proved now, as before, a check rather than an incentive to
production: "I do not write; I have lived too long near Lord Byron, and
the sun has extinguished the glow-worm; for I cannot hope, with St.
John, that THE LIGHT CAME INTO THE WORLD AND THE WORLD KNEW IT NOT." "I
despair of rivalling Lord Byron, as well I may, and there is no other
with whom it is worth contending." To Ollier, in 1820, he wrote: "I
doubt whether I shall write more. I could be content either with the
hell or the paradise of poetry; but the torments of its purgatory vex
me, without exciting my powers sufficiently to put an end to the
vexation." It was not that his spirit was cowed by the Reviews, or that
he mistook the sort of audience he had to address. He more than once
acknowledged that, while Byron wrote for the many, his poems were
intended for the understanding few. Yet the sunetoi, as he called them,
gave him but scanty encouragement. The cold phrases of kindly Horace
Smith show that he had not comprehended "Prometheus Unbound"; and
Shelley whimsically complains that even intelligent and sympathetic
critics confounded the ideal passion described in "Epipsychidion" with
the love affairs of "a servant-girl and her sweetheart." This almost
incomprehensible obtuseness on the part of men who ought to have known
better, combined with the coarse abuse of vulgar scribblers, was enough
to make a man so sincerely modest as Shelley doubt his powers, or shrink
from the severe labour of developing them. (See Medwin, volume 2 page
172, for Shelley's comment on the difficulty of the poet's art.) "The
decision of the cause," he wrote to Mr. Gisborne, "whether or no _I_ am
a poet, is removed from the present time to the hour when our posterity
shall assemble; but the court is a very severe one, and I fear that the
verdict will be, guilty--death." Deep down in his own heart he had,
however, less doubt: "This I know," he said to Medwin, "that whether in
prosing or in versing, there is something in my writings that shall live
for ever." And again, he writes to Hunt: "I am full of thoughts and
plans, and should do something, if the feeble and irritable frame which
encloses it was willing to obey the spirit. I fancy that then I should
do great things." It seems almost certain that the incompleteness of
many longer works designed in the Italian period, the abandonment of the
tragedy on Tasso's story, the unfinished state of "Charles I", and the
failure to execute th