They arrived at Villa Magni on the 26th of April, and began a course of life which was not interrupted till the final catastrophe of July 8.  These few weeks were in many respects the happiest of Shelley’s life.  We seem to discern in his last letter of importance, recently edited by Mr. Garnett, that he was now conscious of having reached a platform from which he could survey his past achievement, and whence he would probably have risen to a loftier altitude, by a calmer and more equable exercise of powers which had been ripening during the last three years of life in Italy.  Meanwhile, “I am content,” he writes, “if the heaven above me is calm for the passing moment.”  And this tranquillity was perfect, with none of the oppressive sense of coming danger, which distinguishes the calm before a storm.  He was far away from the distractions of the world he hated, in a scene of indescribable beauty, among a population little removed from the state of savages, who enjoyed the primitive pleasures of a race at one with nature, and toiled with hardy perseverance on the element he loved so well.  His company was thoroughly congenial and well mixed.  He spent his days in excursions on the water with Williams, or in solitary musings in his cranky little skiff, floating upon the shallows in shore, or putting out to sea and waiting for the landward breeze to bring him home.  The evenings were passed upon the terrace, listening to Jane’s guitar, conversing with Trelawny, or reading his favourite poets aloud to the assembled party.

In this delightful solitude, this round of simple occupations, this uninterrupted communion with nature, Shelley’s enthusiasms and inspirations revived with their old strength.  He began a poem, which, if we may judge of its scale by the fragment we possess, would have been one of the longest, as it certainly is one of the loftiest of his masterpieces.  The “Triumph of Life” is composed in no strain of compliment to the powers of this world, which quell untameable spirits, and enslave the noblest by the operation of blind passions and inordinate ambitions.  It is rather a pageant of the spirit dragged in chains, led captive to the world, the flesh and the devil.  The sonorous march and sultry splendour of the terza rima stanzas, bearing on their tide of song those multitudes of forms, processionally grand, yet misty with the dust of their own tramplings, and half-shrouded in a lurid robe of light, affect the imagination so powerfully that we are fain to abandon criticism and acknowledge only the daemonic fascinations of this solemn mystery.  Some have compared the “Triumph of Life” to a Panathenaic pomp:  others have found in it a reflex of the burning summer heat, and blazing sea, and onward undulations of interminable waves, which were the cradle of its maker as he wrote.  The imagery of Dante plays a part, and Dante has controlled the structure.  The genius of the Revolution passes by:  Napoleon is there, and Rousseau serves for