Shelley, Percy Bysshe

Percy Bysshe (1792-1822), an English poet. He was a native of Sussex. His mother was a woman of beauty but without literary taste. His father was an obstinate member of Parliament, said to have been inbued with rather low views of life. Shelley was educated at Eton and at Oxford. He disliked mathematics, but showed a fondness for Plato, Hume, and French writers. He was a tall, handsome young fellow; in matters of the orthodox religion an unbeliever, but tolerant, and in his theory of government an advocate of liberty. In conversation he is said to have been pure-minded-not only graceful and delicate in his choice of words but recoiling from coarse and unworthy topics.

While in Oxford Shelley was summoned before the faculty, and, refusing to answer questions regarding an anonymous atheistical pamphlet based on Hume's writings, he was expelled summarily. His father was enraged and cut off his allowance. He was forbidden to return home. In this strait he went to London where his sisters were attending school, and lived on their pin money, which they were glad to give their handsome brother. His father finally became so far reconciled as to allow him $1,000 a year. His expulsion from college took place in March, 1811; in August of the same year he ran away with Harriet Westbrook, a pretty school friend of his sisters, and was married in Edinburgh.

For some years he moved here and there, living happily with his wife and children at York, Keswick, Dublin, and lastly in London. Here he met a beautiful young woman, a Mary Godwin, a brilliant intellectual "affinity" with whom he ran away to Switzerland and lived in open defiance of marriage laws. His unfortunate wife fell into evil ways and drowned herself; whereupon Shelley and Miss Godwin were married, and took up their residence near London. So much for the good and the evil in Shelley's private life. Shelley's father supplied him later with an income of $5,000 a year. While sailing in his own schooner off the coast of Greece, a sudden squall overturned his bark. He and two companions were drowned. Their bodies were cast ashore and were cremated. His ashes were taken to Rome and buried in the Protestant burying ground.

As a poet Shelley is associated with Keats and Byron. He is considered the most exquisitely poetical, the most divinely enraptured, poet of England. Queen Mab is one of his earlier productions. Alastor, The Revolt of Islam, Prometheus Unbound, and Cenci are other titles. Adonais is a lament for the death of Keats. It ranks with Lycidas. He reaches the height of his poetic flight, however, and indeed the greatest altitude attained by English poet, in the Skylark and the Cloud. Quotations may be found under those headings. See also BYRON; KEATS.

QUOTATIONS.

CRITICISMS.

When we study Shelley's poetry for its own sake, we forget the man in our admiration of the poet, for it is poetry such as the world has rarely seen: not philosophical like that of Wordsworth or Browning, nor popular like that of Burns or Tennyson, but suffused with a creative beauty, of a purely poetical quality which has appeared in no other English poet with the exception of Spenser, and, to a lesser degree, of Keats.-Gayley and Young.

But let no one suppose that a want of humor and a self-delusion such as Shelley's have no effect upon a man's poetry. The man Shelley, in very truth, is not entirely sane either. The Shelley of actual life is a vision of beauty and radiance, indeed, but availing nothing, effecting nothing. And in poetry no less than in life, he is a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wing in vain.-Matthew Arnold.

Shenandoah. a river of northern Virginia. The Shenandoah flows northwestward between the Blue Ridge and a parallel chain of the Alleghanies, through the eastern county of West Virginia, into the Potomac River at Harper's Ferry. The Shenandoah Valley is noted for beauty and fertility. It was the scene of Stonewall Jackson's forced marches and of Sheridan's ride.