Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer | Page 2

the representation of one of the most ancient English families, which numbered Sir Philip Sidney on its roll of illustrious names, just sixty-four years ago, and in this nineteenth century, for no licentiousness, violence, or dishonor, but, for his refusal to criminate himself or inculpate friends, was, without trial, expelled by learned divines from his university for writing an argumentative thesis, which, if it had been the work of some Greek philosopher, would have been hailed by his judges as a fine specimen of profound analytical abstruseness--for that expulsion are we the debtors to theological charity and tolerance for "Queen Mab."
Excommunicated by a mercenary and abject priesthood, cast off by a savage father, the admirer of that gloomy theology founded by the murderer of Michael Servetus, and charged by his jealous brother writers as one of the founders of a Satanic School, for neither immorality of life nor breach of the parental relation, but for heterodoxy to an expiring system of dogmatism, and for acting on and asserting the right of man to think and judge for himself, a father was to have two children torn from him, in the sacred name of law and justice, by the principal adviser of a dying madman, "Defender of the Faith, by Law Established," and by us despised as the self-willed tyrant, who lost America and poured out human blood like water to gratify his lust of power. By that Lord Chancellor whose cold, impassive statue has a place in Westminster Abbey, where Byron's was refused admittance, and whose memory, when that stone has crumbled into dust, will live as one who furnished an example for execrable tyranny over the parental tie, and that Lord Eldon whom an outraged father curses in imperishable verse:
"By thy most impious hell, and all its terrors; By all the grief, the madness and the guilt Of thine impostures, which must be their errors, That sand on which thy crumbling power is built;
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By all the hate which checks a father's love; By all the scorn which kills a father's care; By those most impious hands that dared remove Nature's high bounds--by thee, and by despair.
"Yes, the despair which bids a father groan, And cry, 'my children are no longer mine. The blood within those veins may be mine own, But, tyrant, their polluted souls are thine.'
"I curse thee, though I hate thee not. O slave! If thou could'st quench the earth consuming hell Of which thou art a demon, on thy grave This curse should be a blessing. Fare thee well."
Sad as it is to contemplate any human being in his agony making use of such language to another; and however much we may sympathize with the poet, yet we cannot but have inwardly a feeling of rejoicing; for, if it had not been for this unheard of villainy, we should probably never have had the other magnificent poetry and prose of Percy Bysshe Shelley composed during his self-imposed ostracism, and which furnish such glorious thoughts for the philosopher, and keen trenchant weapons for the reformer.
Have any of my hearers ever stood, in the calm of a summer evening, in Shelley's native land, listening to the lovely warble of the nightingale, making earth joyful with its unpremeditated strains, and the woods re-echo with its melody? Or gazed upwards with anxious ken towards the skylark careering in the "blue ether," far above this sublunary sphere of gross, sensual earth, there straining after immortality, and
"Like a poet hidden, In the light of thought, Singing hymns unbidden, Till the world is wrought To sympathy with hopes and fears, it heeded not,"
pouring out such bursts of song as to make one almost worship and credit the fables, taught in childhood at our mothers' knees, of the angelic symphonies of heavenly choirs. Such was the poetry of Shelley; and as the music of the nightingale or the skylark is far exceeding in excellence that of the other members of the feathered kingdom, so does Shelley rank as a poet far above all other poets, making even the poet of nature, the great Wordsworth himself, confess that Shelley was indeed the master of harmonious verse in our modern literature. It is broadly laid down in the Marvinian theory that all poets are insane. I would much like to break a lance with the learned Professor of Psychology and Medical Jurisprudence; but as the overthrow of this dogma does not come within the scope of my essay, I would suggest to those who may have been influenced by that paper to read Shelley's "Defence of Poetry." I shall quote two extracts therefrom, each pertinent to my subject. The first describes the function of the poet:
"But poets, or those who imagine and express this indestructible order, are not only the authors of