Note on the “Revolt of Islam”, By Mrs. Shelley.

Shelley possessed two remarkable qualities of intellect—­a brilliant imagination, and a logical exactness of reason.  His inclinations led him (he fancied) almost alike to poetry and metaphysical discussions.  I say ‘he fancied,’ because I believe the former to have been paramount, and that it would have gained the mastery even had he struggled against it.  However, he said that he deliberated at one time whether he should dedicate himself to poetry or metaphysics; and, resolving on the former, he educated himself for it, discarding in a great measure his philosophical pursuits, and engaging himself in the study of the poets of Greece, Italy, and England.  To these may be added a constant perusal of portions of the old Testament—­the Psalms, the Book of Job, the Prophet Isaiah, and others, the sublime poetry of which filled him with delight.

As a poet, his intellect and compositions were powerfully influenced by exterior circumstances, and especially by his place of abode.  He was very fond of travelling, and ill-health increased this restlessness.  The sufferings occasioned by a cold English winter made him pine, especially when our colder spring arrived, for a more genial climate.  In 1816 he again visited Switzerland, and rented a house on the banks of the Lake of Geneva; and many a day, in cloud or sunshine, was passed alone in his boat—­sailing as the wind listed, or weltering on the calm waters.  The majestic aspect of Nature ministered such thoughts as he afterwards enwove in verse.  His lines on the Bridge of the Arve, and his “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”, were written at this time.  Perhaps during this summer his genius was checked by association with another poet whose nature was utterly dissimilar to his own, yet who, in the poem he wrote at that time, gave tokens that he shared for a period the more abstract and etherealised inspiration of Shelley.  The saddest events awaited his return to England; but such was his fear to wound the feelings of others that he never expressed the anguish he felt, and seldom gave vent to the indignation roused by the persecutions he underwent; while the course of deep unexpressed passion, and the sense of injury, engendered the desire to embody themselves in forms defecated of all the weakness and evil which cling to real life.

He chose therefore for his hero a youth nourished in dreams of liberty, some of whose actions are in direct opposition to the opinions of the world; but who is animated throughout by an ardent love of virtue, and a resolution to confer the boons of political and intellectual freedom on his fellow-creatures.  He created for this youth a woman such as he delighted to imagine—­full of enthusiasm for the same objects; and they both, with will unvanquished, and the deepest sense of the justice of their cause, met adversity and death.  There exists in this poem a memorial of a friend of his youth.  The character of the old man who liberates Laon from his tower prison, and tends on him in sickness, is founded on that of Doctor Lind, who, when Shelley was at Eton, had often stood by to befriend and support him, and whose name he never mentioned without love and veneration.