Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer | Page 2

ardor to attain
wisdom; resolved at every personal sacrifice to do right; burning with a
desire for affection and sympathy," a boy-under-graduate of Oxford,
described as of tall, delicate, and fragile figure, with large and lively
eyes, with expressive, beautiful and feminine features, with head
covered with long, brown hair, of gracefulness and simplicity of
manner, the heir to a title and 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;
* * * * *
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;