While studying Italian, he continued faithful to Greek.  Plato was often in his hands, and the dramatists formed his almost inseparable companions.  How deeply he felt the art of the Homeric poems, may be gathered from the following extract:—­“I congratulate you on your conquest of the Iliad.  You must have been astonished at the perpetually increasing magnificence of the last seven books.  Homer there truly begins to be himself.  The battle of the Scamander, the funeral of Patroclus, and the high and solemn close of the whole bloody tale in tenderness and inexpiable sorrow, are wrought in a manner incomparable with anything of the same kind.  The Odyssey is sweet, but there is nothing like this.”  About this time, prompted by Mrs. Gisborne, he began the study of Spanish, and conceived an ardent admiration for Calderon, whose splendid and supernatural fancy tallied with his own.  “I am bathing myself in the light and odour of the starry Autos,” he writes to Mr. Gisborne in the autumn of 1820.  “Faust”, too, was a favourite.  “I have been reading over and over again “Faust”, and always with sensations which no other composition excites.  It deepens the gloom and augments the rapidity of ideas, and would therefore seem to me an unfit study for any person who is a prey to the reproaches of memory, and the delusions of an imagination not to be restrained.”  The profound impression made upon him by Margaret’s story is expressed in two letters about Retzsch’s illustrations:—­“The artist makes one envy his happiness that he can sketch such things with calmness, which I only dared look upon once, and which made my brain swim round only to touch the leaf on the opposite side of which I knew that it was figured.”

The fruits of this occupation with Greek, Italian, Spanish, and German were Shelley’s translations from Homer and Euripides, from Dante, from Calderon’s “Magico Prodigioso”, and from “Faust”, translations which have never been surpassed for beauty of form and complete transfusion of the spirit of one literature into the language of another.  On translation, however, he set but little store, asserting that he only undertook it when he “could do absolutely nothing else,” and writing earnestly to dissuade Leigh Hunt from devoting time which might be better spent, to work of subordinate importance. (Letter from Florence, November 1819.) The following version of a Greek epigram on Plato’s spirit will illustrate his own method of translation:—­

    Eagle! why soarest thou above that tomb? 
    To what sublime and star-y-paven home
    Floatest thou? 
    I am the image of swift Plato’s spirit,
    Ascending heaven:—­Athens does inherit
    His corpse below.

Some time in the year 1820-21, he composed the “Defence of Poetry”, stimulated to this undertaking by his friend Peacock’s article on poetry, published in the Literary Miscellany. (See Letter to Ollier, January 20, 1820, Shelley Memorials, page 135.) This essay not only sets forth his theory of his own art, but it also contains some of his finest prose writing, of which the following passage, valuable alike for matter and style, may be cited as a specimen:—­