No poet was ever warmed by a more genuine and unforced inspiration.  His extreme sensibility gave the intensity of passion to his intellectual pursuits; and rendered his mind keenly alive to every perception of outward objects, as well as to his internal sensations.  Such a gift is, among the sad vicissitudes of human life, the disappointments we meet, and the galling sense of our own mistakes and errors, fraught with pain; to escape from such, he delivered up his soul to poetry, and felt happy when he sheltered himself, from the influence of human sympathies, in the wildest regions of fancy.  His imagination has been termed too brilliant, his thoughts too subtle.  He loved to idealize reality; and this is a taste shared by few.  We are willing to have our passing whims exalted into passions, for this gratifies our vanity; but few of us understand or sympathize with the endeavour to ally the love of abstract beauty, and adoration of abstract good, the to agathon kai to kalon of the Socratic philosophers, with our sympathies with our kind.  In this, Shelley resembled Plato; both taking more delight in the abstract and the ideal than in the special and tangible.  This did not result from imitation; for it was not till Shelley resided in Italy that he made Plato his study.  He then translated his “Symposium” and his “Ion”; and the English language boasts of no more brilliant composition than Plato’s Praise of Love translated by Shelley.  To return to his own poetry.  The luxury of imagination, which sought nothing beyond itself (as a child burdens itself with spring flowers, thinking of no use beyond the enjoyment of gathering them), often showed itself in his verses:  they will be only appreciated by minds which have resemblance to his own; and the mystic subtlety of many of his thoughts will share the same fate.  The metaphysical strain that characterizes much of what he has written was, indeed, the portion of his works to which, apart from those whose scope was to awaken mankind to aspirations for what he considered the true and good, he was himself particularly attached.  There is much, however, that speaks to the many.  When he would consent to dismiss these huntings after the obscure (which, entwined with his nature as they were, he did with difficulty), no poet ever expressed in sweeter, more heart-reaching, or more passionate verse, the gentler or more forcible emotions of the soul.

A wise friend once wrote to Shelley:  ’You are still very young, and in certain essential respects you do not yet sufficiently perceive that you are so.’  It is seldom that the young know what youth is, till they have got beyond its period; and time was not given him to attain this knowledge.  It must be remembered that there is the stamp of such inexperience on all he wrote; he had not completed his nine-and-twentieth year when he died.  The calm of middle life did not add the seal of the virtues which adorn maturity to those generated by the vehement