s is a force which dwindles in
middle life, leaving stranded the poet who has no other resource. Some
men suffer spiritual upheavals and eclipses, in which they lose their
old selves and emerge with new and different powers; but we may be
fairly sure that this would not have happened to Shelley, that as he
grew older he would always have returned to much the same impressions;
for his mind, of one piece through and through, had that peculiar
rigidity which can sometimes be observed in violently unstable
characters. The colour of his emotion would have fluctuated--it took on,
as it was, a deepening shade of melancholy; but there is no indication
that the material on which it worked would have changed.

Chapter II. Principal Writings

The true visionary is often a man of action, and Shelley was a very
peculiar combination of the two. He was a dreamer, but he never dreamed
merely for the sake of dreaming; he always rushed to translate his
dreams into acts. The practical side of him was so strong that he
might have been a great statesman or reformer, had not his imagination,
stimulated by a torrential fluency of language, overborne his will.
He was like a boat (the comparison would have pleased him) built for
strength and speed, but immensely oversparred. His life was a scene
of incessant bustle. Glancing through his poems, letters, diaries, and
pamphlets, his translations from Greek, Spanish, German, and Italian,
and remembering that he died at thirty, and was, besides, feverishly
active in a multitude of affairs, we fancy that his pen can scarcely
ever have been out of his hand. And not only was he perpetually writing;
he read gluttonously. He would thread the London traffic, nourishing his
unworldly mind from an open book held in one hand, and his ascetic body
from a hunch of bread held in the other. This fury for literature seized
him early. But the quality of his early work was astonishingly bad. An
author while still a schoolboy, he published in 1810 a novel, written
for the most part when he was seventeen years old, called 'Zastrozzi',
the mere title of which, with its romantic profusion of sibilants, is
eloquent of its nature. This was soon followed by another like it,
'St. Irvyne, or the Rosicrucian'. Whether they are adaptations from
the German (2) or not, these books are merely bad imitations of the
bad school then in vogue, the flesh-creeping school of skeletons and
clanking chains, of convulsions and ecstas