in

Agnes. The stringency of the Italian quarantine law made it necessary to secure permission to cremate the bodies already officially buried in quicklime on the shore order to preserve the ashes for later interment. On August 15, Trelawny, Hunt, and Byron gathered on the beach; the funeral pyre for Williams's body was made ready, and was lit by Trelawny. "The materials being dry and resinous the pine-wood burnt furiously, and drove us back. It was hot enough before, there was no breath of air, and the loose sand scorched our feet. As soon as the flames became clear, and allowed us to approach, we threw frankincense and salt into the furnace, and poured a flask of wine and oil over the body. The Greek oration was omitted, for we had lost our Hellenic bard." The next day, at Via Reggio, Shelley's remains were similarly treated, before a group of curious native spectators. The story is realistically told by Trelawny. "What surprised us all," he concludes, "was that the heart remained entire. In snatching this relic from the fiery furnace, my hand was severely burnt; and had any one seen me do the act I should have been put into quarantine.”

The final burial of the poet's ashes took place, by Mary's desire, in the Protestant cemetery at Rome, in a tomb built by Trelawny within a recess of the old Roman wall. This was covered with solid stone, bearing an inscription in Latin written by Leigh Hunt, with a passage added by Trelawny from The Tempest, well loved by Shelley :

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

COR CORDIUM

NATUS IV AUG. MDCCXCII

OBIIT VIII JUL. MDCCCXXII

"Nothing of him that doth fade

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange."

In the companion tomb lies Trelawny, whose grave is inscribed with Shelley's lines, The Epitaph. Not far away

6

are the graves of John Keats and Joseph Severn, and that of John Addington Symonds, lover and biographer of Shelley. And all about grow every sorte of flowre,' - violets and daisies, roses and clover, and over all the tall, dark cypresses wave solemn boughs.

There is nothing more difficult to define than Poetry, because there is nothing more Protean. The statements are as various as the creators and the critics, and it is well that it is so, for particularity and insistent dicta are foreign to the spirit of literature. Literature is large and catholic; it is in its essence a mystery, incapable of precise scientific analysis; it is an unquenchable spiritual impulse and adventure realized in words; it is the interpretation of the dream of life; and with its instinct humanity is inalienably endowed. "You cannot escape Literature," declared Sidney Lanier. "For how can you think yourself out of thought? How can you run away from your own feet?"

Yet there are at least three qualities that may seem to determine the literary artist, the poet. He must, first, seek pure truth with a devoted and single-minded enthusiasm, whatever the cost. He must cherish every hint, every gleam. He must catch the rhythms of the noisy life about him as those of the sea and the forest. He must be at heart a man of intense social sympathy, yet of a lonely habit. Certainly, he will belong the more truly to the world of men because he does not belong to them. He must be for mankind

'The only speaker of essential truth,

Opposed to relative, comparative
And temporal truths.'

"Poets," said Shelley, "are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." And again, “A poem is the very image of life

1 The attempt has been made to touch the biographical sketch with criticism. The present treatment aims to derive general critical principles from the particulars already given.

expressed in its eternal truth." The place of the poet is high but hard. It is his, above others, to experience with fortitude the baptism in salt water," to suffer nobly in life and even at times in art for his power's sake. If slowly and with struggle, yet he still spells out his word. Shelley's solitary figure of Alastor was not, we must think, unhappy, though his ear was holden to hear "the eternal note of sadness."

The poet must have, also, fine sensibility to the beauty that lurks in language. This is the plastic material with which he works, positively, in words; negatively, in silences. His diction must be sure, representing life and representing him. He must be keenly aware of the dignity of words, their music, colours, individualities, and kinships. His poems must not be word-prisons, but word-homes. And to this regard for words—indeed, as conditioning and justifying such regard—he must, last, add an impelling insight into the root rightness of things. Art, with its hunger for truth and its passion for beauty, feeds also and always upon good, upon the law of love and virtue. A fine-grained æsthete must the artist be; but he must be, before and beyond that, a man. One in any field who delights to picture the unholy for its own sake, who is preoccupied rather with the temporary alliance of energy and evil than with the struggle that makes for character such an one is not less dead to beauty than to good. It is quite true that the professed moralizer has no place in pure literature, for he is a briefholder, a special pleader, and does not see and show impartially. "A poet would do ill," thought Shelley, "to embody his own conceptions of right and wrong, which are usually those of his place and time, in his poetical creations, which participate in neither." Yet it is also true that life is seen by the poet as a unit, and that art, like life, is of moral significance. Every great artist is implicitly devoted to the idea of good, is sincerely on the better side. All sure literary masterpieces are marked by unmistakable signs of love for

that which is holy, whatever plot or method may appear. No genius, however erratic, therefore, has been radically vicious. Though the light he lives in may sometimes blind him, it will not blast him. Extraordinary sincerity is demanded in art, whole-hearted allegiance to one's ideal and inspiration, and lifelong perseverance in the attempt to realize these. "Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man.”

Notwithstanding the varying emphases of the great poets, variations often more apparent than real, it will be found that their lives and their works satisfy these conditions. It is easy to distinguish Shelley's poetry from Wordsworth's, or from Shakespeare's, and yet it would sometimes be a good deal less easy were it not for the single fact of style, the characteristic clothing, or rather the special way in which each man's work wears its clothing. Even so, there are brief passages in Alastor that Wordsworth might have uttered, and lyric touches in the Prometheus that would not readily be wrested as spurious from one of Shakespeare's romantic comedies. The truth is, that Poetry, too, is one, and that, as Shelley himself so finely phrases it, "poetical abstractions are beautiful and new, not because the portions of which they are composed had no previous existence in the mind of man or in nature, but because the whole produced by their combination has some intelligible and beautiful analogy with those sources of emotion and thought, and with the contemporary condition of them: one great poet is a masterpiece of nature which another not only ought to study but must study. He might as wisely and as easily determine that his mind should no longer be the mirror of all that is lovely in the visible universe, as exclude from his contemplation the beautiful which exists in the writings of a great contemporary. A poet is the combined product of such internal powers as modify the nature of others; and of such external influences as excite and sustain these powers; he is not one, but both. Every man's mind

is, in this respect, modified by all the objects of nature and art; by every word and every suggestion which he ever admitted to act upon his consciousness; it is the mirror upon which all forms are reflected, and in which they compose one form. Poets, not otherwise than philosophers, painters, sculptors, and musicians, are, in one sense, the creators, and, in another, the creations, of their age. From this subjection the loftiest do not escape.'

Shelley, for his part, saturated himself as a youth in the plays of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and other Elizabethans; in the Faerie Queene of Spenser (whose influence on succeeding English poets, particularly Milton and Keats, has justly won for him the title of "the poets' poet"); in Homer and the Greek tragedies; in Theocritus, Moschus, and Bion; in Horace, Ovid, Virgil, and Lucretius; in Tasso, Ariosto, and lesser Italians; in Milton's austere epic and his minor works; and in the poems of Scott, Moore, Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. Goethe, too, he read. In later years he praised much Calderon and Dante, and read Byron with the added interest their frequent contact aroused. This is but a partial catalogue of the poetry he eagerly absorbed the prose was correspondingly considerable and which more and more discovered to him his powers and opportunities, as his own works did for Browning in a later day. He was stirred and moved, also, by the great Biblical poems and dramas, the book of Job especially.

The living persons who most influenced Shelley have been already mentioned and described in the sketch of his life, and there also it was shown how deeply his imagination was affected by the elemental forces of nature. Forces, because, Titanic or delicate as the object might be, Mont Blanc or a skylark, Shelley seems chiefly concerned with its incentive, the spirit that gives it being and direction. He sees nature neither as vast painted scenery against which as against a background man plays his part, nor yet as the 1 From the Preface to Prometheus Unbound.