It is true that he shared the fate of nearly all the great poets contemporary with him, in being unappreciated.  Like them, he suffered from critics who were for ever shearing the wild tresses of poetry between rusty rules, who could never see a literary bough project beyond the trim level of its day but they must lop it with a crooked criticism, who kept indomitably planting in the defile of fame the “established canons” that had been spiked by poet after poet.  But we decline to believe that a singer of Shelley’s calibre could be seriously grieved by want of vogue.  Not that we suppose him to have found consolation in that senseless superstition, “the applause of posterity.”  Posterity! posterity which goes to Rome, weeps large-sized tears, carves beautiful inscriptions over the tomb of Keats; and the worm must wriggle her curtsey to it all, since the dead boy, wherever he be, has quite other gear to tend.  Never a bone less dry for all the tears!

A poet must to some extent be a chameleon and feed on air.  But it need not be the musty breath of the multitude.  He can find his needful support in the judgement of those whose judgement he knows valuable, and such support Shelley had: 

         La gloire
   Ne compte pas toujours les voix;
   Elle les pese quelquefois.

Yet if this might be needful to him as support, neither this, nor the applause of the present, nor the applause of posterity, could have been needful to him as motive:  the one all-sufficing motive for a great poet’s singing is that expressed by Keats: 

I was taught in Paradise
To ease my breast of melodies.

Precisely so.  The overcharged breast can find no ease but in suckling the baby-song.  No enmity of outward circumstances, therefore, but his own nature, was responsible for Shelley’s doom.

A being with so much about it of child-like unreasonableness, and yet withal so much of the beautiful attraction luminous in a child’s sweet unreasonableness, would seem fore-fated by its very essence to the transience of the bubble and the rainbow, of all things filmy and fair.  Did some shadow of this destiny bear part in his sadness?  Certain it is that, by a curious chance, he himself in Julian and Maddalo jestingly foretold the manner of his end.  “O ho!  You talk as in years past,” said Maddalo (Byron) to Julian (Shelley); “If you can’t swim, Beware of Providence.”  Did no unearthly dixisti sound in his ears as he wrote it?  But a brief while, and Shelley, who could not swim, was weltering on the waters of Lerici.  We know not how this may affect others, but over us it is a coincidence which has long tyrannised with an absorbing inveteracy of impression (strengthened rather than diminished by the contrast between the levity of the utterance and its fatal fulfilment)—­thus to behold, heralding itself in warning mockery through the very lips of its predestined victim, the Doom upon whose breath his locks were lifting along the coasts of Campania.  The death which he had prophesied came upon him, and Spezzia enrolled another name among the mournful Marcelli of our tongue; Venetian glasses which foamed and burst before the poisoned wine of life had risen to their brims.