led
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 excee