ther he should
dedicate himself to poetry or metaphysics; and, resolving on the former,
he educated himself for it, discarding in a great measure his
philosophical pursuits, and engaging himself in the study of the poets
of Greece, Italy, and England. To these may be added a constant perusal
of portions of the old Testament--the Psalms, the Book of Job, the
Prophet Isaiah, and others, the sublime poetry of which filled him with
delight.

As a poet, his intellect and compositions were powerfully influenced by
exterior circumstances, and especially by his place of abode. He was
very fond of travelling, and ill-health increased this restlessness. The
sufferings occasioned by a cold English winter made him pine, especially
when our colder spring arrived, for a more genial climate. In 1816 he
again visited Switzerland, and rented a house on the banks of the Lake
of Geneva; and many a day, in cloud or sunshine, was passed alone in his
boat--sailing as the wind listed, or weltering on the calm waters. The
majestic aspect of Nature ministered such thoughts as he afterwards
enwove in verse. His lines on the Bridge of the Arve, and his "Hymn to
Intellectual Beauty", were written at this time. Perhaps during this
summer his genius was checked by association with another poet whose
nature was utterly dissimilar to his own, yet who, in the poem he wrote
at that time, gave tokens that he shared for a period the more abstract
and etherealised inspiration of Shelley. The saddest events awaited his
return to England; but such was his fear to wound the feelings of others
that he never expressed the anguish he felt, and seldom gave vent to the
indignation roused by the persecutions he underwent; while the course of
deep unexpressed passion, and the sense of injury, engendered the desire
to embody themselves in forms defecated of all the weakness and evil
which cling to real life.

He chose therefore for his hero a youth nourished in dreams of liberty,
some of whose actions are in direct opposition to the opinions of the
world; but who is animated throughout by an ardent love of virtue, and a
resolution to confer the boons of political and intellectual freedom on
his fellow-creatures. He created for this youth a woman such as he
delighted to imagine--full of enthusiasm for the same objects; and they
both, with will unvanquished, and the deepest sense of the justice of
their cause, met adversity and death. There exists in this poem a
memo