In the shipwreck of his life there rises, as in Don Juan, "the bubbling cry Of some strong swimmer in his agony." It must be admitted that Byron was always an imagebreaker; he was strong only in destruction; he had no hopeful theory. "When he thinks," said Goethe, "he is a child." Byron himself wrote in 1813: "I have simplified my politics into an utter detestation of all existing governments." But his defiance, it must be remembered, was at its best splendidly sincere, full of "imperishable strength," and the images he shattered were often idols of Baal. "To tell him not to fight," says Professor Nichol, "was like telling Wordsworth not to reflect, or Shelley not to sing." In his nobler moments and at what he finally achieved, Byron was the better self of his heroes: Harold, Don Juan, Cain, Manfred, Bonnivard - the "Eternal spirit of the chainless mind." His friend Shelley, who understood what was best in him, called him "the Pilgrim of Eternity." PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY "MAD SHELLEY," "the immortal child," "a creature of impetuous breath," "a beautiful and ineffectual angel," these are some of the epithets that have been applied to Shelley. And in them lies what is most striking in his personality: his visionary idealism, his ingenuous earnestness, his passionate love of beauty and truth, his high ethereal spirit, unconscious of bodily existence. He described himself as "A pardlike spirit beautiful and swift." His poetry is similarly individual; it has been called a "lyrical cry." He himself is his "Cloud," who sings, "I bind the sun's throne with a burning zone, And the moon's with a girdle of pearl ; The volcanoes are dim and the stars reel and swim, He himself is the leaf borne along the "Wild West Wind;" he is his "Skylark" - an "unbodied joy". "In the golden lightning Of the sunken sun." It is the coursers of his own Promethean mind who are "wont to respire' "On the brink of the night and the morning," and to drink of "the whirlwind's stream." On August 4, 1792, Percy Bysshe Shelley, the son of Sir Timothy Shelley and Elizabeth Pilfold, was born at Field Place, near Horsham, in Sussex. His father, a stanch Whig in the House of Commons, was fairly obsessed by conventional respectability and a commonplace belief in tradition — qualities which must have early provoked the opposition of his meteor-spirited son. Shelley's mother left the boy an inheritance of her great beauty; the immediate attention of all was attracted by his slender frame, deep blue eyes, ruddy complexion, and curling golden brown hair. This boyish appearance he retained all through life, even though his hair turned prematurely gray. Trelawny describes him at their first meeting, only two years before Shelley's death, as "blushing like a girl.” Shy, impulsive, and enthusiastic for studies not in the curriculum, Shelley did not get along well at school. After two years at Sion House Academy, Isleworth, he was sent, when twelve years old, to Eton. Among his fellows he was conspicuously abnormal. He delighted not in their sports, his shyness precluded companionship except with one or two, and his independent nature rebelled openly against the system of fagging. "Mad Shelley," the boys dubbed him; he was "surrounded," says one of his schoolfellows, "hooted, baited like a maddened bull." Yet he was preparing himself in his own way — by private reading and experiments in science, forbidden as a dangerous study for the young. One of his experiments was to set fire with a burningglass to a valued old oak. There are some lines in the Revolt of Islam descriptive of these Eton days - lines ringing with Miltonic prophecy of his high calling: "And from that hour did I with earnest thought Shelley's literary efforts began early. In childhood he scribbled verses with fluency, and he delighted in amusing his sisters with strange tales or in leading them through imaginary romantic escapades. His first published book was the novel Zastrozzi, an extravagant reflection of the wild romances he had been reading, especially those of Mrs. Radcliffe and Godwin. Zastrozzi came out just before he left Eton and was followed in the fall of the same year (1810) by a similar romance, St. Irvyne or the Rosicrucian. The Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire was another work of that year. From Eton Shelley went to University College, Oxford, in 1810. Of his short life there a most interesting account is given by his constant companion, Thomas Jefferson Hogg. The two were thrown together the first night at supper, continued their discourses in Hogg's room, and became forthwith inseparable. In Shelley's rooms, where they usually took supper, everything was in confusion: retorts supported by costly books, beakers used alternately for tea and aqua regia, stains on furniture and carpet and in the midst of it Percy Bysshe Shelley, radiant, transfigured with enthusiasm, discussing vehemently in his shrill voice the wonders of science or the perfectibility of man. Hogg's account is full of Shelley's peculiarities- eccentricities which have become familiar to all: how he stepped on his hands when going upstairs; how he read as he walked, whether in the country or the crowded streets of London; how he slept after supper on the hearth-rug, with his little round head exposed to the heat of a blazing fire; how, in spite of his occasional awkwardness, "he would often glide without collision through a crowded assembly." Byron compared him to a snake- an animal which always had a strange fascination for Shelley. But Hogg saw beyond the eccentricities: he has dwelt lovingly on Shelley's generosity and quick sympathy, on his nobility of character and veneration for true greatness. was. Hogg's testimony, moreover, is of the greater value because it throws light on Shelley's atheism. The dread word atheist is so apt to inspire, even to-day, the horror which bristled in the hearts of the Oxford powers that it is necessary to see just what kind of atheist Shelley "I never could discern in him any more than two fixed principles," says Hogg. "The first was a strong irrepressible love of liberty; of liberty in the abstract. . . The second was an equally ardent love of toleration of all opinions, but more especially of religious opinions. He felt an intense abhorrence of persecution of every kind, public or private." Add to this the further testimony: "Shelley was actually offended at a coarse or awkward jest, especially if it were immodest or uncleanly." And as a third consideration: "In no individual, perhaps, was the moral sense ever more completely developed than in Shelley." His atheism, then, was not a blind revolt of immorality against traditions and customs, as some have thought; it was the philosophy of a man who, inspired by the French Revolution, set up Reason as his guide. He had indeed a profound reverence for the divine spirit of "nature," or of "necessity," the very devotion to which, he would have put it, forbade his using for it the name of God, a word associated through many centuries with the tyranny and bigotry and sordid selfishness of the church. For the personality of Christ he had a deep veneration; for the authority of dogmatic Christianity, for institutionalism, |