’Alas! this is not what I thought Life was. 
    I knew that there were crimes and evil men,
    Misery and hate; nor did I hope to pass
    Untouched by suffering through the rugged glen. 
    In mine own heart I saw as in a glass
    The hearts of others...And, when
    I went among my kind, with triple brass
    Of calm endurance my weak breast I armed,
    To bear scorn, fear, and hate—­a woful mass!’

I believed that all this morbid feeling would vanish if the chord of sympathy between him and his countrymen were touched.  But my persuasions were vain, the mind could not be bent from its natural inclination.  Shelley shrunk instinctively from portraying human passion, with its mixture of good and evil, of disappointment and disquiet.  Such opened again the wounds of his own heart; and he loved to shelter himself rather in the airiest flights of fancy, forgetting love and hate, and regret and lost hope, in such imaginations as borrowed their hues from sunrise or sunset, from the yellow moonshine or paly twilight, from the aspect of the far ocean or the shadows of the woods,—­which celebrated the singing of the winds among the pines, the flow of a murmuring stream, and the thousand harmonious sounds which Nature creates in her solitudes.  These are the materials which form the “Witch of Atlas”:  it is a brilliant congregation of ideas such as his senses gathered, and his fancy coloured, during his rambles in the sunny land he so much loved.

Note on Oedipus Tyrannus, by Mrs. Shelley.

In the brief journal I kept in those days, I find recorded, in August, 1820, Shelley ’begins “Swellfoot the Tyrant”, suggested by the pigs at the fair of San Giuliano.’  This was the period of Queen Caroline’s landing in England, and the struggles made by George IV to get rid of her claims; which failing, Lord Castlereagh placed the “Green Bag” on the table of the House of Commons, demanding in the King’s name that an enquiry should be instituted into his wife’s conduct.  These circumstances were the theme of all conversation among the English.  We were then at the Baths of San Giuliano.  A friend came to visit us on the day when a fair was held in the square, beneath our windows:  Shelley read to us his “Ode to Liberty”; and was riotously accompanied by the grunting of a quantity of pigs brought for sale to the fair.  He compared it to the ‘chorus of frogs’ in the satiric drama of Aristophanes; and, it being an hour of merriment, and one ludicrous association suggesting another, he imagined a political-satirical drama on the circumstances of the day, to which the pigs would serve as chorus—­and “Swellfoot” was begun.  When finished, it was transmitted to England, printed, and published anonymously; but stifled at the very dawn of its existence by the Society for the Suppression of Vice, who threatened to prosecute it, if not immediately withdrawn.  The friend who had taken the trouble of bringing it out, of course did not think it worth the annoyance and expense of a contest, and it was laid aside.