rather put out by observing in the passage near the open door, opposite to where I sat, a pair of glittering eyes steadily fixed on mine; it was too dark to make out whom they belonged to. With the acuteness of a woman, Mrs. Williams's eyes followed the direction of mine, and, going to the doorway, she laughingly said, "Come in, Shelley, it's only our friend Tre just arrived." Swiftly gliding in, blushing like a girl, a tall thin stripling held out both his hands; and, although I could hardly believe as I looked at his flushed, feminine, and artless face -that it could be the poet, I returned his warm pressure. After the ordinary greetings and courtesies, he sat down and listened. I was silent from astonishment. Was it possible this mild-looking, beardless boy could be the veritable monster at war with all the world? excommunicated by the Fathers of the Church, deprived of his civil rights by the fiat of a grim Lord Chancellor, discarded by every member of his family, and denounced by the rival sages of our literature as the founder of a Satanic school? I could not believe it; it must be a hoax. He was habited like a boy, in a black jacket and trowsers which he seemed to have outgrown; or his tailor, as is the custom, had most shamefully stinted him in his 'sizings.' Mrs. Williams saw my embarrassment, and, to relieve me, asked Shelley what book he had in his hand. 'Calderon's 'Magico Prodigioso.' I am translating some passages in it.' 'Oh, read it to us!' Shoved off from the shore of commonplace incidents that could not interest him, and fairly launched on a theme that did, he instantly became oblivious of everything but the book in his hand. The masterly manner in which he analysed the genius of

re

the author, his lucid interpretation of the story, and the ease with which he translated into our language the most subtle and imaginative passages of the Spanish poet, were marvellous, as was his command of the two languages. After this touch of his quality, I no longer doubted his identity. A dead silence ensued. Looking up, I asked, 'Where is he?' Mrs. Williams said, 'Who? Shelley? Oh, he comes and goes like a spirit, no one knows when or where.' Presently he appeared with Mrs. Shelley." I should like to quote something also from Mr. Jefferson Hogg. He is, in his way, as graphic as Trelawny, but much more discursive and less condensed; less reasonable also, and addicted to constant raillery which is seldom without a spice-often a very large spice of exaggeration. Yet I am convinced he has touched off Shelley to the life in many respects; banteringly, but acutely, and affectionately too. Indeed, Trelawny told me that, having first read Hogg's book only quite lately, after I had made his own personal acquaintance in 1869, he recognised beyond dispute, in the extremely youthful Shelley depicted by Hogg, the very same man whom, at the close of his brief career, he himself had known and loved in Italy. From Hogg I will not borrow any description of Shelley's personal appearance; but may refer to his laughable observations on the way in which the impulsive young genius, continually flitting about various parts of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and afterwards of the Continent, with no very cogent motive for so doing, would incessantly profess that he had settled down "for ever" at each of his transient halting-places. Or again-in our author's own

words: "To be always in a hurry was Bysshe's grand and first rule of conduct. His second canon of practical wisdom-and this he esteemed hardly less important than the former-was to make a mystery of everything, to treat as a profound secret matters manifest, patent, and fully known to everybody. A lively fancy, which imagined difficulties and created obstacles where none existed, was the true cause of a a course of dealing that was troublesome and injurious to himself and to all connected with him."

And now, very briefly, as to Shelley's opinions. Mr. Hogg, who continued to see him up to 1817 or thereabouts, when the poet was twenty-five years of age, but who never set eyes on him afterwards, and from whom I have just cited the two chief rules of conduct with which he credits his friend, has recorded likewise his two chief standards of opinion. "I knew Shelley," he says, "more intimately than any man, but I never could discern in him more than two fixed principles. The first was a strong, irrepressible love of liberty; of liberty in the abstract, and somewhat after the pattern of the ancient republics, without reference to the English Constitution, respecting which he knew little and cared nothing, heeding it not at all. The second

was

:

an equally ardent love of toleration of all opinions, but more especially of religious opinionsof toleration, complete, entire, universal, unlimited as a deduction and corollary from which latter principle he felt an intense abhorrence of persecution of every kind, public or private." Such is Hogg's comprehensive account of Shelley's principles: personal and political Liberty, religious and absolute Toleration, And no doubt these are two of the ideas which

one traces throughout the poet's writings, dominant and intense; his mental horizon expands, the inferences and deductions of his reason waver and shift from time to time, but these great principles remain intact. There is, however, a broader and loftier conception than bare liberty or simple toleration, to which Shelley paid earnest, passionate, lifelong homage: it is that which he has expressed under the name "Intellectual Beauty." Among the earliest poems of his manhood is one entitled "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty;" a very fine poem, and a singularly noble one, and of no slight importance in its directly biographic character. Mind, soul, or spirit, the power whereby we are cognisant of ourselves and of the universe-mind limitless and supreme-this it was which ruled the depths of his being as the moon rules the tides; mind which is a law to itself, and which can only find its full scope and fruition when that law of its own being is perfected not into truth alone but into beauty. "Man," he writes. in this hymn,

Man were immortal and omnipotent, Didst thou, unknown and awful as thou art,

Keep with thy glorious train firm

state within his heart.

And he speaks of himself-r

doubt with substantial truth-as having in boyhood received, as it were, a sudden revealing, an overshadowing of this spirit of Intellectual Beauty :

I vowed that I would dedicate my

Unlinked with hope that thou wouldst free

This world from its dark slavery.

Or I might quote from his first serious poetic effort, "Queen Mab":

Throughout this varied and eternal world,

Soul is the only element, the block
That for uncounted ages has remained.
The moveless pillar of a mountain's
weight

Is active living spirit. Every grain
Is sentient both in unity and part,
And the minutest atom comprehends
A world of loves and hatreds.

But to return to the two practical regulative principles-Liberty and Toleration. Shelley, for his own part, asserted this liberty, and made demands upon this toleration, to the uttermost. I have said that in early youth he was a Materialist; but afterwards he was certainly much more an Immaterialist, adhering, yet not with rigid conformity, to the philosophy of Berkeley, or veering between him and Spinosa. One of his fragmentary essays, named "On Life,"-written no one knows at what precise date-contains the following passage:-"I am one of those who are unable to refuse my assent to the conclusions of those philosophers who assert that nothing exists but as it is perceived. Materialism is a seducing system to young and superficial minds. It allows its disciples to talk, and dispenses them from thinking. But I was discontented with such a view of things as it afforded. Man is a being of high aspirations, looking both before and after, whose thoughts wander through eternity, disclaiming alliance with transience and decay, incapable of imagining to himself annihilation, existing but in the future and the past-being, not what he is, but what he has been and shall be. Whatever may be his true and

final destination, there is a spirit within him at enmity with nothingness and dissolution. This is the character of all life and being. Each is at once the centre and the circumference; the point to which all things are referred, and the line in which all things are contained. Such contemplations as

these Materialism, and the popular philosophy of mind and matter, alike forbid; they are only consistent with the intellectual system."

But Shelley could never, either to his own mind or to others, be rigid and pragmatic on these vast topics of speculation. The mysteries of the universe, the mysteries of the origin of things and of mind, he found unfathomable, and reluctantly acquiesced in so finding and leaving them. He always continued opposed, not only to religious intolerance, but to religious dogma and prescription of all kinds; but to call him simply an atheist in his maturer years would be certainly a crude and partly a misleading term. He became, perhaps, rather pantheist than atheist. He believed passionately in good; he hungered and thirsted to make the law of love the law of his own life, and of mankind. In immortality also he had a certain real and even fervid belief, but it was not a belief resting upon argument or susceptible of demonstration; to him it was a vast and intense but undefined and insecure presumption, arising out of the nature, and especially out of the desires, of the human spirit. His political foresight and sagacity were really considerable; and I might say the same of his political moderation, although, as regards ultimate aspirations, no one ever had a more vivid enthusiasm or more limitless conceptions. In intellectual matters generally, we should remember that Shelley was the heir-it might

be said the orphaned heir of the French Revolution. His mind was just beginning to expand when the glorious longings and insatiable efforts of the Revolution were visibly exhausted and cowed down, and, in England especially, were objects of the most deadly general abhorrence. But Shelley's spirit ignited in the divine fire hid under sullenly deceptive yet still terrible ashes; and he, of all poets, is the one who has most transmitted that devouring flame, purified into splendour of radiant heat and light, to succeeding

ages.

This gives us to some extent Shelley's position in poetical and in European literature. But I am fain to glance onward yet a little, and endeavour to express to my own mind and to yours his personal integral station in the Pantheon of our race. In this his character counts for something-his poetry for much more: the two together make up the indivisible unit. I think that our debt to Shelleythe debt that we of the later nineteenth century owe, and that our descendants for an indefinite series of years will continue owing-is much greater than can be assessed even by recounting and dilating on the transcendent splendours of his poetry. It is a limitless debt. We men of the modern years needed some writer of the imaginative or poetic order whom we could regard as an Ideal; one

whom our minds would naturally invest with something of that abstract beauty, that perfected exaltation of type, that we find in antique art. Shelley responds to this demand. He is as truly an ideal type in modern poetic intellect as the Apollo Belvedere in ancient godhood, or Dante in Catholic Medievalism. His person and youth, his adventures and misfortunes, his character, his intellect, his speculations and aspirations, above all, his poetry -invite and compel a certain enthusiastic homage which we could not in equal measure bestow upon any other poet of the recent ages. Byron and Göthe come nearest to asserting a rival claim; each of these mighty spirits is indeed in his way a type not less absolute than Shelley. But they supply types of a different kind: Byron, the tameless personal pride of genius; Göthe, the personal lordship of mind over all its surroundings, embracing them all, regarding and disregarding them all. Neither has the self-devotion of Shelley-his intense singleness of aim, and rapture of anticipation. In Shelley alone-the ardent, the suffering Shelley-we find that radiant semblance of the personal pang merged into the world-wide sympathy-the plaintive inner voice which passing through the whole diapason of the soul, becomes the trumpet-call of the future and of man

IN September of last year there died at an English sea-side resort the wife of a German Professor, and distinguished worker in the field of chemical research. Within

two hours he committed suicide. For nearly ten years the pair had been married, and their lives had grown together. There was nothing singular about either, but when his wife, in whom his gentler existence had been bound up, had passed from him, the man, though he had many affectionate friends, was conscious that he was alone.

He was in his forty-fifth year, had been a student of Bonn and Gottingen, where he shewed enthusiastic devotion to his laboratory work; and had continued his labours at Paris, at Berlin, and at University College, London.

His union, many things led his friends to conjecture, had much of the romantic character, though the lady was not young or possessed of any special personal attractions. But none failed to appreciate that her charm lay in her extreme goodness and amiability.

upon the

The only cloud marriage was an illness of the lady, from which she never entirely recovered. This distracted her husband and hindered his scientific pursuits, though with unconquer