In a letter to Leigh Hunt, dated January 25, 1822, he says:  “My faculties are shaken to atoms and torpid.  I can write nothing; and if “Adonais” had no success, and excited no interest, what incentive can I have to write?” Again:  “I write little now.  It is impossible to compose except under the strong excitement of an assurance of finding sympathy in what you write.”  Lord Byron’s company proved now, as before, a check rather than an incentive to production:  “I do not write; I have lived too long near Lord Byron, and the sun has extinguished the glow-worm; for I cannot hope, with St. John, that the light came into the world and the world knew it not.”  “I despair of rivalling Lord Byron, as well I may, and there is no other with whom it is worth contending.”  To Ollier, in 1820, he wrote:  “I doubt whether I shall write more.  I could be content either with the hell or the paradise of poetry; but the torments of its purgatory vex me, without exciting my powers sufficiently to put an end to the vexation.”  It was not that his spirit was cowed by the Reviews, or that he mistook the sort of audience he had to address.  He more than once acknowledged that, while Byron wrote for the many, his poems were intended for the understanding few.  Yet the sunetoi, as he called them, gave him but scanty encouragement.  The cold phrases of kindly Horace Smith show that he had not comprehended “Prometheus Unbound”; and Shelley whimsically complains that even intelligent and sympathetic critics confounded the ideal passion described in “Epipsychidion” with the love affairs of “a servant-girl and her sweetheart.”  This almost incomprehensible obtuseness on the part of men who ought to have known better, combined with the coarse abuse of vulgar scribblers, was enough to make a man so sincerely modest as Shelley doubt his powers, or shrink from the severe labour of developing them. (See Medwin, volume 2 page 172, for Shelley’s comment on the difficulty of the poet’s art.) “The decision of the cause,” he wrote to Mr. Gisborne, “whether or no I am a poet, is removed from the present time to the hour when our posterity shall assemble; but the court is a very severe one, and I fear that the verdict will be, guilty—­death.”  Deep down in his own heart he had, however, less doubt:  “This I know,” he said to Medwin, “that whether in prosing or in versing, there is something in my writings that shall live for ever.”  And again, he writes to Hunt:  “I am full of thoughts and plans, and should do something, if the feeble and irritable frame which encloses it was willing to obey the spirit.  I fancy that then I should do great things.”  It seems almost certain that the incompleteness of many longer works designed in the Italian period, the abandonment of the tragedy on Tasso’s story, the unfinished state of “Charles I”, and the failure to execute the cherished plan of a drama suggested by the Book of Job, were due to the depressing effects of ill-health and external discouragement.  Poetry with Shelley was no light matter.  He composed under the pressure of intense excitement, and he elaborated his first draughts with minute care and severe self-criticism.