Adonais.
by Sh.e.l.ley.
PREFACE.
_Adonais_ is the first writing by Sh.e.l.ley which has been included in the _Clarendon Press Series_. It is a poem of convenient length for such a purpose, being neither short nor decidedly long; and--leaving out of count some of the short poems--is the one by this author which approaches nearest to being "popular." It is elevated in sentiment, cla.s.sical in form,--in substance, biographical in relation to Keats, and in some minor degree autobiographical for Sh.e.l.ley himself. On these grounds it claimed a reasonable preference over all his other poems, for the present method of treatment; although some students of Sh.e.l.ley, myself included, might be disposed to maintain that, in point of absolute intrinsic beauty and achievement, and of the qualities most especially characteristic of its author, it is not superior, or indeed is but barely equal, to some of his other compositions. To take, for instance, two poems not very different in length from _Adonais_--_The Witch of Atlas_ is more original, and _Epipsychidion_ more abstract in ideal.
I have endeavoured to present in my introductory matter a comprehensive account of all particulars relevant to _Adonais_ itself, and to Keats as its subject, and Sh.e.l.ley as its author. The accounts here given of both these great poets are of course meagre, but I a.s.sume them to be not insufficient for our immediate and restricted purpose. There are many other books which the reader can profitably consult as to the life and works of Sh.e.l.ley; and three or four (at least) as to the life and works of Keats. My concluding notes are, I suppose, ample in scale: if they are excessive, that is an involuntary error on my part. My aim in them has been to ill.u.s.trate and elucidate the poem in its details, yet without travelling far afield in search of remote a.n.a.logies or discursive comment--my wish being rather to "stick to my text": wherever a difficulty presents itself, I have essayed to define it, and clear it up--but not always to my own satisfaction. I have seldom had to discuss the opinions of previous writers on the same points, for the simple reason that of detailed criticism of _Adonais_, apart from merely textual memoranda, there is next to none.
It has appeared to me to be part of my duty to point out here and there, but by no means frequently, some special beauty in the poem; occasionally also something which seems to me defective or faulty. I am aware that this latter is an invidious office, which naturally exposes one to an imputation, from some quarters, of obtuseness, and, from others, of presumption; none the less I have expressed myself with the frankness which, according to my own view, belongs to the essence of such a task as is here undertaken. _Adonais_ is a composition which has retorted beforehand upon its actual or possible detractors. In the poem itself, and in the prefatory matter adjoined to it, Sh.e.l.ley takes critics very severely to task: but criticism has its discerning and temperate, as well as its "stupid and malignant" phases.
W.M. ROSSETTI.
_July, 1890._
MEMOIR OF Sh.e.l.lEY.
The life of Percy Bysshe Sh.e.l.ley is one which has given rise to a great deal of controversy, and which cannot, for a long time to come, fail to be regarded with very diverse sentiments. His extreme opinions on questions of religion and morals, and the great lat.i.tude which he allowed himself in acting according to his own opinions, however widely they might depart from the law of the land and of society, could not but produce this result. In his own time he was generally accounted an outrageous and shameful offender. At the present date many persons entertain essentially the same view, although softened by lapse of years, and by respect for his standing as a poet: others regard him as a conspicuous reformer. Some take a medium course, and consider him to have been sincere, and so far laudable; but rash and reckless of consequences, and so far censurable. His poetry also has been subject to very different constructions. During his lifetime it obtained little notice save for purposes of disparagement and denunciation. Now it is viewed with extreme enthusiasm by many, and is generally admitted to hold a permanent rank in English literature, though faulty (as some opine) through vague idealism and want of backbone. These are all points on which I shall here offer no personal opinion. I shall confine myself to tracing the chief outlines of Sh.e.l.ley"s life, and (very briefly) the sequence of his literary work.
Percy Bysshe Sh.e.l.ley came of a junior and comparatively undistinguished branch of a very old and noted family. His branch was termed the Worminghurst Sh.e.l.leys; and it is only quite lately[1] that the affiliation of this branch to the more eminent and senior stock of the Michelgrove Sh.e.l.leys has pa.s.sed from the condition of a probable and obvious surmise into that of an established fact. The family traces up to Sir William Sh.e.l.ley, Judge of the Common Pleas under Henry VII, thence to a Member of Parliament in 1415, and to the reign of Edward I, or even to the Norman Conquest. The Worminghurst Sh.e.l.leys start with Henry Sh.e.l.ley, who died in 1623. It will be sufficient here to begin with the poet"s grandfather, Bysshe Sh.e.l.ley. He was born at Christ Church, Newark, North America, and raised to a noticeable height, chiefly by two wealthy marriages, the fortunes of the junior branch.
Handsome, keen-minded, and adventurous, he eloped with Mary Catherine, heiress of the Rev. Theobald Mich.e.l.l, of Horsham; after her death he eloped with Elizabeth Jane, heiress of Mr. Perry, of Penshurst. By this second wife he had a family, now represented, by the Baron de l"Isle and Dudley: by his first wife he had (besides a daughter) a son Timothy, who was the poet"s father, and who became in due course Sir Timothy Sh.e.l.ley, Bart., M.P. His baronetcy was inherited from his father Bysshe--on whom it had been conferred, in 1806, chiefly through the interest of the Duke of Norfolk, the head of the Whig party in the county of Suss.e.x, to whose politics the new baronet had adhered.
Mr. Timothy Sh.e.l.ley was a very ordinary country gentleman in essentials, and a rather eccentric one in some details. He was settled at Field Place, near Horsham, Suss.e.x, and married Elizabeth, daughter of Charles Pilfold, of Effingham, Surrey; she was a beauty, and a woman of good abilities, but without any literary turn. Their first child was the poet, Percy Bysshe, born at Field Place on Aug. 4, 1792: four daughters also grew up, and a younger son, John: the eldest son of John is now the Baronet, having succeeded, in 1889, Sir Percy Florence Sh.e.l.ley, the poet"s only surviving son. No one has managed to discover in the parents of Percy Bysshe any qualities furnishing the prototype or the nucleus of his poetical genius, or of the very exceptional cast of mind and character which he developed in other directions. The parents were commonplace: if we go back to the grandfather, Sir Bysshe, we encounter a man who was certainly not commonplace, but who seems to have been devoid of either poetical or humanitarian fervour. He figures as intent upon his worldly interests, acc.u.mulating a ma.s.sive fortune, and spending lavishly upon the building of Castle Goring; in his old age, penurious, unsocial, and almost churlish in his habits. His pa.s.sion was to domineer and carry his point; of this the poet may have inherited something. His ideal of success was wealth and worldly position, things to which the poet was, on the contrary, abnormally indifferent.
Sh.e.l.ley"s schooling began at six years of age, when he was placed under the Rev. Mr. Edwards, at Warnham. At ten he went to Sion House School, Brentford, of which the Princ.i.p.al was Dr. Greenlaw, the pupils being mostly sons of local tradesmen. In July, 1804, he proceeded to Eton, where Dr. Goodall was the Head Master, succeeded, just towards the end of Sh.e.l.ley"s stay, by the far severer Dr. Keate. Sh.e.l.ley was shy, sensitive, and of susceptible fancy: at Eton we first find him insubordinate as well. He steadily resisted the f.a.gging-system, learned more as he chose than as his masters dictated, and was known as "Mad Sh.e.l.ley," and "Sh.e.l.ley the Atheist." It has sometimes been said that an Eton boy, if rebellious, was termed "Atheist," and that the designation, as applied to Sh.e.l.ley, meant no more than that. I do not feel satisfied that this is true at all; at any rate it seems to me probable that Sh.e.l.ley, who constantly called himself an atheist in after-life, received the epithet at Eton for some cause more apposite than disaffection to school-authority.
He finally left Eton in July, 1810. He had already been entered in University College, Oxford, in April of that year, and he commenced residence there in October. His one very intimate friend in Oxford was Thomas Jefferson Hogg, a student from the county of Durham. Hogg was not, like Sh.e.l.ley, an enthusiast eager to learn new truths, and to apply them; but he was a youth appreciative of cla.s.sical and other literature, and little or not at all less disposed than Percy to disregard all prescription in religious dogma. By demeanour and act they both courted academic censure, and they got it in its extremest form. Sh.e.l.ley wrote, probably with some co-operation from Hogg, and he published anonymously in Oxford, a little pamphlet called _The Necessity of Atheism_; he projected sending it round broadcast as an invitation or challenge to discussion. This small pamphlet--it is scarcely more than a flysheet--hardly amounts to saying that Atheism is irrefragably true, and Theism therefore false; but it propounds that the existence of a G.o.d cannot be proved by reason, nor yet by testimony; that a direct revelation made to an individual would alone be adequate ground for convincing that individual; and that the persons to whom such a revelation is not accorded are in consequence warranted in remaining unconvinced. The College authorities got wind of the pamphlet, and found reason for regarding Sh.e.l.ley as its author, and on March 25, 1811, they summoned him to appear. He was required to say whether he had written it or not. To this demand he refused an answer, and was then expelled by a written sentence, ready drawn up. With Hogg the like process was repeated. Their offence, as entered on the College records, was that of "contumaciously refusing to answer questions," and "repeatedly declining to disavow" the authorship of the work. In strictness therefore they were expelled, not for being proclaimed atheists, but for defying academic authority, which required to be satisfied as to that question.
Shortly before this disaster an engagement between Sh.e.l.ley and his first cousin on the mother"s side, Miss Harriet Grove, had come to an end, owing to the alarm excited by the youth"s sceptical opinions.
Settling in lodgings in London, and parting from Hogg, who went to York to study conveyancing, Percy pretty soon found a subst.i.tute for Harriet Grove in Harriet Westbrook, a girl of fifteen, schoolfellow of two of his sisters at Clapham. She was exceedingly pretty, daughter of a retired hotel-keeper in easy circ.u.mstances. Sh.e.l.ley wanted to talk both her and his sisters out of Christianity; and he cultivated the acquaintance of herself and of her much less juvenile sister Eliza, calling from time to time at their father"s house in Chapel Street, Grosvenor Square. Harriet fell in love with him: besides, he was a highly eligible _parti_, being a prospective baronet, absolute heir to a very considerable estate, and contingent heir (if he had a.s.sented to a proposal of entail, to which however he never did a.s.sent, professing conscientious objections) to another estate still larger. Sh.e.l.ley was not in love with Harriet; but he liked her, and was willing to do anything he could to further her wishes and plans. Mr. Timothy Sh.e.l.ley, after a while, pardoned his son"s misadventure at Oxford, and made him a moderate allowance of 200 a-year. Percy then visited a cousin in Wales, a member of the Grove family. He was recalled to London by Harriet Westbrook, who protested against a project of sending her back to school. He counselled resistance. She replied in July 1811 (to quote a contemporary letter from Sh.e.l.ley to Hogg), "that resistance was useless, but that she would fly with me, and threw herself upon my protection."
This was clearly a rather decided step upon the damsel"s part: we may form our own conclusions whether she was willing to unite with Percy without the bond of marriage; or whether she confidently calculated upon inducing him to marry her, her family being kept in the dark; or whether the whole affair was a family manoeuvre for forcing on an engagement and a wedding. Sh.e.l.ley returned to London, and had various colloquies with Harriet: in due course he eloped with her to Edinburgh, and there on 28th August he married her. His age was then just nineteen, and hers sixteen. Sh.e.l.ley, who was a profound believer in William G.o.dwin"s _Political Justice_, rejected the inst.i.tution of marriage as being fundamentally irrational and wrongful. But he saw that he could not in this instance apply his own pet theories without involving in discredit and discomfort the woman whose love had been bestowed upon him. Either his opinion or her happiness must be sacrificed to what he deemed a prejudice of society: he decided rather to sacrifice the former.
For two years, or up to an advanced date in 1813, the married life of Sh.e.l.ley and Harriet appears to have been a happy one, so far as their mutual relation was concerned; though rambling and scrambling, restricted by mediocrity of income (400 a year, made up between the two fathers), and pestered by the continual, and to Percy at last very offensive, presence of Miss Westbrook as an inmate of the house. They lived in York, Keswick in c.u.mberland, Dublin (which Sh.e.l.ley visited as an express advocate of Catholic emanc.i.p.ation and repeal of the Union), Nantgwillt in Radnorshire, Lynmouth in Devonshire, Tanyrallt in Carnarvonshire, London, Bracknell in Berkshire: Ireland and Edinburgh were also revisited. Various strange adventures befell; the oddest of all being an alleged attempt at a.s.sa.s.sination at Tanyrallt. Sh.e.l.ley a.s.serted it, others disbelieved it: after much disputation the biographer supposes that, if not an imposture, it was a romance, and, if not a romance, at least a hallucination,--Sh.e.l.ley, besides being wild in talk and wild in fancy, being by this time much addicted to laudanum-dosing. In June 1813 Harriet gave birth, in London, to her first child, Ianthe Eliza (she married a Mr. Esdaile, and died in 1876).
About the same time Sh.e.l.ley brought out his earliest work of importance, the poem of _Queen Mab_: its speculative audacities were too extreme for publication, so it was only privately printed.
Amiable and accommodating at first, and neither ill-educated nor stupid, Harriet did not improve in tone as she advanced in womanhood. Her sympathy or tolerance for her husband"s ideals and vagaries flagged; when they differed she gave him the cold shoulder; she wanted luxuries--such as a carriage of her own--which he neither cared for nor could properly afford. He even said--and one can hardly accuse him of saying it insincerely--that she had been unfaithful to him: this however remains quite unproved, and may have been a delusion. He sought the society of the philosopher G.o.dwin, then settled as a bookseller in Skinner Street, Holborn. G.o.dwin"s household at this time consisted of his second wife, who had been a Mrs. Clairmont; Mary, his daughter by his first wife, the celebrated Mary Wollstonecraft; and his young son by his second wife, William; also his step-children, Charles and Clare Clairmont, and f.a.n.n.y Wollstonecraft (or Imlay), the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft by her first irregular union with Gilbert Imlay. Until May 1814, when she was getting on towards the age of seventeen, Sh.e.l.ley had scarcely set eyes on Mary G.o.dwin: he then saw her, and a sudden pa.s.sion sprang up between them--uncontrollable, or, at any rate, uncontrolled. Harriet Sh.e.l.ley has left it on record that the advances and importunities came from Mary G.o.dwin to Sh.e.l.ley, and were for a while resisted: it was natural for Harriet to allege this, but I should not suppose it to be true, unless in a very partial sense. Sh.e.l.ley sent for his wife, who had gone for a while to Bath (perhaps in a fit of pettishness, but this is not clear), and explained to her in June that they must separate--a resolve which she combated as far as seemed possible, but finally she returned to Bath, staying there with her father and sister. Sh.e.l.ley made some arrangements for her convenience, and on the 28th of July he once more eloped, this time with Mary G.o.dwin.
Clare Clairmont chose to accompany them. G.o.dwin was totally opposed to the whole transaction, and Mrs. G.o.dwin even pursued the fugitives across the Channel; but her appeal was unavailing, and the youthful and defiant trio proceeded in much elation of spirit, and not without a good deal of discomfort at times, from Calais to Paris, and thence to Brunen by the Lake of Uri in Switzerland. It is a curious fact, and shows how differently Sh.e.l.ley regarded these matters from most people, that he wrote to Harriet in affectionate terms, urging her to join them there or reside hard by them. Mary, before the elopement took place, had made a somewhat similar proposal. Harriet had no notion of complying; and, as it turned out, the adventurers had no sooner reached Brunen than they found their money exhausted, and they travelled back in all haste to London in September,--Clare continuing to house with them now, and for the most part during the remainder of Sh.e.l.ley"s life. Even a poet and idealist might have been expected to show a little more worldly wisdom than this. After his grievous experiences with Eliza Westbrook, the sister of his first wife, Sh.e.l.ley might have managed to steer clear of Clare Clairmont, the sister by affinity of his second partner in life.
He would not take warning, and he paid the forfeit: not indeed that Clare was wanting in fine qualities both of mind and of character, but she proved a constant source of excitement and uneasiness in the household, of unfounded scandal, and of hara.s.sing complications.
In London Sh.e.l.ley and Mary lived in great straits, abandoned by almost all their acquaintances, and playing hide-and-seek with creditors. But in January 1815 Sir Bysshe Sh.e.l.ley died, and Percy"s money affairs improved greatly. An arrangement was arrived at with his father, whereby he received a regular annual income of 1000, out of which he a.s.signed to Harriet 200 for herself and her two children--a son, Charles Bysshe, having been born in November 1814 (he died in 1826). Sh.e.l.ley and Mary next settled at Bishopgate, near Windsor Forest. In May 1816 they went abroad, along with Miss Clairmont and their infant son William, and joined Lord Byron on the sh.o.r.e of the Lake of Geneva. An amour was already going on between Byron and Miss Clairmont; it resulted in the birth of a daughter, Allegra, in January 1817; she died in 1822, very shortly before Sh.e.l.ley. He and Mary had returned to London in September 1816. Very shortly afterwards, 9th of November, the ill-starred Harriet Sh.e.l.ley drowned herself in the Serpentine: her body was only recovered on the 10th of December, and the verdict of the Coroner"s Jury was "found drowned," her name being given as "Harriet Smith." The career of Harriet since her separation from her husband is very indistinctly known. It has indeed been a.s.serted in positive terms that she formed more than one connexion with other men: she had ceased to live along with her father and sister, and is said to have been expelled from their house. In these statements I see nothing either unveracious or unlikely: but it is true that a sceptical habit of mind, which insists upon express evidence and upon severe sifting of evidence, may remain unconvinced[2]. This was the second suicide in Sh.e.l.ley"s immediate circle, for f.a.n.n.y Wollstonecraft had taken poison just before under rather unaccountable circ.u.mstances. No doubt he felt dismay and horror, and self-reproach as well; yet there is nothing to show that he condemned his conduct, at any stage of the transactions with Harriet, as heinously wrong. He took the earliest opportunity--30th of December--of marrying Mary G.o.dwin; and thus he became reconciled to her father and to other members of the family.
It was towards the time of Harriet"s suicide that Sh.e.l.ley, staying in and near London, became personally intimate with the essayist and poet, Leigh Hunt, and through him he came to know John Keats: their first meeting appears to have occurred on 5th February, 1817. As this matter bears directly upon our immediate theme, the poem of _Adonais_, I deal with it at far greater length than its actual importance in the life of Sh.e.l.ley would otherwise warrant.
Hunt, in his _Autobiography_, narrates as follows. "I had not known the young poet [Keats] long when Sh.e.l.ley and he became acquainted under my roof. Keats did not take to Sh.e.l.ley as kindly as Sh.e.l.ley did to him.
Sh.e.l.ley"s only thoughts of his new acquaintance were such as regarded his bad health with which he sympathised [this about bad health seems properly to apply to a date later than the opening period when the two poets came together], and his poetry, of which he has left such a monument of his admiration as _Adonais_. Keats, being a little too sensitive on the score of his origin, felt inclined to see in every man of birth a sort of natural enemy. Their styles in writing also were very different; and Keats, notwithstanding his unbounded sympathies with ordinary flesh and blood, and even the transcendental cosmopolitics of _Hyperion_, was so far inferior in universality to his great acquaintance that he could not accompany him in his daedal rounds with Nature, and his Archimedean endeavours to move the globe with his own hands [an allusion to the motto appended to _Queen Mab_]. I am bound to state thus much; because, hopeless of recovering his health, under circ.u.mstances that made the feeling extremely bitter, an irritable morbidity appears even to have driven his suspicions to excess; and this not only with regard to the acquaintance whom he might reasonably suppose to have had some advantages over him, but to myself, who had none; for I learned the other day with extreme pain ... that Keats, at one period of his intercourse with us, suspected both Sh.e.l.ley and myself of a wish to see him undervalued! Such are the tricks which constant infelicity can play with the most n.o.ble natures. For Sh.e.l.ley let _Adonais_ answer." It is to be observed that Hunt is here rather putting the cart before the horse. Keats (as we shall see immediately) suspected Sh.e.l.ley and Hunt "of a wish to see him undervalued" as early as February 1818; but his "irritable morbidity" when "hopeless of recovering his health" belongs to a later date, say the spring and summer of 1820.
It is said that in the spring of 1817 Sh.e.l.ley and Keats agreed that each of them would undertake an epic, to be written in a s.p.a.ce of six months: Sh.e.l.ley produced _The Revolt of Islam_ (originally ent.i.tled _Laon and Cythna_), and Keats produced _Endymion_. Sh.e.l.ley"s poem, the longer of the two, was completed by the early autumn, while Keats"s occupied him until the winter which opened 1818. On 8th October, 1817, Keats wrote to a friend, "I refused to visit Sh.e.l.ley, that I might have my own unfettered scope; meaning presumably that he wished to finish _Endymion_ according to his own canons of taste and execution, without being hampered by any advice from Sh.e.l.ley. There is also a letter from Keats to his two brothers, 22nd December, 1817, saying: "Sh.e.l.ley"s poem _Laon and Cythna_ is out, and there are words about its being objected to as much as _Queen Mab_ was. Poor Sh.e.l.ley, I think he has his quota of good qualities." As late as February 1818 He wrote, "I have not yet read Sh.e.l.ley"s poem." On 23rd January of the same year he had written: "The fact is, he [Hunt] and Sh.e.l.ley are hurt, and perhaps justly, at my not having showed them the affair [_Endymion_ in MS.] officiously; and, from several hints I have had, they appear much disposed to dissect and anatomize any trip or slip I may have made." It was at nearly the same date, 4th February, that Keats, Sh.e.l.ley, and Hunt wrote each a sonnet on _The Nile_: in my judgment, Sh.e.l.ley"s is the least successful of the three.
Soon after their marriage, Sh.e.l.ley and his second wife settled at Great Marlow, in Buckinghamshire. They were shortly disturbed by a Chancery suit, whereby Mr. Westbrook sought to deprive Sh.e.l.ley of the custody of his two children by Harriet, Ianthe and Charles. Towards March 1818, Lord Chancellor Eldon p.r.o.nounced judgment against Sh.e.l.ley, on the ground of his culpable conduct as a husband, carrying out culpable opinions upheld in his writings. The children were handed over to Dr. Hume, an army-physician named by Sh.e.l.ley: he had to a.s.sign for their support a sum of 120 per annum, brought up to 200 by a supplement from Mr.
Westbrook. About the same date he suffered from an illness which he regarded as a dangerous pulmonary attack, and he made up his mind to quit England for Italy; accompanied by his wife, their two infants William and Clara, Miss Clairmont, and her infant Allegra, who was soon afterwards consigned to Lord Byron in Venice. Mr. Charles Cowden Clarke, who was Keats"s friend from boyhood, writes: "When Sh.e.l.ley left England for Italy, Keats told me that he had received from him an invitation to become his guest, and in short to make one of his household. It was upon the purest principle that Keats declined his n.o.ble proffer, for he entertained an exalted opinion of Sh.e.l.ley"s genius--in itself an inducement. He also knew of his deeds of bounty, and from their frequent social intercourse he had full faith in the sincerity of his proposal.... Keats said that, in declining the invitation, his sole motive was the consciousness, which would be ever prevalent with him, of his being, in its utter extent, not a free agent, even within such a circle as Sh.e.l.ley"s--he himself nevertheless being the most unrestricted of beings." Mr. Clarke seems to mean in this pa.s.sage that Sh.e.l.ley, _before_ starting for Italy, invited Keats to accompany him thither--a fact, if such it is, of which I find no trace elsewhere. It is however just possible that Clarke was only referring to the earlier invitation, previously mentioned, for Keats to visit at Great Marlow; or he may most probably, with some confusion as to dates and details, be thinking of the message which Sh.e.l.ley, when already settled in Italy for a couple of years, addressed to his brother-poet--of which more anon.
Sh.e.l.ley and his family--including for the most part Miss Clairmont--wandered about a good deal in Italy. They were in Milan, Leghorn, the Bagni di Lucca, Venice and its neighbourhood, Rome, Naples, Florence, Pisa, the Bagni di Pisa, and finally (after Sh.e.l.ley had gone to Ravenna by himself) in a lonely house named Casa Magni, between Lerici and San Terenzio, on the Bay of Spezzia. Their two children died; but in 1819 another was born, the Sir Percy Florence Sh.e.l.ley who lived on till November 1889. They were often isolated or even solitary. Among their interesting acquaintances at one place or another were, besides Byron, Mr. and Mrs. Gisborne (the latter had previously been Mrs.
Reveley, and had been sought in marriage by G.o.dwin after the death of Mary Wollstonecraft in 1797); the Contessina Emilia Viviani, celebrated in Sh.e.l.ley"s poem of _Epipsychidion_; Captain Medwin, Sh.e.l.ley"s cousin and schoolfellow; the Greek Prince, Alexander Mavrocordato; Lieutenant and Mrs. Williams, who joined them at Casa Magni; and Edward John Trelawny, an adventurous and daring sea-rover, who afterwards accompanied Byron to Greece.
It was only towards the summer of 1819 that Sh.e.l.ley read the _Endymion_.
He wrote of it thus in a letter to his publisher, Mr. Ollier, September 6, 1819. "I have read ... Keats"s poem.... Much praise is due to me for having read it, the author"s intention appearing to be that no person should possibly get to the end of it. Yet it is full of some of the highest and the finest gleams of poetry: indeed, everything seems to be viewed by the mind of a poet which is described in it. I think, if he had printed about fifty pages of fragments from it, I should have been led to admire Keats as a poet more than I ought--of which there is now no danger." Sh.e.l.ley regarded the Hymn to Pan, in the first Book of _Endymion_, as affording "the surest promise of ultimate excellence."
The health of Keats having broken down, and consumption having set in, Sh.e.l.ley wrote to him from Pisa urging him to come over to Italy as his guest. Keats did not however go to Pisa, but, along with the young painter Joseph Severn, to Naples, and thence to Rome. I here subjoin Sh.e.l.ley"s letter.
"Pisa--27 July, 1820.
"MY DEAR KEATS,
"I hear with great pain the dangerous accident you have undergone [recurrence of blood-spitting from the lungs], and Mr. Gisborne, who gives me the account of it, adds that you continue to wear a consumptive appearance. This consumption is a disease particularly fond of people who write such good verses as you have done, and with the a.s.sistance of an English winter, it can often indulge its selection. I do not think that young and amiable poets are bound to gratify its taste: they have entered into no bond with the Muses to that effect. But seriously (for I am joking on what I am very anxious about) I think you would do well to pa.s.s the winter in Italy, and avoid so tremendous an accident; and, if you think it as necessary as I do, so long as you continue to find Pisa or its neighbourhood agreeable to you, Mrs. Sh.e.l.ley unites with myself in urging the request that you would take up your residence with us. You might come by sea to Leghorn (France is not worth seeing, and the sea is particularly good for weak lungs)--which is within a few miles of us.
You ought, at all events, to see Italy; and your health, which I suggest as a motive, may be an excuse to you. I spare declamation about the statues and paintings and ruins, and (what is a greater piece of forbearance) about the mountains and streams, the fields, the colours of the sky, and the sky itself.
"I have lately read your _Endymion_ again, and even with a new sense of the treasures of poetry it contains--though treasures poured forth with indistinct profusion. This people in general will not endure; and that is the cause of the comparatively few copies which have been sold. I feel persuaded that you are capable of the greatest things, so you but will. I always tell Ollier to send you copies of my books. _Prometheus Unbound_ I imagine you will receive nearly at the same time with this letter. _The Cenci_ I hope you have already received: it was studiously composed in a different style.
"Below the _good_ how far! but far above the _great_[3]!"
In poetry I have sought to avoid system and mannerism. I wish those who excel me in genius would pursue the same plan.
"Whether you remain in England, or journey to Italy, believe that you carry with you my anxious wishes for your health and success--wherever you are, or whatever you undertake--and that I am
"Yours sincerely,
"P.B. Sh.e.l.lEY."
Keats"s reply to Sh.e.l.ley ran as follows:--
"Hampstead--August 10, 1820.
"MY DEAR Sh.e.l.lEY,
"I am very much gratified that you, in a foreign country, and with a mind almost over-occupied, should write to me in the strain of the letter beside me. If I do not take advantage of your invitation, it will be prevented by a circ.u.mstance I have very much at heart to prophesy[4].
There is no doubt that an English winter would put an end to me, and do so in a lingering hateful manner. Therefore I must either voyage or journey to Italy, as a soldier marches up to a battery. My nerves at present are the worst part of me: yet they feel soothed that, come what extreme may, I shall not be destined to remain in one spot long enough to take a hatred of any four particular bedposts.
"I am glad you take any pleasure in my poor poem--which I would willingly take the trouble to unwrite if possible, did I care so much as I have done about reputation.