In baskets: with pure streams their thirsting lips they wet.”[240]
While he was yet residing in Marlow, the Princess Charlotte, daughter of the Prince of Wales (afterwards George IV.,) died; and, since her character had been in strong contrast with her father’s and with royal persons’ in general, her early death seems to have caused, not only ceremonial mourning, but also genuine regret amongst all in the community having any knowledge of her exceptional amiability. The poet seized the opportunity of so public an event, and published An Address to the People on the Death of the Princess Charlotte. By the Hermit of Marlow, in which he inscribed the motto—“We pity the plumage, but forget the dying bird.” In this pamphlet, while paying due tribute of regret for the death of an amiable girl, and fully appreciating the sorrow caused by death as well among the destitute and obscure (with whom, indeed, the too usual absence of the care and sympathy of friends intensifies the sorrow) as among the rich and powerful, he invited, in studiously moderate language, attention to the many just reasons for national mourning in the interests of the poor no less than of princes; and, in particular, invited the nation to express its indignant grief for the fate of the Lancashire mechanics who, missing the happier fate of their brethren slaughtered at Peterloo, were subjected to an ignominious death by a government which had, by its neglect, encouraged the growth of a just discontent.
In 1818 Shelley left England never to return. At this time was composed the principal part of his masterpiece—Prometheus Unbound, the most finished and carefully executed of all his poems. While in Rome (1819) he published The Cenci, which had been suggested to him by the famous picture of Guido, until lately supposed to be that of Beatrice Cenci, and by the traditions, current even in the poet’s time, of the cruel fate of his heroine. Shakspere’s four great dramas excepted, The Cenci must take rank as the finest tragic drama since the days of the Greek masters. It is worked up to a degree of pathos unsurpassed by anything of the kind in literature. “The Fifth Act,” remarks Mrs. Shelley, his editor and commentator, “is a masterpiece. Every character has a voice that echoes truth in its tones.” The Cenci was followed in quick succession by the Witch of Atlas, Adonais (an elegy on the death of Keats), the most exquisite “In Memoriam”—not excepting Milton’s or Tennyson’s—ever written; and Hellas, which was inspired by his strong sympathy with the Greeks, who were then engaged in the war of independence.
Of his lesser productions, the Ode to the Skylark is of an inspiration seldom equalled in its kind. With the “blythe spirit,” whom he apostrophises, the poet rises in rapt ecstasy “higher still and higher.” For the rest of his productions (the Letters from Italy and criticisms or rather eulogies on Greek art have an especial interest) and for the other events in his brief remaining existence we must refer our readers to the complete edition of his works.[241] The last work upon which he was engaged was his Triumph of Life, a poem in the terza rima of the Divine Comedy. It breaks off abruptly—it is peculiarly interesting to note—with the significant words, “Then what is Life, I cried?”
The manner of his death is well known. While engaged in his usual recreation of boating he was drowned in the bay of Spezia. His body was washed on to the shore and, according to regulations then in force by the Italian governments of the day, in guarding against possible infection from the plague, it was burned where it lay, in presence of his friends Byron and Trelawney, and the ashes were entombed in the Protestant cemetery in Rome—a not unfitting disposal of the remains of one the most spiritualised of human beings.
The following just estimate of the character of his genius and writings, by a thoughtful critic, is worth reproduction here:—“No man was more essentially a poet—‘glancing from earth to heaven.’ He was, indeed, ‘of imagination all compact.’ ... In all his poems he uniformly denounces vice and immorality in every form; and his descriptions of love, which are numerous, are always refined and delicate, with even less of sensuousness than in many of our most admired writers. It is true that he decried marriage, but not in favour of libertinism; and the evils he depicts, or laments, are those arising from the indissolubility of the bond, or from the opinions of society as to its necessity—opinions to which he himself submitted by marrying the woman to whom he was attached.... His reputation as a poet has gradually widened since his death, and has not yet reached its culminating point. He was the poet of the future—of an ideal futurity—and hence it was that his own age could not entirely sympathise with him. He has been called the ‘poet of poets,’ a proud title, and, in some respects, deserved.”[242]
Of his creed, the article which he most firmly held, and which, perhaps, most distinguishes him from ordinary thinkers, was the Perfectibility of his species, and his firm faith in the ultimate triumph of Good. “He believed,” says the one authority who had the best means of knowing his thought and feeling, “that mankind had only to will that there should be no evil, and there would be none. It is not my part in these notes to criticise the arguments that have been urged against this opinion, but to mention the fact that he entertained it, and was, indeed, attached to it with fervent enthusiasm. That man could be so perfectionised as to be able to expel Evil from his own nature, and from the greater part of the world, was the cardinal point of his system. And the subject he liked best to dwell upon was the image of One warring with an evil principle, oppressed not only by it but by all, even the good, who were deluded into considering evil a necessary portion of humanity—a victim full of gratitude and of hope and of the spirit of triumph emanating from a reliance in the ultimate omnipotence of Good.” Such was the conviction which inspired his greatest poem The Prometheus Unbound.
A principal charm of his poetry is that which repels the common class of readers: “He loved to idealise reality, and this is a task shared by few. We are willing to have our passing whims exalted into passions, for this gratifies our vanity. But few of us understand or sympathise with the endeavour to ally the love of abstract beauty and adoration of abstract Good with sympathies with our own kind.”[243] Of so rare a spirit it is peculiarly interesting to know something of the outward form:—
“His features [describes one of his biographers] were not symmetrical—the mouth, perhaps, excepted. Yet the effect of the whole was extremely powerful. They breathed an animation, a fire, an enthusiasm, a vivid and preternatural intelligence, that I never met with in any other countenance. Nor was the moral expression less beautiful than the intellectual: for there was a softness, a delicacy, a gentleness, and especially (though this will surprise many) that air of profound religious veneration that characterises the best works, and chiefly the frescoes, of the great Masters of Florence and of Rome.