United States or Djibouti ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Hogg pretends to believe that Shelley did not even understand the meaning of the phrases, and most probably many English would not have cared to do so. In any case Shelley's enthusiasm for an oppressed people must be admired, and it is noticeable that our greatest statesman of the present day has come to agree with Shelley after eighty years of life and of conflicting endeavour.
This addition to the circle introduced much conversation about apparitions, and each member of the party undertook to produce a ghost story. Polidori's "Vampyre" and Mrs. Shelley's "Frankenstein" were the only durable results of their determination. But an incident occurred which is of some importance in the history of Shelley's psychological condition.
Their transparent sincerity and unpremeditated grace, combined with natural finish of expression, make them masterpieces of a style at once familiar and elevated. That Shelley's sensibility to art was not so highly cultivated as his feeling for nature, is clear enough in many passages: but there is no trace of admiring to order in his comments upon pictures or statues.
Shelley's "History of a Six Week's Tour" relates the details of this trip, which was of great importance in forming Shelley's taste, and in supplying him with the scenery of river, rock, and mountain, so splendidly utilized in "Alastor".
All of this book is interesting on account of the sorcerer's methods and the attractiveness of some of his characters and the repulsiveness of the rest, but no part of it is so much so as are the chapters wherein he tries to think he thinks he sets forth the causes which led to Shelley's desertion of his wife in 1814. Harriet Westbrook was a school-girl sixteen years old.
Rousseau, Voltaire, and other authors cause the time to fly, until their spirits are damped by a letter arriving from Shelley's solicitor, requiring his return to England. While in Switzerland Mary received some letters from Fanny, her half-sister; these letters are interesting, showing a sweet, gentle disposition, very affectionate to both Shelley and Mary.
The Princesses are brought up immediately under the eye of their mother, who is allowed by every one to be a faultless model for her sex. The Duc d'Orléans is said to be wholly engrossed in the future prospects of his children, and in insuring, as far as human foresight can insure, their prosperity. I have been reading Shelley's works, in which I have found many beautiful thoughts.
But the diseases of the two were different, as their natures were; and Shelley's fever was not Byron's. Now it is worth remarking, that it is Shelley's form of fever, rather than Byron's, which has been of late years the prevailing epidemic.
This poem has the dignity of "Lycidas" without its refrigerating classicism, and with all the tenderness of Cowper's lines on the receipt of his mother's picture. It may well compare with others of the finest memorial poems in the language, with Shelley's "Adonais," and Matthew Arnold's "Thyrsis," leaving out of view Tennyson's "In Memoriam" as of wider scope and larger pattern.
The wrongs of Keats, also, are not so much stressed in genuine poetry as formerly, and the fiction that his death was due to the hostility of his critics is dying out, though Shelley's Adonais will go far toward giving it immortality. In even less significant verse the most maudlin sympathy with Keats is expressed.
Word Of The Day