This performance was probably the pamphlet which caused Shelley’s expulsion from Oxford; and Stockdale hoped to be regarded as a friend of the family by telling Sir T. all about it, and thus preventing a young aristocrat of such high birth and pretensions from falling into the slough of the blackguard Free-thinkers.  No doubt he was influenced to do this good turn to the family by the fact that the bill for the last romance was unpaid, and he knew that if Sir Timothy would not, and Shelley, being a minor, could not, liquidate it, he would, between the two unreliable stools, come to the ground.  In order to apologize for Shelley, and make it appear to his father that he was not to blame for writing such wickedness, but that another had indoctrinated him with all bad notions, he pitched upon Hogg as the scapegoat.  This is, at all events, the English writer’s explanation; but it was a futile as well as a foolish thing for the cunning publisher to do, for he made them all his enemies, and Sir Timothy refused to pay a farthing of the printing account.  So the publisher lost it.  Shelley, it is true, in a cool, polite business letter (April 11, 1811), asks for his account, which is delayed, and does not reach the poet until some time after it is sent, when it finds him in Radnorshire, Wales, too poor to pay it.  With an innocency worthy of the days of Adam and Eve, he, after promising to pay as soon as he can, offers Stockdale the manuscript of some metaphysical and moral essays—­the result of “some serious studies”—­“in part payment of his debt.”

JANUARY SEARLE.

* * * * *

CHANGES.

  All things resume their wonted look and place,
    Day unto day shows beauty, night to night: 
  No whit less fresh and fugitive a grace
    Marks the transitions of the swift year’s flight;
          But, gradual, sure and strange,
  Throughout our being hath been wrought a change.

  Brief while ago the first soft day of spring
    A personal, fair fortune seemed to be;
  The soul awoke with earth’s awakening,
    With Nature bound in closest sympathy;
          Sunshine or quiet rain
  Could soothe life’s pulse or make it leap again.

  Now, stripped of all illusive veil or haze,
    Each object looms remote, distinct, apart: 
  We know its worth, its limits, weight and ways;
    It is no longer one with our own heart;
          No answering ecstasy
  Is roused in us by earth or sea or sky.

  Who will affirm this brave display is real,
    When on a radiant morn the doom is sent
  That rends our world asunder, and we feel
    The dear, familiar earth, the firmament,
          All forms that meet the eye,
  An insubstantial, vacant mockery?

  A cobweb world of thin, transparent shapes,
    Though limp as silk, the magic woof proves wrought
  Stronger than steel:  no outlets, no escapes
    Ope to the struggling spirit, trapped and caught. 
          Prisoned in walls of glass,
  She sees beyond them, but she may not pass.