In Europe the fame of Shelley has risen superior to the clouds that darkened its earlier days, hiding his true image from his fellow-men, and from his own sad eyes oftentimes the common light of day. As a thinker, men have learned to pardon what they consider errors in opinion for the sake of singular nobleness, purity, and love in his main tendency or spirit. As a poet, the many faults of his works having been acknowledged, there are room and place to admire his far more numerous and exquisite beauties.
The heart of the man, few, who have hearts of their own, refuse to reverence, and many, even of devoutest Christians, would not refuse the book which contains Queen Mab as a Christmas gift. For it has been recognized that the founder of the Christian church would have suffered one to come unto him, who was in faith and love so truly what he sought in a disciple, without regard to the form his doctrine assumed.
The qualities of his poetry have often been analyzed, and the severer critics, impatient of his exuberance, or unable to use their accustomed spectacles in the golden mist that broods over all he has done, deny him high honors; but the soul of aspiring youth, untrammelled by the canons of taste, and untamed by scholarly discipline, swells into rapture at his lyric sweetness, finds ambrosial refreshment from his plenteous fancies, catches fire at his daring thought, and melts into boundless weeping at his tender sadness—the sadness of a soul betrothed to an ideal unattainable in this present sphere.
For ourselves, we dispute not with the doctrinaires or the critics. We cannot speak dispassionately of an influence that has been so dear to us. Nearer than the nearest companions of life actual has Shelley been to us. Many other great ones have shone upon us, and all who ever did so shine are still resplendent in our firmament, for our mental life has not been broken and contradictory, but thus far we "see what we foresaw." But Shelley seemed to us an incarnation of what was sought in the sympathies and desires of instinctive life, a light of dawn, and a foreshowing of the weather of this day.
When still in childish years, the "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" fell in our way. In a green meadow, skirted by a rich wood, watered by a lovely rivulet, made picturesque by a mill a little farther down, sat a party of young persons gayer than, and almost as inventive, as those that told the tales recorded by Boccaccio. They were passing a few days in a scene of deep seclusion, there uncared for by tutor or duenna, and with no bar of routine to check the pranks of their gay, childish fancies. Every day they assumed parts which through the waking hours must be acted out. One day it was the characters in one of Richardson's novels; and most solemnly we "my deared" each other with richest brocade of affability, and interchanged in long, stiff phrase our sentimental secrets and prim opinions. But to-day we sought relief in personating birds or insects; and now it was the Libellula who, tired of wild flitting and darting, rested on the grassy bank and read aloud the "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty," torn by chance from the leaf of a foreign magazine.
It was one of those chances which we ever remember as the interposition of some good angel in our fate. Solemn tears marked the change of mood in our little party and with the words
"Have I not kept my vow?"
began a chain of thoughts whose golden links still bind the years together.
Two or three years passed. The frosty Christmas season came; the trees cracked with their splendid burden of ice, the old wooden country house was banked up with high drifts of the beautiful snow, and the Libellula became the owner of Shelley's Poems. It was her Christmas gift, and for three days and three nights she ceased not to extract its sweets; and how familiar still in memory every object seen from the chair in which she sat enchanted during those three days, memorable to her as those of July to the French nation! The fire, the position of the lamp, the variegated shadows of that alcoved room, the bright stars up to which she looked with such a feeling of congeniality from the contemplation of this starry soul,—O, could but a De Quincey describe those days in which the bridge between the real and ideal rose unbroken! He would not do it, though, as Suspiria de Profundis, but as sighs of joy upon the mountain height.