s "fearlessness, his gracious
nature, his truth, his purity from all flesh-liness of appetite, his
freedom from vanity, his diffusive love and tenderness." This testimony
is worth much, the more especially when we remember that it is from the
pen of Thomas de Quincey, who, while truthfully acknowledging the man,
hesitates not to use polished irony, rough wit, and covert sneering,
when dealing with the man's uttered thinkings.

"That Shelley understood the true mission of a poet, and the true nature
of poetry, will appear from the following extract from one of his prose
essays:--"Poetry," he says, "is the record of the best and happiest
moments of the happiest and best minds. We are aware of evanescent
visitations of thought and feeling, sometimes associated with place
and person, sometimes regarding our own mind alone, and always arising
unforeseen, and departing unbidden, but elevating stud delightful beyond
all expression. Poets are not only subject to these experiences, as
spirits of the most refined organization, but they can color all they
combine with the evanescent lines of this ethereal world; a word,
a trait in the representation of a scene or passion will touch the
enchanted cord, and reanimate in those who have ever experienced these
emotions, the sleeping, the cold, the buried image of the past. Poetry
thus makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the world;
it arrests the vanishing apparitions which haunt the interlunations
of life, and veiling them, or in language or in form, sends them forth
among mankind, bearing sweet news of kindred joy to those with whom
their sisters abide--abide, because there is no portal of expression
from the caverns of the spirit which they inhabit into the universe of
things."

Shelley's beautiful imagery and idealistic drapery is sometimes so
accumulated in his poems, that it is difficult to follow him in his
thinkings. In his verse he wishes to stand high as a philosophical
reasoner, and this, together with his devotion to the cause, which even
men of De Quincey's stamp call "Insolent Infidelity," has prevented
Shelley from becoming so popular as he might have been.

Shelley lived a life of strife, passed his boyhood and youth in
struggling to be free--misunderstood and misinterpreted: and when at
last in his manhood happier circumstances were gathering around him,
a blast of wind came, and the waves of the sea washed away one who was
really and truly "a man a