precariousness of my life, and I engaged in this task, resolved to leave some record of myself.  Much of what the volume contains was written with the same feeling—­as real, though not so prophetic—­as the communications of a dying man.  I never presumed indeed to consider it anything approaching to faultless; but, when I consider contemporary productions of the same apparent pretensions, I own I was filled with confidence.  I felt that it was in many respects a genuine picture of my own mind.  I felt that the sentiments were true, not assumed.  And in this have I long believed that my power consists; in sympathy, and that part of the imagination which relates to sentiment and contemplation.  I am formed, if for anything not in common with the herd of mankind, to apprehend minute and remote distinctions of feeling, whether relative to external nature or the living beings which surround us, and to communicate the conceptions which result from considering either the moral or the material universe as a whole.  Of course, I believe these faculties, which perhaps comprehend all that is sublime in man, to exist very imperfectly in my own mind.  But, when you advert to my Chancery-paper, a cold, forced, unimpassioned, insignificant piece of cramped and cautious argument, and to the little scrap about “Mandeville”, which expressed my feelings indeed, but cost scarcely two minutes’ thought to express, as specimens of my powers more favourable than that which grew as it were from “the agony and bloody sweat” of intellectual travail; surely I must feel that, in some manner, either I am mistaken in believing that I have any talent at all, or you in the selection of the specimens of it.  Yet, after all, I cannot but be conscious, in much of what I write, of an absence of that tranquillity which is the attribute and accompaniment of power.  This feeling alone would make your most kind and wise admonitions, on the subject of the economy of intellectual force, valuable to me.  And, if I live, or if I see any trust in coming years, doubt not but that I shall do something, whatever it may be, which a serious and earnest estimate of my powers will suggest to me, and which will be in every respect accommodated to their utmost limits.

[Shelley to Godwin.]

Note on Rosalind and Helen by Mrs. Shelley.

“Rosalind and Helen” was begun at Marlow, and thrown aside—­till I found it; and, at my request, it was completed.  Shelley had no care for any of his poems that did not emanate from the depths of his mind, and develop some high or abstruse truth.  When he does touch on human life and the human heart, no pictures can be more faithful, more delicate, more subtle, or more pathetic.  He never mentioned Love but he shed a grace borrowed from his own nature, that scarcely any other poet has bestowed on that passion.  When he spoke of it as the law of life, which inasmuch as we rebel against we err