to their parent’s, while Shelley’s income was mulcted in a sum of 200 pounds for their maintenance.  Thus sternly did the father learn the value of that ancient Aeschylean maxim, to drasanti pathein, the doer of the deed must suffer.  His own impulsiveness, his reckless assumption of the heaviest responsibilities, his overweening confidence in his own strength to move the weight of the world’s opinions, had brought him to this tragic pass—­to the suicide of the woman who had loved him, and to the sequestration of the offspring whom he loved.

Shelley is too great to serve as text for any sermon; and yet we may learn from him as from a hero of Hebrew or Hellenic story.  His life was a tragedy; and like some protagonist of Greek drama, he was capable of erring and of suffering greatly.  He had kicked against the altar of justice as established in the daily sanctities of human life; and now he had to bear the penalty.  The conventions he despised and treated like the dust beneath his feet, were found in this most cruel crisis to be a rock on which his very heart was broken.  From this rude trial of his moral nature he arose a stronger being; and if longer life had been granted him, he would undoubtedly have presented the ennobling spectacle of one who had been lessoned by his own audacity, and by its bitter fruits, into harmony with the immutable laws which he was ever seeking to obey.  It is just this conflict between the innate rectitude of Shelley’s over-daring nature and the circumstances of ordinary existence, which makes his history so tragic; and we may justly wonder whether, when he read the Sophoclean tragedies of Oedipus, he did not apply their doctrine of self-will and Nemesis to his own fortunes.

CHAPTER 5.

Life at Marlow, and journey to Italy.

Amid the torturing distractions of the Chancery suit about his children, and the still more poignant anguish of his own heart, and with the cloud of what he thought swift-coming death above his head, Shelley worked steadily, during the summer of 1817, upon his poem of “Laon and Cythna”.  Six months were spent in this task.  “The poem,” to borrow Mrs. Shelley’s words, “was written in his boat, as it floated under the beech-groves of Bisham, or during wanderings in the neighbouring country, which is distinguished for peculiar beauty.”  Whenever Shelley could, he composed in the open air.  The terraces of the Villa Cappuccini at Este and the Baths of Caracalla were the birthplace of “Prometheus”.  “The Cenci” was written on the roof of the Villa Valsovano at Leghorn.  The Cascine of Florence, the pine-woods near Pisa, the lawns above San Guiliano, and the summits of the Euganean Hills, witnessed the creation of his loveliest lyrics; and his last great poem, the “Triumph of Life”, was transferred to paper in his boat upon the Bay of Spezia.