The poem, bold in its opinions and uncompromising in their expression, met with many censurers, not only among those who allow of no virtue but such as supports the cause they espouse, but even among those whose opinions were similar to his own.  I extract a portion of a letter written in answer to one of these friends.  It best details the impulses of Shelley’s mind, and his motives:  it was written with entire unreserve; and is therefore a precious monument of his own opinion of his powers, of the purity of his designs, and the ardour with which he clung, in adversity and through the valley of the shadow of death, to views from which he believed the permanent happiness of mankind must eventually spring.

’Marlowe, December 11, 1817.

’I have read and considered all that you say about my general powers, and the particular instance of the poem in which I have attempted to develop them.  Nothing can be more satisfactory to me than the interest which your admonitions express.  But I think you are mistaken in some points with regard to the peculiar nature of my powers, whatever be their amount.  I listened with deference and self-suspicion to your censures of “The Revolt of Islam”; but the productions of mine which you commend hold a very low place in my own esteem; and this reassures me, in some degree at least.  The poem was produced by a series of thoughts which filled my mind with unbounded and sustained enthusiasm.  I felt the 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”