That the pale name of Priest might shrink and dwindle
Into the Hell from which it first was hurled....”
He used to say to me, falling from the heights of recitation:
“Shelley lived in the time of the Duke of Wellington. He was the son of a rich old baronet in Sussex, but he had nothing to do with his parents as soon as he could escape from them. He wrote the greatest lyrics that ever were—that is, songs not meant to be sung, and no musician could write good enough music for them, either. He was tall, and brave, and gentle. He feared no man, and he almost loved death. He was beautiful. His hair was long, and curled, and had been nearly black, but it was going grey when he died. He was drowned in the Mediterranean at thirty. The other poets burnt his body on the sea-shore, but one of them saved the heart and buried it at Rome with the words on the stone above it, Cor cordium, Heart of hearts. It is not right, it is not right....”
He would mutter, “It is not right,” but what he meant I could not tell, unless he was thus—seventy years late—impatiently indignant at the passing of Shelley out of this earth. As likely as not he would forget his indignation, if such it was, by whispering—but not to me—with honied milky accents, as of one whose feet would refuse to crush a toad or bruise a flower:
“Thou Friend, whose presence on my wintry heart
Fell like bright Spring upon some herbless plain,
How beautiful and calm and free thou wert
In thy young wisdom, when the mortal chain
Of custom thou didst burst and rend in twain,