It is obvious that all these singers are only veiled expositions of Shelley's own character, as he understood it, and all enthusiastic readers of Shelley's poetry have pictured an ideal poet who is reminiscent of Shelley. Even a poet so different from him, in many respects, as Browning, could not escape from the impress of Shelley's character upon his ideal. Browning seems to have recognized fleeting glimpses of Shelley in Sordello, and to have acknowledged them in his apostrophe to Shelley at the beginning of that poem. Browning's revulsion of feeling, after he discovered Shelley's abandonment of Harriet, did not prevent him from holding to his early ideal of Shelley as the typical poet. A poem by James Thomson, B.V., is characteristic of later poets' notion of Shelley. The scene of the poem is laid in heaven. Shelley, as the most compassionate of the angels, is chosen to go to the earth, to right its evils. He comes to this world and lives with "the saint's white purity," being
A voice of right amidst a world's foul wrong,
* * * * *
With heavenly inspiration, too divine
For souls besotted with earth's sensual wine.
[Footnote: Shelley.]
Consequently he is misunderstood and persecuted, and returns to heaven heart-broken by the apparent failure of his mission.
Aside from Shelley, Marlowe is the historical poet most frequently chosen to illustrate the world's proneness to take advantage of the poet's innocence. In the most famous of the poems about Marlowe, The Death of Marlowe, R. H. Horne takes a hopeful view of the world's depravity, for he makes Marlowe's innocence of evil so touching that it moves a prostitute to reform. Other poets, however, have painted Marlowe's associates as villains of far deeper dye. In the drama by Josephine Preston Peabody, the persecutions of hypocritical puritans hound Marlowe to his death. [Footnote: Marlowe.]
The most representative view of Marlowe as an innocent, deceived youth is that presented by Alfred Noyes, in At the Sign of the Golden Shoe. In this poem we find Nash describing to the Mermaid group thetragic end of Marlowe, who lies
Dead like a dog in a drunken brawl,
Dead for a phial of paint, a taffeta gown.
While there float in from the street, at intervals, the cries of the ballad-mongers hawking their latest doggerel,
Blaspheming Tamborlin must die,
And Faustus meet his end;
Repent, repent, or presently
To hell you must descend,
Nash tells his story of the country lad who walked to London, bringing
his possessions carried on a stick over his shoulder, bringing also,
All unshielded, all unarmed,
A child's heart, packed with splendid hopes and dreams.
His manner,