Such reflections are forced upon us by the lives of three great English poets of this century.  Byron died when he was thirty-six, Keats when he was twenty-five, and Shelley when he was on the point of completing his thirtieth year.  Of the three, Keats enjoyed the briefest space for the development of his extraordinary powers.  His achievement, perfect as it is in some poetic qualities, remains so immature and incomplete that no conjecture can be hazarded about his future.  Byron lived longer, and produced more than his brother poets.  Yet he was extinguished when his genius was still ascendant, when his “swift and fair creations” were issuing like worlds from an archangel’s hands.  In his case we have perhaps only to deplore the loss of masterpieces that might have equalled, but could scarcely have surpassed, what we possess.  Shelley’s early death is more to be regretted.  Unlike Keats and Byron, he died by a mere accident.  His faculties were far more complex, and his aims were more ambitious than theirs.  He therefore needed length of years for their co-ordination; and if a fuller life had been allotted him, we have the certainty that from the discords of his youth he would have wrought a clear and lucid harmony.

These sentences form a somewhat gloomy prelude to a biography.  Yet the student of Shelley’s life, the sincere admirer of his genius, is almost forced to strike a solemn key-note at the outset.  We are not concerned with one whose “little world of man” for good or ill was perfected, but with one whose growth was interrupted just before the synthesis of which his powers were capable had been accomplished.

August 4, 1792, is one of the most memorable dates in the history of English literature.  On this day Percy Bysshe Shelley was born at Field Place, near Horsham, in the county of Sussex.  His father, named Timothy, was the eldest son of Bysshe Shelley, Esquire, of Goring Castle, in the same county.  The Shelley family could boast of great antiquity and considerable wealth.  Without reckoning earlier and semi-legendary honours, it may here be recorded that it is distinguished in the elder branch by one baronetcy dating from 1611, and by a second in the younger dating from 1806.  In the latter year the poet’s grandfather received this honour through the influence of his friend the Duke of Norfolk.  Mr. Timothy Shelley was born in the year 1753, and in 1791 he married Elizabeth, daughter of Charles Pilford, Esquire, a lady of great beauty, and endowed with fair intellectual ability, though not of a literary temperament.  The first child of this marriage was the poet, named Bysshe in compliment to his grandfather, the then living head of the family, and Percy because of some remote connexion with the ducal house of Northumberland.  Four daughters, Elizabeth, Mary, Hellen, and Margaret, and one son, John, who died in the year 1866, were the subsequent issue of Mr. Timothy Shelley’s marriage.  In the year 1815, upon the death of his father, he succeeded to the baronetcy, which passed, after his own death, to his grandson, the present Sir Percy Florence Shelley, as the poet’s only surviving son.