventual success of the Austrians in restoring the false Neapolitan king. During the early months of 1821 he sought and found social reinforcement of his views. The

Gisbornes were back, though a lively misunderstanding prevented an early renewal of old ties; and Thomas Medwin, the poet's cousin and former schoolmate, had found his not too welcome way to Pisa. Over against these was the finer intelligence and exalted spirit of the Greek patriot, Alexander Mavrocordato, to whom Shelley's prophetic drama, Hellas, was afterward dedicated; the finesse of Francesco Pacchiani, a Pisan academician; the good-natured vapidity of Count Taaffe; the skilful improvisations of the famous Sgricci; and the pathetic durance of the Contessina Emilia Viviani, beloved alike by Shelley, Mary, and Claire. Condemned, with her sister, to the strict seclusion of a convent life by a jealous stepmother and an indifferent father, Emilia was in evil case, and this, with her exquisite loveliness, so wrought upon Shelley's imagination that he sought continually to deliver her from the Intolerance he had so often scourged of old. He became her "caro fratello” and Mary her "dearest sister." The profound though passing influence exerted upon Shelley by her character and situation is apparent in his Epipsychidion. "It is," he wrote to Gisborne, after many months, an idealized history of my life and feelings. I think one is always in love with something or other; the error- and I confess it is not easy for spirits cased in flesh and blood to avoid it consists in seeking in a mortal image the likeness of what is, perhaps, eternal." The "isle under Ionian skies," an idea which had so strong a hold upon Shelley's fancy,' as upon the youthful Browning's,2 here achieves its right poetic value. Emilia married at last a Signor Biondi, and lived but a brief and checkered life. It was fitting though almost acci

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1 Cf. letter of August, 1821, to Mary: "My greatest content would be utterly to desert all human society. I would retire with you and our child to a solitary island in the sea and build a boat, and shut upon my retreat the floodgates of the world." Cf. also Prometheus, IV, iv, 200, 201.

2 Cf. Pippa Passes, ii, 314–327.

dental that at this time Shelley should put into critical form his own noble theory of poetry, published after his death.

Soon after the departure of Claire, who was now engaged in tutoring certain young Florentines, there arrived in Pisa friends of Medwin, Lieutenant Edward Elliker Williams and his wife Jane. The Shelleys, both husband and wife, were much pleased with the newcomers, who in their turn attached themselves with sympathy and understanding to their fellow-exiles. With Williams and Reveley the poet would sail the Arno in a light Arthurian shallop that on one exciting occasion suddenly overset, nearly ending Shelley, the non-swimmer, then and there. Notwithstanding this mishap his love for nautical excursions grew into a passion, nearly every day found him on the water, and on May 4, he even undertook a venturesome excursion with Reveley from the mouth of the Arno to Leghorn. In San Giuliano the case was not different, and it was here, indeed, that The Boat on the Serchio was born. Here also was produced the last of Shelley's completed major poems, Adonais, written in memory of John Keats.

Upon hearing of Keats's illness and of his arrival in Italy, Shelley had urged him to accept the invitation to Pisa he had previously extended, but poor Keats was already struggling with death, and yielded himself at Rome, February 23, 1821. Shelley received the news some weeks later, probably in a letter from England, and began almost immediately to brood his elegy. He had not known Keats well, had variously estimated his work, and had scarcely sympathized with his consuming passion for his art. Indeed, he had written Keats an earnest word concerning his own freedom from "system and mannerism," instancing the Prometheus and The Cenci. Over-regularity he had sought to avoid. "I wish those who excel me in genius would pursue the same plan." And Keats had good-humouredly replied: "An artist must serve Mammon; he must have 'self-concentration' selfishness, perhaps. You, I am sure, will for

give me for sincerely remarking that you might curb your magnanimity, and be more of an artist, and load every rift of your subject with ore.' Shelley did not much admire Endymion, but he thought Hyperion "grand poetry," the product of "transcendent genius." He sincerely respected Keats, though he failed to understand him, and it is matter for large regret that the two poets, because of the sensitiveness of the one and the too lately aroused concern of the other, did not find a closer union - a communion possible. The poem itself, written in Spenserians, is as a pure elegy unequalled in our language. It sounds the deeps of death, for Keats, for Shelley, for all "the inheritors of unfulfilled renown." It was first printed at Pisa, with the types of Didot. "I am especially curious," wrote Shelley to his English publisher, Ollier, "to hear the fate of Adonais. I confess I should be surprised if that poem were born to an immortality of oblivion.”

After a flying visit to Florence, house-hunting on behalf of Horace Smith, who was defending him against calumnies consequent upon the pirated republication of Queen Mab, and who failed, eventually, to reach Italy, Shelley journeyed to Ravenna early in August, 1821, to become the guest of Byron at the Guiccioli Palace. He found his fellow-poet less extravagant than before in conduct, if not in criticism of all things. Had he known of Byron's perfidy in failing to suppress indeed actually using reports against Shelley's honour, a perfidy completed when he engaged yet failed to deliver to Mrs. Hoppner an important letter written to her by Mary, it is doubtful whether he would have consented to meet Byron again. As it was, he found life in Ravenna none too pleasant, and though he was captivated with the fifth canto of Don Juan, as Byron read it, and felt his own inability to rival the facility of such art, yet both Byron's personality and his very genius oppressed Shelley, and he left Ravenna for Pisa August 17. Before long, however, Byron and his companion had decided to