"Kind thoughts, and mighty hopes, and gentle deeds
Abound for fearless love, and the pure law
Of mild equality and peace succeeds
To faiths which long had held the world in awe,
Bloody, and false, and cold: as whirlpools draw
All wrecks of ocean to their chasm, the sway
Of thy strong genius, Laon, which foresaw
This hope, compels all spirits to obey,
Which round thy secret strength now throng in wide array."
This extraordinary man, and most purely poetic genius of his age—this great and fearless, and yet benign apostle of freedom, whose influence on succeeding ages it is impossible to calculate, or calculating, perhaps, to overrate, mixed, it is true, with a skeptical leaven deeply to be deplored, was a descendant of a true poetic line, that of Sir Philip Sidney. He was born at Field Place, in Sussex, on the 4th of August, 1792. He was the eldest son of Sir Timothy Shelley, Bart., of Castle Goring in that county; and his son, Percy Florence Shelley, now bears the family title. His family connections belonged to the Whig aristocrats of the House of Commons; and Mr. Hunt has, in the circumstances of such birth and connection, hit, perhaps, upon the fact which solves the mystery of a mind like Shelley's rushing into the extreme course he did. "To a man of genius," he observes, "endowed with a metaphysical acuteness to discern truth and falsehood, and a strong sensibility to give way to his sense of it, such an origin, however respectable in the ordinary point of view, was not the very luckiest that could have happened for the purpose of keeping him within ordinary bounds. With what feelings is truth to open its eyes upon this world, among the most respectable of our mere party gentry? Among licensed contradictions of all sorts? Among the Christian's doctrines, and the worldly practices? Among fox-hunters and their chaplains? Among beneficed loungers, noli-episcoparian bishops, rakish old gentlemen, and more startling young ones, who are old in the folly of knowingness? In short, among all those professed demands of what is right and noble, mixed with real inculcations of what is wrong and full of hypocrisy? * * * Mr. Shelley began to think at a very early age, and to think, too, of these anomalies. He saw that at every step in life some compromise was expected between the truth which he was told he was not to violate, and a coloring and a double meaning of it, which forced him upon the violation."
This is, no doubt, the great secret of both the noble resolve of Shelley to burst at once loose from this conventional labyrinth, and of the length to which the impetus of his effort carried him. He saw that truth and falsehood were so intimately mixed in all the education, life, and purposes of the class by which he was surrounded, that he suspected the same mixture in every thing; and the very effort necessary to clear himself of this state of things, plunged him into the natural result of rejecting indiscriminately, in the case of Christianity, the grain with the chaff. At every school to which he was sent, he found the same system existing. Education was molded to a great national plan—to a future support of a church and a party. The noble heart of the boy rebelled against this sacrifice of truth to interest, and, I believe, at every school to which he went, showed a firm resolve never to bend to it. He was brought up for the first seven or eight years in the retirement of Field Place with his sisters, receiving the same education as they; and hence, it is stated, he never showed the least taste for the sports or amusements of boys. Captain Medwin tells us that it was not Eton, but Sion House, Brentford, to which he alludes in his introductory stanzas to the Revolt of Islam, where he says,
"There rose
From the near school-room voices that, alas!
Were but an echo from a world of woes,
The harsh and grating strife of tyrants and of foes."
Captain Medwin, who is a relative, was Shelley's schoolfellow there, and says, "this place was a perfect hell to Shelley. His pure and virgin mind was shocked by the language and manners of his new companions; but, though forced to be with them, he was not of them. Methinks I see him now, pacing with rapid strides a favorite and remote spot of the play-ground, generally alone, and where, he says, he formed these resolutions:
'To be wise,
And just, and free, and mild, if in me lies
Such power; for I grow weary to behold
The selfish and the strong still tyrannize
Without reproach or check.'
"Tyranny," continues Captain Medwin, "generally produces tyranny in common minds; not so with Shelley. Doubtless much of his hatred of oppression may be attributed to what he saw and suffered at this school; and so odious was the recollection of the place to both of us, that we never made it a subject of conversation in after life. He was, as a schoolboy, exceedingly shy, bashful, and reserved; indeed, though peculiarly gentle, and elegant, and refined in his manners, he never entirely got rid of his diffidence; and who would have wished he should? With the character of true genius, he was ever modest, humble, and prepared to acknowledge merit wherever he found it, without any desire to shine himself by making a foil of others."
Yet it was this gentle and shy boy, who had so early resolved to be "just, and free, and mild," that was roused by his sense of truth, and his abhorrence of oppression, to make the most bold and determined stand against unjust and degrading customs, however sanctioned by time, place, or persons. At Eton, whither he went at the age of thirteen, he rose up stoutly in opposition to the system of fagging. He organized a conspiracy against it, and for a time compelled it to pause. While thus resisting school tyranny, he was reading deeply of German romances and poetry; and to Bürger's Leonora, and the ghost stories and legends of the Black Forest, has been traced his fondness for the romantic, the marvelous, and the mystic. His mind was rapidly unfolding, and to the high pitch of his moral nature and aims, these stanzas from the Dedication to the Revolt of Islam bear touching testimony:
"Thoughts of great deeds were mine, dear friend, when first
The clouds that wrap this world from youth did pass.
I do remember well the hour which burst
My spirit's sleep: a fresh May-day it was
When I walked forth upon the glittering grass,
And wept, I knew not why; until there rose
From the near school-room voices that, alas!
Were but an echo from a world of woes,
The harsh and grating strife of tyrants and of foes.
"And then I clasped my hands, and looked around—
But none was near to mark my streaming eyes,
Which poured their warm drops on the sunny ground.
So without shame I spoke, 'I will be wise,
And just, and free, and mild, if in me lies
Such power; for I grow weary to behold
The selfish and the strong still tyrannize
Without reproach or check.' I then controlled
My tears; my heart grew calm, and I was meek and bold.