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The idea is somewhat elaborated from F of F B. Other changes are necessitated by the change in the mode of presenting the story. In The Fields of Fancy Mathilda speaks as one who has already died. Cf. Shelley's emphasis on hope and its association with love in all his work.
His words, he hoped, were to be 'the trumpet of a prophecy' to 'unawakened earth. Shelley had sat at the feet of Godwin, and represented that vague metaphysical dreaming to which the Utilitarians were radically hostile. To the literary critic, Shelley's power is the more remarkable because from a flimsy philosophy he span an imaginative tissue of such magical and marvellous beauty.
It was during the month of the coup d'état that Browning went back in thought to the poet of his youthful love, and wrote that essay which was prefixed to the volume of forged letters published as Shelley's by Moxon in 1852.
He was reciting poetry either Tennyson's or Shelley's, or his own, you couldn't tell and about him sat Zena with her hands clasped and Nora Gallagher looking at the sky and Jocelyn Drone gazing into infinity, and a little tubby woman looking at the poet with her head falling over sideways in fact, there was a whole group of them.
The poetic view he takes of death, and the lofty scorn he displays towards his calumniators, are as a prophecy on his own destiny when received among immortal names, and the poisonous breath of critics has vanished into emptiness before the fame he inherits. Shelley's favourite taste was boating; when living near the Thames or by the Lake of Geneva, much of his life was spent on the water.
One would imagine from Flaubert's exclamations that Ronsard had a range like Shelley's, whereas, in fact, he was more comparable with the English cavalier poets. He had the cavalier poet's gift of making love seem a profession rather than a passion. He was always very much a gentleman, both in his moods and his philosophy. A great deal of his best poetry is merely a variation on carpe diem.
"Lawless love" is Shelley's expressed ideal of the relation of the sexes; and his justice, his benevolence, his pity, are all equally lawless.
The prominence given to Shelley's earthly loves in this poem has led J. A. Symonds to deny that it is truly Platonic. He remarks, While Shelley's doctrine in Epipsychidion seems Platonic, it will not square with the Symposium.... When a man has formed a just conception of universal beauty, he looks back with a smile on those who find their soul's sphere in the love of some mere mortal object.
"Towards the close of 1813, estrangements, which for some time had been slowly growing between Mr. and Mrs. Shelley, came to a crisis. Separation ensued; and Mrs. Shelley returned to her father's house. Here she gave birth to her second child, a son, who died in 1826. "The occurrences of this painful epoch in Shelley's life, and the causes which led to them, I am spared from relating.
The direct reference here is to the action taken by Shelley's father-in-law and sister-in-law, Mr. and Miss Westbrook, which resulted in the decree of Lord Chancellor Eldon whereby Shelley was deprived of the custody of the two children of his first marriage. See p. 12. As a bankrupt thief turns thief-taker in despair, so an unsuccessful author turns critic.