SHELLEY’S LIFE.  There are three classes of men who see visions, and all three are represented in our literature.  The first is the mere dreamer, like Blake, who stumbles through a world of reality without noticing it, and is happy in his visions.  The second is the seer, the prophet, like Langland, or Wyclif, who sees a vision and quietly goes to work, in ways that men understand, to make the present world a little more like the ideal one which he sees in his vision.  The third, who appears in many forms,—­as visionary, enthusiast, radical, anarchist, revolutionary, call him what you will,—­sees a vision and straightway begins to tear down all human institutions, which have been built up by the slow toil of centuries, simply because they seem to stand in the way of his dream.  To the latter class belongs Shelley, a man perpetually at war with the present world, a martyr and exile, simply because of his inability to sympathize with men and society as they are, and because of his own mistaken judgment as to the value and purpose of a vision.

Shelley was born in Field Place, near Horsham, Sussex, in 1792.  On both his father’s and his mother’s side he was descended from noble old families, famous in the political and literary history of England.  From childhood he lived, like Blake, in a world of fancy, so real that certain imaginary dragons and headless creatures of the neighboring wood kept him and his sisters in a state of fearful expectancy.  He learned rapidly, absorbed the classics as if by intuition, and, dissatisfied with ordinary processes of learning, seems to have sought, like Faustus, the acquaintance of spirits, as shown in his “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”: 

    While yet a boy, I sought for ghosts, and sped
      Through many a listening chamber, cave and ruin,
      And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing
    Hopes of high talk with the departed dead.

Shelley’s first public school, kept by a hard-headed Scotch master, with its floggings and its general brutality, seemed to him like a combination of hell and prison; and his active rebellion against existing institutions was well under way when, at twelve years of age, he entered the famous preparatory school at Eton.  He was a delicate, nervous, marvelously sensitive boy, of great physical beauty; and, like Cowper, he suffered torments at the hands of his rough schoolfellows.  Unlike Cowper, he was positive, resentful, and brave to the point of rashness; soul and body rose up against tyranny; and he promptly organized a rebellion against the brutal fagging system.  “Mad Shelley” the boys called him, and they chivied him like dogs around a little coon that fights and cries defiance to the end.  One finds what he seeks in this world, and it is not strange that Shelley, after his Eton experiences, found causes for rebellion in all existing forms of human society, and that he left school “to war among mankind,” as he says of himself in the Revolt of Islam.