Chapter XX: Part 20

The poets and Mrs. Shelley were constantly together, out in the air amid that sublime scenery in fine weather, and in the evenings at each other's houses; and during a week of rain, they horrified themselves with German ghost-stories, and gave a mutual challenge to write each one of their own. To this we owe the Vampire, which was, on its first appearance, attributed to Lord Byron, but was, in reality, written by his vain satellite of a physician, Polidori. Byron wrote a story called The Marriage of Belphegor, which was to narrate the circumstances of his own--as he was now smarting under a recent refusal of his wife to live with him; but on hearing from England that Lady Byron was ill, with an impulse that did him honor, he thrust it into the fire. What Shelley did does not appear, but the production of Mrs. Shelley was Frankenstein.

On his return to England in the autumn of that year, he had to endure the misery of his two children being taken from him by the Court of Chancery, on the ground of his disbelief of revealed religion, and the authorship of Queen Mab, a work published without his consent. It was at this period that he went to live at Great Marlowe, in Buckinghamshire. Mrs. Shelley says, "Shelley's choice of abode was fixed chiefly by this town being at no great distance from London, and its neighborhood to the Thames. The poem of the Revolt of Islam was written in his boat, as it floated under the beech groves of Bisham, or during wanderings in the neighboring country, which is distinguished for its peculiar beauty. The chalk-hills break into cliffs that overhang the Thames, or form valleys clothed with beech. The wilder portion of the country is rendered beautiful by exuberant vegetation, and the cultivated part is particularly fertile. With all this wealth of nature, which, either in the form of gentlemen's parks, or soil dedicated to agriculture, flourishes around, Marlowe was inhabited--I hope it is altered now--by a very poor population. The women are lace-makers, and lose their health by sedentary labor, for which they are very ill paid. The poor-laws ground to the dust not only the paupers, but those who had risen just above that state, and were obliged to pay poor-rates. The change produced by peace following a long war, and a bad harvest, brought with them the most heart-rending evils to the poor. Shelley afforded what alleviation he could. In winter, while bringing out his poem, he had a severe attack of ophthalmia, caught while visiting the cottages. I mention these things--for this minute and active sympathy with his fellow-creatures gives a thousandfold interest to his speculations, and stamps with reality his pleadings for the human race."

Shelley does not seem to have had any acquaintance at Marlowe or in the neighborhood; it was simply the charm of the country and the river which attracted him; but his friend Mr. Peacock, of the India House, was residing there at the time, either drawn there by Shelley, or Shelley by him. Marlowe stands in a fine open valley, on the banks of the Thames. The river here is beautiful, running bankful through the most beautiful meadows, level as a bowling green, of the richest verdure, and of a fine, ample, airy extent. Beyond the river these meadows are bounded by steep hills clothed with noble woods, and a more charming scene for boating can not be imagined. The grass and flowers on the river margin overhang and dip lovingly into the waters, which, from running over a chalk bottom, are as transparent nearly as the air itself; and at the various turns of the river new features of beauty salute you. Impending woods, which invite you to land and stroll away into them; solitary valleys, where house or man is not seen; and then, again, cultivated farms, and hills covered with flocks. No wonder that Shelley was all summer floating upon this fine river, and luxuriating in the composition of his splendid poem. A little below the town stands the village of Little Marlowe, with its gray church, and old manor-house, called Bisham Abbey, amid its fine trees; and around, a lovely scene of the softly flowing, beautiful river, the level meads, and the hills and woods. On the other side of the town, the country is of that clear, bright aspect, with its tillage farms and isolated clumps of beech on swelling hills, which always marks a chalk district. The town itself is small, and intensely quiet. The houses are low and clean-looking, as if no smoke ever fell on them from the pure diaphanous air. It consists of three principal streets, something in the shape of the letter T, with some smaller ones. In passing along it, you would not suspect it of that intense poverty which Mrs. Shelley speaks of, though, from the wretched depression of the hand-lace weaving, it may exist. The houses have a neat miniature look, and the people look cheerful, healthy, and the women of a very agreeable expression of countenance.

Such was the spot where Shelley resided eight-and-twenty years ago. His house was in the main street--a long stuccoed dwelling, of that species of nondescript architecture which once was thought Gothic, because it had pointed windows and battlements. It must have been then a spacious and a very pleasant residence. It is now, as is the lot of most places in which poets have lived, desolated and desecrated. It is divided into three tenements, a school, a private house, and a pot-house. I entered the latter, and with a strange feeling. In a large room with a boarded floor, and which had probably been Shelley's dining-room, was a sort of bar partitioned off, and a number of visitors were drinking on benches along the walls, which still bore traces, amid disfigurement and stains, of former taste. The garden behind had evidently been extensive, and very pleasant. There were remains of fine evergreen trees, and of a mound on which grew some deciduous cypresses, where had evidently stood a summer-house. This was gone. The garden was divided into as many portions as there were now tenants, and all evidences of care had vanished from it. Along the side of it, however, lay a fine open meadow, and the eye ran across this to some sweetly wooded hills. It was a melancholy thing to go back to the time when Shelley and his wife and friends walked in this garden, enjoying it and its surrounding quiet scenery, and to reflect what had been the subsequent fate of it and him.

Among the poor of the town the remembrance of his benevolence and unassuming kindness had still chroniclers; but from the other classes little could be learned, and that not what the memory of such a man deserves. One old shopkeeper, not far from his house, remembered him, and "hoped his children did not take after him." "Why?" "Oh! he was a very bad man!" "Indeed! what bad actions did he do?" "Oh! I beg your pardon! he did no bad actions that I ever heard of, but, on the contrary, he was uncommonly good to the poor; but then--" "But then, what?" "Why, he did not believe in the devil!" Such are the fruits of bigot teaching. Christ says, "By their _fruits_ shall ye know" men; but those calling themselves his followers say, "No;" no matter what good fruits men produce, they are all doomed to perdition if they cast a single aspersion on that very favorite personage, Satan. I begged the poor man, of whom I found Shelley bought no groceries, to at least leave Shelley to the judgment of his God and of Christ, who came to seek and to save all that were lost; and to believe those great assurances of the Gospel, that the prodigal, when he had committed all kind of crimes, found not only a pacified, but a fond father; that he that hath not charity is as sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal; and that he that loveth intensely, though he may think very erroneously, will stand a very fair chance with the Father of love himself.

"But, pray, what has become of this Mr. Shelley, then?" asked the man's wife, who had come from an inner room. "He was drowned," I replied. "Oh! that's just what one might have expected. Drowned! Lud-a-mercy! ay, just what we might ha' said he'd come to. He was always on the water, always boating, boating--never easy but when he was in that boat. Do you know what a trick was played him by some wag?" "No." "He called his boat '_Vaga_,' and one morning he found the name lengthened by a piece of chalk with the word '_bond_'--_Vagabond_. There are clever fellows here as well as in London, mind you. But Mr. Shelley was not offended. He only laughed; for, you see, he did not believe in a devil, and so he thought there could be nothing wrong. He used to say, when he heard of any wickedness, 'Ah, poor people! it's only ignorance; if they knew better, they'd do better!' Oh! what darkness and heathenry! to excuse sin, and feel no godly jealousy against wickedness!" I found that the crabbed creedsman had been there too long before me. My hint about charity was thrown away, and I moved off, lest both myself and Jesus Christ, who would not condemn even the adulteress at the desire of the vengeful and the sensual, should be found wanting in holy indignation too.

It was in vain that I inquired among the class of little gentry in the place for information about Shelley; they knew nothing of any such person. At length, after much research, and the running to and fro of waiters from the inn, I was directed to an ancient surgeon, who had attended almost every body for the last half century. I found him an old man of nearly ninety. He recollected Shelley; had attended him, but knew little about him. He was a very unsocial man, he said; kept no company but Mr. Peacock's, and that of his boat, and was never seen in the town but he had a book in his hand, and was reading as he went along. The old gentleman, however, kindly sent his servant to point out Shelley's house to me, and as I returned up the street, I saw him standing bare-headed on the pavement before his door, in active discourse with various neighbors. My inquiries had evidently aroused the Marlowean curiosity. On coming up, the old gentleman inquired eagerly if I wanted to learn more yet about Mr. Shelley--I had learned little or nothing. I replied that I should be very happy. "Then," said he, "come in, sir, for I have sent for a gentleman who knows all about him." I entered, and found a tall, well-dressed man, with a very solemn aspect. "It is the squire of the place," said I to myself. With a very solemn bow he arose, and with very solemn bows we sat down opposite to each other. "I am happy to hear," said I, "that you knew Mr. Shelley, and can give me some particulars regarding his residence here." "I can, sir," he replied, with another solemn bow. I waited to hear news, but I waited in vain. That Mr. Shelley had lived there, and that he had long left there, and that his house was down the street, and that he was a very extraordinary man, he knew, and I knew; but that was all: not a word of his doings or his sayings at Marlowe came out of the solemn brain of that large, solemn man. But at length a degree of interest appeared to gather in his cheeks and brighten in his eyes. "Thank God!" I exclaimed, inwardly. "The man is slow, but it is coming now." His mouth opened, and he said, "But pray, sir, what became of that Mr. Shelley?"

"Good gracious!" I exclaimed. "What! did you never hear? Did it never reach Marlowe--but thirty miles from London--that sad story of his death, which created a sensation throughout the civilized world?" No, the thing had never penetrated into the Boeotian denseness of that place! I rose up, and now bowed solemnly too. "And, pray, what family might he leave?" asked the solemn personage, as I was hasting away. "You will learn that," I said, still going away, "in the Baronetage, if such a book ever reaches Marlowe."

I hastened to the inn, where my chaise was standing ready for my departure, and was just in the act of entering it, when I heard a sort of outcry, perceived a sort of bustle behind me, and, turning my head, saw the tall and solemn man hasting with huge and anxious strides after me.

"You'll excuse me, sir--you'll excuse me, I think; but I _could_ relate to you a fact, and I think I _will_ venture to relate to you a fact connected with the late Mr. Shelley." "Do," said I. "I think I _will_," replied the tall, stout man, heaving a deep sigh, and erecting himself to his full height, far above my head, and casting a most awful glance at the sky; "I _think_ I will--I _think_ I may venture." "It is certainly something very sad and agonizing," I said to myself; "but I wish he would only bring it out." "Well, then," continued he, with another heave of his capacious chest, and another great glance at the distant horizon, "I certainly will mention it. It was this: When Mr. Shelley left Marlowe, he ordered all his bills to be paid, most honorably, certainly most honorably; and they were paid--all--except--mine! There, sir! it is out; excuse it--excuse it; but I am glad it is out."

"What! a bill!" I exclaimed, in profoundest astonishment; "a bill! was that all?"

"All, sir! all! every thing of the sort; every shilling, I assure you, has been paid but my little account; and it was my fault; I don't know how in the world I forgot to send it in."

"What!" said I, "are you not the squire here? What are you?"

"Oh, Lord! no, sir! I am no squire here! I am a tradesman! I am--in the general way!"

"Drive on!" I said, springing into the carriage; "drive like the Dragon of Wantley out of this place: Shelley is remembered in Marlowe because there was one bill left unpaid!"

There again is fame. It would be a curious thing if the man who deems himself most thoroughly and universally famous, and walks about in the comfortable persuasion of it, could see his fame mapped upon the country. What an odd figure it would make! A few feeble rays shooting here and there, but all around what vast patches of unvisited country, what unilluminated regions, what deserts of oblivion of his name! Shelley lived, and suffered, and spent himself for mankind; and, in the place where he last lived in England, within thirty miles of the great metropolis of genius and knowledge, he is only remembered by a bad joke on his boat, by his disbelief of the devil, and by a forgotten bill. Were it not forgotten, he had been so! _Eheu! jam satis._

On the 12th of March, 1818, Shelley quitted England once more. He was never to return. His own fate and that of Byron were wonderfully alike. The two greatest, most original, most powerful, and influential poets of the age were driven into exile by the public feeling of their country. They could not bring themselves to think on political questions with a large party, nor on religious ones with a still larger; and every species of vituperation and insult was let loose upon them. As if charity and forbearance had been heathen qualities, and wrath and calumny Christian virtues, the British public most loftily resolved not to do as Christ required them--to love those who hated them and despitefully used them--but to hate those who loved them, and had noble virtues, though they had their errors. Their errors should have been lamented, and their doctrines refuted as much as possible; but there is no law, human or divine, that can release us from the law of love, and the command of seventy times seven forgiveness of injuries. Both these great men died in their exile of hatred; the world had its will for the time, and the spirits of these dead outcasts must now have their will, in their deathless volumes, to the end of time.

If any one would know what sort of a man this moral monster, Shelley, was, let him read the eloquent account of him and his life at Oxford in the New Monthly Magazine for 1832, written by one who was his friend and companion, and who, Mrs. Shelley says, has described him most faithfully. There we find him full of zeal for learning; most zealous in accumulating knowledge; overflowing in kindness; indignant against all oppression to man or to animals. Never failing to rush in on witnessing any cruelty or hearing of any calamity, to stop the one and alleviate the other. Full of gayety and fun as a child, sailing his paper boats on every pool and stream, or rambling far and wide over the country in earnest talk and deep love of all nature. He was ready to caress children, to smile on even gipsies and beggars, to run for refreshment for starving people by the way side, pledging even his favorite microscope, his daily means of recreation, to assist a poor old man. Such was the dreadful creature that must be expelled from colleges, have his children torn from him to prevent the contamination of his virtues, and to be hooted out of his native land. Yet, amid all the anguish that this inflicted on him, he was ever ready still to do a sublime good, or enter with the most boyish relish into the merest joke. Nothing can convey a more vivid idea of the latter disposition--which is not that of a man systematically malicious, which is the true spirit of wickedness--than to quote a joke related to him by the writer of these articles, and see the manner in which it was enjoyed.

"I was walking one afternoon, in the summer, on the western side of that short street leading from Long Acre to Covent Garden, where the passenger is earnestly invited, as a personal favor to the demandant, to proceed straightway to Highgate or Kentish Town, and which is called, I think, James-street. I was about to enter Covent Garden, when an Irish laborer, whom I met bearing an empty hod, accosted me somewhat roughly, and asked why I had run against him. I told him briefly that he was mistaken. Whether somebody had actually pushed the man, or he only sought to quarrel, and although he, doubtless, attended a weekly row regularly, and the week was already drawing to a close, he was unable to wait till Sunday for a broken head, I know not, but he discoursed for some time with the vehemence of a man who considers himself injured or insulted, and he concluded, being emboldened by my long silence, with a cordial invitation just to push him again. Several persons, not very unlike in costume, had gathered round him, and appeared to regard him with sympathy. When he paused, I addressed him slowly and quietly, and it should seem with great gravity, these words, as nearly as I can recollect them: 'I have put my hand into the hamper; I have looked upon the sacred barley; I have eaten out of the drum! I have drunk, and was well pleased; I have said, [Greek: konx ompax], and it is finished!' 'Have you, sir?' inquired the astonished Irishman; and his ragged friends instantly pressed round him with, 'Where is the hamper, Paddy?' 'What barley? and the like. And ladies from his own country, that is to say, the basket-women, suddenly began to interrogate him; 'Now, I say, Pat, where have you been drinking? What have you had?' I turned, therefore, to the right, leaving the astounded neophyte, whom I had thus planted, to expound the mystic words of initiation as he could to his inquisitive companions. As I walked slowly under the piazzas, and through the streets and courts toward the West, I marveled at the ingenuity of Orpheus--if he were, indeed, the inventor of the Eleusinian mysteries; that he was able to devise words that, imperfectly as I had repeated them, and in the tattered fragment that has reached us, were able to soothe people so savage and barbarous as those to whom I had addressed them, and which, as the apologists for those venerable rites affirm, were manifestly well adapted to incite persons who hear them for the first time, however rude they may be, to ask questions. Words that can awaken curiosity even in the sluggish intellect of a wild man, and can open the inlet of knowledge!"

"_Konx ompax_; and it is finished!" exclaimed Shelley, crowing with enthusiastic delight at my whimsical adventure. A thousand times, as he strode about the house, and in his rambles out of doors, he would stop and repeat the mystic words of initiation, but always with an energy of manner, and a vehemence of tone and gesture, that would have prevented the ready acceptance which a calm, passionless delivery had once procured for them. How often would he throw down his book, clasp his hands, and, starting from his seat, cry suddenly, with a thrilling voice, "I have said _Konx ompax_; and it is finished!"

This child-like, this great, and greatly kind, and if men would have let him, this light-hearted man, thus then quitted England. Like Byron, he sought a home in Italy. He lived in various cities, and wrote there his very finest works; among them, Prometheus Unbound; The Cenci; Hellas; part of Rosalind and Helen; his Ode to Liberty, perhaps the very finest ode in the language, and certainly, in its description of Athens, never excelled in any piece of description in any language; Adonais, an elegy on the death of Keats, and those very melancholy verses written in the Bay of Naples. He was drowned, as is well known, by the sinking of his boat in a squall, in the Gulf of Spezia, in the summer of 1822, at the age of thirty.

Shelley must have enjoyed this portion of his life beyond all others, had he been in health and spirits. He was united to a woman worthy of him, and who could partake of all his intellectual pleasures. Children were growing around him, and he was living in that beautiful country, surrounded by the remains of former art and history, and under that fine sky, pouring out from heart and brain, glorious, and impassioned, and immortal works. But his health failed him, and the darts of calumny were rankling in his bosom, depressing his spirits, and sapping his constitution. I can only allow myself a few passing glances at his homes in Italy, of which Mrs. Shelley has given us such delightful sketches in the notes to her edition of her husband's poems.

They went direct to Milan, and visited the Lake of Como; then proceeding to Pisa, Leghorn, the Baths of Lucca, Venice, Este, Rome, Naples, and back to Rome for the winter. There he chiefly wrote his Prometheus. In 1818 they were at the Baths of Lucca, where Shelley finished Rosalind and Helen. Thence he visited Venice, and occupied a house lent him by Lord Byron at Este. "I Capucini was a villa built on the site of a Capuchin convent, demolished when the French suppressed religious houses. It was situated on the very overhanging brow of a low hill, at the foot of a range of higher ones. The house was cheerful and pleasant; a vine-trellised walk, or pergola, as it is called in Italian, led from the hall door to a summer-house at the end of the garden, which Shelley made his study, and in which he began the Prometheus; and here, also, as he mentioned in a letter, he wrote Julian and Maddalo. A slight ravine, with a wood in its depth, divided the garden from the hill, on which stood the ruins of the ancient Castle of Este, whose dark, massive wall gave forth an echo, and from whose ivied crevices owls and bats flitted forth at night, as the crescent moon sunk behind the black and heavy battlements. We looked from the garden over the wide plain of Lombardy, bounded to the west by the far Apennines; while to the east, the horizon was lost in misty distance. After the picturesque but limited view of mountain, ravine, and chestnut wood at the Baths of Lucca, there was something infinitely gratifying to the eye in the wide range of prospect commanded by our new abode."

Here they lost a little girl, and quitting the neighborhood of Venice, they proceeded southward. Shelley was delighted beyond expression with the scenery and antiquities of Italy. "The aspect of its nature, its sunny sky, its majestic streams; the luxuriant vegetation of the country, and the noble, marble-built cities, enchanted him. The first entrance to Rome opened to him a scene of remains of ancient grandeur that far surpassed his expectations; and the unspeakable beauty of Naples and its environs added to the impression he received of the transcendent and glorious beauty of Italy."

The winter was spent at Naples, where they lived in utter solitude, yet greatly enjoyed their excursions along its sunny sea or into its beautiful environs. From Naples they returned to Rome, where they arrived in March, 1819. Here they had the old MS. account of the story of the Cenci put into their hands, and visited the Doria and Colonna palaces, where the portraits of Beatrice were to be found. Her beauty cast the reflection of its grace over her appalling story, and Shelley conceived the subject of his masterly drama. In Rome they lost their eldest child, a very lovely and engaging boy, and, quitting the Eternal City, took the villa Valsovano, between Leghorn and Monte Nero, where they resided during the summer. "Our villa," says Mrs. Shelley, "was situated in the midst of a podere; the peasants sang as they worked beneath our windows, during the heat of a very hot season; and in the evening the water-wheel creaked as the progress of irrigation went on, and the fire-flies flashed among the myrtle hedges; nature was bright, sunshiny, and cheerful, or diversified by storms of a majestic terror, such as we had never before witnessed.

"At the top of the house there was a sort of terrace. There is often such in Italy, generally roofed. This one was very small, yet not only roofed, but glazed. This Shelley made his study; it looked out on a wide prospect of fertile country, and commanded a view of the near sea. The storms that sometimes varied our day, showed themselves most picturesquely as they were driven across the ocean. Sometimes the dark, lurid clouds dipped toward the waves, and became water-spouts, that churned up the waters beneath as they were chased onward, and scattered by the tempest. At other times the dazzling sunlight and heat made it almost intolerable to every other; but Shelley basked in both, and his health and spirits revived under their influence. In this airy cell he wrote the principal part of the Cenci."

They spent part of the year 1819 in Florence, where Shelley passed several hours dayly in the Gallery, studying the works of art, and making notes. The summer of 1820 was spent chiefly at the Baths of Guiliano, near Pisa, where Shelley made a solitary journey on foot during some of the hottest weather of the season to the summit of Monte San Pelegrino, a mountain on which stands a pilgrimage chapel, much frequented; and during this expedition he conceived the idea of The Witch of Atlas, and immediately on his return sat down and wrote it in three days. An overflowing of the Serchio inundated the house, and caused them to quit San Guiliano: they returned to Pisa.

In 1821, the Spanish Revolution excited throughout Italy a similar spirit. In Naples, Genoa, Piedmont, almost every where, the spirit of revolt showed itself; and Shelley, still at Pisa, sympathized enthusiastically with these movements. Then came the news of the Greek insurrection, and the battle of Navarino, which put the climax to his joy; and in this exultation he wrote Hellas. These circumstances seem to have given a new life to him. He had now his new boat, and was sailing it on the Arno. It was a pleasant summer, says Mrs. Shelley, bright in all but Shelley's health; yet he enjoyed himself greatly. He was in high anticipation of the arrival of Leigh Hunt; and at this juncture, the now happy poet and his family made their last remove. Let us give the deeply interesting picture of Shelley's last home in the words of his gifted wife.

"The Bay of Spezia is of considerable extent, and is divided by a rocky promontory into a larger and a smaller one. The town of Lerici is situated on the eastern point, and in the depth of the smaller bay, which bears the name of this town, is the village of Sant Arenzo. Our house, Casa Magni, was close to this village; the sea came up to the door, a steep hill sheltered it behind. The proprietor of the estate was insane; he had begun to erect a large house at the summit of the hill behind, but his malady prevented its being finished, and it was falling into ruin. He had, and this, to the Italians, seemed a glaring symptom of decided madness, rooted up the olives on the hill-side, and planted forest trees. These were mostly young; but the plantation was more in English taste than I ever saw elsewhere in Italy. Some fine walnut and ilex trees intermingled their dark, massy foliage, and formed groups which still haunt my memory, as then they satiated the eye with a sense of loveliness. The scene was, indeed, of unimaginable beauty; the blue extent of waters, the almost land-locked bay, the near Castle of Lerici, shutting it in to the east, and distant Porto Venere to the west; the various forms of precipitous rocks that bound in the beach, near which there was only a winding, rugged path toward Lerici, and none on the other side; the tideless sea, leaving no sands nor shingle, formed a picture such as one sees in Salvator Rosa's landscapes only. Sometimes the sunshine vanished when the sirocco raged--the ponente, the wind was called on that shore. The gales and squalls that hailed our first arrival surrounded the bay with foam; the howling wind swept round our exposed house, and the sea roared unremittingly, so that we almost fancied ourselves on board ship. At other times sunshine and calm invested sea and sky, and the rich tints of Italian heaven bathed the scene in bright and ever-varying hues.

"The natives were wilder than the place. Our near neighbors, of Sant Arenzo, were more like savages than any people I ever before lived among. Many a night they passed on the beach, singing, or, rather, howling; the women dancing about among the waves that broke at their feet, the men leaning against the rocks, and joining in their loud, wild chorus. We could get no provisions nearer than Sarzana, at a distance of three miles and a half off, with the torrent of the Margra between; and even there the supply was deficient. Had we been wrecked on an island of the South Seas, we could scarcely have felt ourselves further from civilization and comfort; but where the sun shines, the latter becomes an unnecessary luxury, and we had enough society among ourselves. Yet, I confess, housekeeping became rather a toilsome task, especially as I was suffering in my health, and could not exert myself actively."

To this wild region they had come to indulge Shelley's passion for boating. News came of Leigh Hunt having arrived at Pisa. Shelley, and his friend Captain Ellerker Williams, set out to welcome him, and were on their return to Lerici when the fatal squall came on, and they went down in a moment. The particulars of that event, and the singular scene of the burning of the body by his friends, Byron, Hunt, Trelawney, and Captain Shenley, have been so vividly related by Mr. Hunt as to be familiar to every one. Shelley had gone down with the last volume of Keats, the Lamia, &c., in his jacket pocket, where it was found open. The bodies came on shore near Via Reggio, but had been so long in the sea as to be much decomposed. Wood was therefore collected on the strand, and they were burned in the old classical style. The magnificent Bay of Spezia, says Mr. Hunt, is on the right of this spot, Leghorn on the left, at equal distances of about twenty-two miles. The headlands projecting boldly and far into the sea, form a deep and dangerous gulf, with a heavy swell and a strong current generally running right into it.

So ended this extraordinary man his short, but eventful and influential life; and his ashes were buried near his friend John Keats, under a beautiful ruined tower in the English burial-ground at Rome. It was remarkable, that Shelley always said that no presentiment of evil ever came to him except as an unusual elevation of spirits. When he was last seen, just before his embarking for his return, he was said to be in most brilliant spirits. On the contrary, Mrs. Shelley says, "If ever shadow of evil darkened the present hour, such was over my mind when they went. During the whole of our stay at Lerici an intense presentiment of coming evil brooded over my mind, and covered this beautiful place and genial summer with the shadow of coming misery. * * A vague expectation of evil shook me to agony, and I could scarcely bring myself to let them go." The very beauty of the place, she says, seemed unearthly in its excess; the distance they were from all signs of civilization, the sea at their feet, its murmurings or its roarings forever in their ears, led the mind to brood over strange thoughts, and, lifting it from every-day life, caused it to be familiar with the unreal. "Shelley," she adds, "had now, as it seemed, almost anticipated his own destiny; and when the mind figures his skiff wrapped from sight by the thunder-storm, as it was last seen upon the purple sea, and then as the cloud of the tempest passed away, no sign remained of where it had been--who but will regard as a prophecy the last stanza of the Adonais?

'The breath, whose might I have invoked in song,
Descend upon me: my spirit's bark is driven
Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng,
Whose sails were never to the tempest given;
The massy earth and sphered skies are riven!
I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar;
While burning through the inmost veil of heaven,
The soul of Adonais, like a star,
Beacons from the abode where the eternal are.'"

LORD BYRON.

In The Rural Life of England, I have already recorded my visits to two of the most interesting haunts of Lord Byron--Newstead Abbey and Annesley Hall. In this paper we will take a more chronological and consecutive survey of his haunts and abodes.

Lord Byron was, it appears, born in London, in lodgings in Holles-street, as his mother was on her way from France to Scotland. His mother, whose history and ill-starred marriage are well known through Moore's life of the poet, had accompanied her husband to France soon after their marriage, to avoid the swarm of claimants on her property, the creditors of her dissipated husband, which that marriage had brought upon her. The Byrons, who had inherited the estate of Newstead, in Nottinghamshire, since the reign of Henry VIII., when it was granted to Sir John Byron, generally called The Little Sir John Byron, had distinguished themselves greatly in the civil wars, but had of late years been much more conspicuous for their poverty and eccentricity. Commodore Byron, whose name will always be remembered from the narrative of the sufferings of himself and crew, in consequence of the wreck of the Wager, and who was still better known by the name of "Foul-weather Jack," from the singular fact that he never put to sea, even when holding the rank of admiral, and in command of the fleet for the protection of the West Indies, without encountering the most tempestuous weather, was his grandfather. His father, Captain Byron, appears to have been one of the most unprincipled and dissipated men of his day. He ran off with the wife of Lord Carmarthen to the Continent; and this, of course, leading to a divorce, he married Lady Carmarthen, and had by her one daughter, the present Hon. Augusta Leigh, the wife of Colonel Leigh. Lady Carmarthen did not live long; and covered with debt, and pursued by hungry creditors, Captain Byron looked out for some woman of fortune to victimize to his own comfort. This species of legalized robbery, that is, of selecting a simple and unsuspecting woman to plunder under the sanction of the laws, instead of running the hazard of hanging or transportation by the more vulgar method of highway robbery, house-breaking, or forgery, is one so fashionable, that a man like Captain Byron was not likely to boggle at it. Of all species of theft, it is the most dastardly and despicable, because it is performed under the sacred name of affection. The vampire who means to suck the blood of the selected victim, makes his approach with flatteries and vows of the deepest attachment, of the most eternal tenderness, and protection from the ills of life. He wins the heart of the confiding woman by the basest lies, and then deliberately proceeds to the altar to pronounce before the all-seeing God the same falsehood, "to love and comfort," and "cherish till death," the helpless creature that is binding herself for life to ruin and deception. One would think it were enough for a man to feel, as he stands thus before God and man, that he is a mere seeker of creature comforts and worldly honor while he is wedding a rich wife; but knowingly to have picked out his prey under the pretense of loving her above all of her sex, in order to hand over her estate to his creditors, to defray the scores of his gambling and licentiousness, that characterizes a monster of so revolting a kind, that nothing but the gradual corruption of society through the medium of conventionalism could save him from the expatriating execrations of his fellows. There are cases of peculiar aggravation of this kind, those where the property of the victim is almost wholly demanded for the liquidation of the demon-lover's debts, and the wife is left to instantaneous beggary. The marriage of Captain Byron was one very much of this kind. His wife's most convertible property, as bank shares, salmon fisheries, money securities, were hastily disposed of; then went the timber from her estates, then the estates themselves, all amounting to probably £30,000, leaving her a mere annuity of £123! The property gone to this mite, the harpy husband still hung upon her, and upbraided her with the want of further means to contribute to his reckless riot. With cash extorted from her now severe poverty, he at length luckily departed again for the Continent, and died at Valenciennes in 1791, when Byron was three years old.

Such were the circumstances in which Lord Byron entered the world. If he were the prey of violent passions; if he, too, had a tendency to dissipation; if he, in future years, followed his father's example, though not to so culpable a degree, and married an heiress,

"And spoiled her goodly lands to gild his waste,"

there may be some excuse for him, drawn from hereditary taint. His father was not the solitary instance of irregularity, violent passions, and wastefulness. His great-uncle, to whose title and diminished property he succeeded, was of the like stamp. His violence had led to his wife's separation from him; he had killed his next neighbor, Mr. Chaworth, in a duel; he had shot his coachman; he had hewed down extensive plantations on his estate, with the avowed purpose of preventing his son's enjoyment of their profit, because he had offended him. This son, and also his grandson, died before him, and the wifeless and childless old lord had led a moody and solitary life in the decaying abbey of Newstead, which threatened to drop about his ears, feeding a heap of crickets on the hearth, and feared by the whole peasant population of the country round.

Such was the paternal lineage of Lord Byron; his maternal one, if more moral, was not the less fiery and volcanic. His mother, a little fat woman, was a woman of a most excitable temperament, an evil which no doubt was much aggravated by the outrage on her warm affections and trust in her husband, which the base object of his marriage with her revealed in all its blackness to her. She appeared all feeling and passion, with very little judgment to control them. She was fond to distraction of her child, and used to spoil him to the utmost extreme, at the same time that her passions occasionally broke out so impetuously against his freaks, that she would fling the tongs or poker at his head when a mere child.

At the age of eleven brought to England, and, with all this ancestral fire in him, introduced to the ruinous and gloomy abode of his forefathers, with the stories of their recent doings rife all around him, no wonder that on his peculiarly sensitive mind the impression became deep. He grew up a Byron in the eccentricity and other characteristics of his life; like his father, his morals were not very nice, his habits were not very temperate, he too married to repair the waste of his lands, and quitted his wife to live abroad, and die there a comparatively early death. Happily, there was implanted in him an ethereal principle, which gave a higher object to the exercise of his passions and energies than had of late distinguished his fathers. He was a born poet, and the divine gift of poetry converted, in some degree, his hereditary impetuosity into an ennobling instrument. His very dissipations extended his knowledge of life and human nature, and if they led him too frequently to seek to embellish sensuality, they compelled him to depict in the strongest terms that language can furnish, the disgust and remorse which inevitably pursue vice. He was a strange mixture of the poet and the man of the world; of the radical and the aristocrat; of the scoffer at creeds, and the worshiper of the Divine Being in the sublimity of his works. Well was it for him and the world that his early years were cast amid the beauty and the solitude of nature, where he could wander wholly abandoned to the influences of heath and mountain, river and forest; and that the prospect of aristocratic splendor did not come in to disturb those influences till they had acquired a life-long power over him. The grandeur of nature can not make a poet; thousands and millions live during their whole existences amid its most glorious displays, and are little more sentient than the rocks that tower around them; but where the spark of poetry lies latent, it is sure to call it forth.

They who ever visit, then, the earliest scenes of Lord Byron's life, will not be surprised at the influence which they exercised upon him, nor at the fondness with which he cherished the memory of them. This is strongly expressed in one of his juvenile poems.

LACHIN-Y-GAIR.

"Away, ye gay landscapes, ye gardens of roses!
In you let the minions of luxury rove;
Restore me the rocks, where the snow-flake reposes,
Though still they are sacred to freedom and love:
Yet, Caledonia, beloved are thy mountains,
Round their white summits though elements war;
Though cataracts foam 'stead of smooth-flowing fountains,
I sigh for the valley of dark Loch na Garr.

"Ah! there my young footsteps in infancy wandered;
My cap was the bonnet, my cloak was the plaid;
On chieftains long perished my memory pondered,
As daily I strode through the pine-covered glade:
I sought not my home till the day's dying glory
Gave place to the rays of the bright polar star;
For fancy was cheered by traditional story,
Disclosed by the natives of dark Loch na Garr."

_Hours of Idleness_, p. 111.

The feeling thus ardent in youth was equally vivid to the last. Only about two years before his death he wrote thus in The Island:

"He who first met the Highlands' swelling blue
Will love each peak that shows a kindred hue;
Hail in each crag a friend's familiar face,
And clasp the mountain in his mind's embrace.
Long have I roved through lands which are not mine,
Adored the Alp, and loved the Apennine;
Revered Parnassus, and beheld the steep
Jove's Ida, and Olympus crown the deep;
But 'twas not all long ages' love, nor all
_Their_ nature held me in their thrilling thrall;
The infant rapture still survived the boy,
And Loch na Garr with Ida looked o'er Troy;
Mixed Celtic memories with the Phrygian mount,
And Highland linns with Castalie's clear fount."

The city of Aberdeen was the place where the chief part of the earlier boyhood of Byron was spent. He went thither as an unconscious infant, and there, in the neighboring Highlands, he continued till in his eleventh year, when the title fell to him, and he was brought by his mother to England. Aberdeen is a city which must have been a very charming abode for a boy of Byron's disposition, ready either to mix in the throng of lads of his own age in all their plays, contentions, and enterprises, to shoot a marble, or box out a quarrel, or to stroll away into the country and enjoy nature and liberty with an equal zest. There are people who are inclined to think that a great deal of the sublime tone of some of Byron's poetry, as that of the Childe Harold, of the sentiment, almost sentimentality of his Hours of Idleness, and many of his smaller poems throughout his works, was put on by him at will and for effect. They do not see how these things could proceed from the same mind as the rodomontade of many of his most familiar letters, or the slang and wild humor of many parts of Don Juan. How little do such persons know of the human mind! Did not Tam O'Shanter, and Mary in Heaven, and the Cotter's Saturday Night, all proceed from the same mind, and one of the most earnest minds that ever lived? Did not the sublime scenes of the Iliad, and the battle of the beggars in the Odyssey, and the trick of Ulysses in the cave of Polypheme, when he called himself Noman--so that when Polypheme roared out as they put out his eye, and he told his neighbors who came running to inquire what was the matter, that Noman hurt him, they replied,

"If no man hurt thee, why dost thou complain?"

and marched away without helping him--did not these proceed from the same mind? Did not the puns of Hood, and the sober ballad of Eugene Aram, and the Song of the Shirt, proceed from one and the same mind? Did not John Gilpin and the loftiest strains of pious poetry proceed from that of Cowper? Did not Chatterton write equally Sly Dick and the tragedy of Ella? In fact, we might run through the whole circuit of poetic and prose literature, and show that the moods of our minds are as various and changeable as those of external nature. The very gravest, the most steadfast of us, have our transitions from sad to gay, from frivolous to the highest tone of the highest purpose, with a rapidity that seems to belong to the most changeful of us. There is, in fact, no such chameleon, no such kaleidoscope as the human mind. Light and shadow pass over us, and communicate their lusters or their glooms. Facts give us a turn up or down, and the images of our brain present new and ever new arrangements. But in all this change there is no mere chance, far less confusion; every movement depends on a fixed principle. Perhaps there have been few men in whom circumstances--circumstances of physical organization, of life, and education--cherished and made habitual so many varied moods as in Lord Byron. Thrown at a very early age into the bosom of a beautiful and solitary nature, he imbibed a profound and sincere love of nature and solitude. Sent early to public schools to battle his way among boys of his own age, and with a personal defect which often subjected him to raillery, his native spirit made him bristle up and show fight, as he did afterward with his reviewers. Raised to rank and wealth, and, spite of his crooked foot, endowed with, in all other respects, a very fine person, he was led to plunge into the dissipations of young men of his class, and he thus acquired a tone of libertinism that ever afterward, under the same circumstances, was sure to show itself. Led by his quick sense of right and wrong, and by his shrewd insight into character, to despise priestcraft and political despotism, and spurred on by the spirit of the time, especially abroad where he traveled, he imbibed a spirit of skepticism and radicalism as principles. From these causes, he soon began to exhibit the most opposite phases of character. In solitude and nature he was religious in his tone--in society, a scoffer; in solitude he was pensive, and even sentimental--in society he was convivial, fond of practical jokes, satirical. He wrote like a radical, and spoke like an aristocrat. In him Childe Harold and Don Juan, the sublime and the ludicrous, the noble and the mean, the sarcastic and the tender, the voluptuous and beautifully spiritual, the pious and the impious, were all embodied. He was all these by turns, and in all, for the moment, most sincere. Like an instrument of many strings, each had its peculiar tone, and answered faithfully to the external impulse. Multifarious as were his moods, you might in any given circumstances have predicated which of these would prevail. There would be no sensuality in the face of the Alps, there would be no sublimity in the city saloon. If he had to speak in the House of Lords, his speech, by the spirit of antagonism, would assuredly be radical; did he come into contact with the actual mob, he would case himself in the hauteur of the aristocrat. With nature, he was ashamed of men, and his doings and sayings among them; with men, he was ashamed of nature and poetry. He would laugh at his own flights of sentiment. He was a many-sided monster, showing now sublime and now grotesque, but with a feeling in the depths of his soul that he ought to be something greater than he was or dared to be.