After some deliberation I decided to give this little work on Shelley the narrative rather than the essay form, impelled thereto by one commanding reason.  Shelley’s life and his poetry are indissolubly connected.  He acted what he thought and felt, with a directness rare among his brethren of the poet’s craft; while his verse, with the exception of “The Cenci”, expressed little but the animating thoughts and aspirations of his life.  That life, moreover, was “a miracle of thirty years,” so crowded with striking incident and varied experience that, as he said himself, he had already lived longer than his father, and ought to be reckoned with the men of ninety.  Through all vicissitudes he preserved his youth inviolate, and died, like one whom the gods love, or like a hero of Hellenic story, young, despite grey hairs and suffering.  His life has, therefore, to be told, in order that his life-work may be rightly valued:  for, great as that was, he, the man, was somehow greater; and noble as it truly is, the memory of him is nobler.

To the world he presented the rare spectacle of a man passionate for truth, and unreservedly obedient to the right as he discerned it.  The anomaly which made his practical career a failure, lay just here.  The right he followed was too often the antithesis of ordinary morality:  in his desire to cast away the false and grasp the true, he overshot the mark of prudence.  The blending in him of a pure and earnest purpose with moral and social theories that could not but have proved pernicious to mankind at large, produced at times an almost grotesque mixture in his actions no less than in his verse.  We cannot, therefore, wonder that society, while he lived, felt the necessity of asserting itself against him.  But now that he has passed into the company of the great dead, and time has softened down the asperities of popular judgment, we are able to learn the real lesson of his life and writings.  That is not to be sought in any of his doctrines, but rather in his fearless bearing, his resolute loyalty to an unselfish and in the simplest sense benevolent ideal.  It is this which constitutes his supreme importance for us English at the present time.  Ours is an age in which ideals are rare, and we belong to a race in which men who follow them so single-heartedly are not common.

As a poet, Shelley contributed a new quality to English literature—­a quality of ideality, freedom, and spiritual audacity, which severe critics of other nations think we lack.  Byron’s daring is in a different region:  his elemental worldliness and pungent satire do not liberate our energies, or cheer us with new hopes and splendid vistas.  Wordsworth, the very antithesis to Shelley in his reverent accord with institutions, suits our meditative mood, sustains us with a sound philosophy, and braces us by healthy contact with the Nature he so dearly loved.  But in Wordsworth there is none of Shelley’s magnetism. $What remains of permanent value in Coleridge’s