to be the greater poet, he became inactive.  Shelley, on the contrary, stimulated Byron’s productive faculty to nobler efforts, raised his moral tone, and infused into his less subtle intellect something of his own philosophical depth and earnestness.  Much as he enjoyed Byron’s society and admired his writing, Shelley was not blind to the imperfections of his nature.  The sketch which he has left us of Count Maddalo, the letters written to his wife from Venice and Ravenna, and his correspondence on the subject of Leigh Hunt’s visit to Italy, supply the most discriminating criticism which has yet been passed upon his brother poet’s character.  It is clear that he never found in Byron a perfect friend, and that he had not accepted him as one with whom he sympathized upon the deeper questions of feeling and conduct.  Byron, for his part, recognized in Shelley the purest nature he had ever known.  “He was the most gentle, the most amiable, and least worldly-minded person I ever met; full of delicacy, disinterested beyond all other men, and possessing a degree of genius joined to simplicity as rare as it is admirable.  He had formed to himself a beau ideal of all that is fine, high-minded, and noble, and he acted up to this ideal even to the very letter.”

Toward the end of June the two poets made the tour of Lake Geneva in their boat, and were very nearly wrecked off the rocks of Meillerie.  On this occasion Shelley was in imminent danger of death from drowning.  His one anxiety, however, as he wrote to Peacock, was lest Byron should attempt to save him at the risk of his own life.  Byron described him as “bold as a lion;” and indeed it may here be said, once and for all, that Shelley’s physical courage was only equalled by his moral fearlessness.  He carried both without bravado to the verge of temerity, and may justly be said to have never known what terror was.  Another summer excursion was a visit to Chamouni, of which he has left memorable descriptions in his letters to Peacock, and in the somewhat Coleridgian verses on Mont Blanc.  The preface to “Laon and Cythna” shows what a powerful impression had been made upon him by the glaciers, and how he delighted in the element of peril.  There is a tone of exultation in the words which record the experiences of his two journeys in Switzerland and France:—­“I have been familiar from boyhood with mountains and lakes and the sea, and the solitude of forests.  Danger, which sports upon the brink of precipices, has been my playmate.  I have trodden the glaciers of the Alps, and lived under the eye of Mont Blanc.  I have been a wanderer among distant fields.  I have sailed down mighty rivers, and seen the sun rise and set, and the stars come forth, whilst I have sailed night and day down a rapid stream among mountains.  I have seen populous cities, and have watched the passions which rise and spread, and sink and change amongst assembled multitudes of men.  I have seen the theatre of the more visible ravages of tyranny and war, cities and villages reduced to scattered groups of black and roofless houses, and the naked inhabitants sitting famished upon their desolated thresholds.”