and his
sister Dorothy, also that recorded in Landor's shaken lines:

Friends! hear the words my wandering thoughts would say,
And cast them into shape some other day;
Southey, my friend of forty years, is gone,
And shattered with the fall, I stand alone.

The intimacy of Shelley and Byron, recorded in _Julian and Maddalo_, was
of a less ardent sort. Indeed Byron said of it, "As to friendship, it is
a propensity in which my genius is very limited.... I did not even feel
it for Shelley, however much I admired him." [Footnote: Letter to Mrs.
(Shelley?) undated.] Arnold's _Thyrsis_, Tennyson's _In Memoriam_, and
more recently, George Edward Woodberry's _North Shore Watch_, indicate
that even when the poet has been able to find a human soul which
understood him, the friendship has been cut short by death. In fact, the
premature close of such friendships has usually been the occasion for
their celebration in verse, from classic times onward.

Such friendships, like happy love-affairs, are too infrequent and
transitory to dissipate the poet's conviction that he is the loneliest
of men. "Thy soul was like a star and dwelt apart," might have been
written by almost any nineteenth century poet about any other. Shelley,
in particular, in spite of his not infrequent attachments, is almost
obsessed by melancholy reflection upon his loneliness. In _To a
Skylark_, he pictures the poet "hidden in the light of thought."
Employing the opposite figure in the _Defense of Poetry_, he says,
"The poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer his
own solitude." Of the poet in _Alastor_ we are told,

He lived, he died, he sung, in solitude.

Shelley's sense of his personal loneliness is recorded in _Stanzas
Written in Dejection_, and also in _Adonais_. In the latter poem
he says of himself,

He came the last, neglected and apart,

and describes himself as

companionless
As the last cloud of an expiring storm,
Whose thunder is its knell.

Victorian poets were not less depressed by reflection upon the poet's
lonely life. Arnold strikes the note again and again, most poignantly in
_The Buried Life_, of the poet's sensitive apprehension that all
human intercourse is mockery, and that the gifted soul really dwells in
isolation. _Sordello_ is a monumental record of a genius without
friends. Francis Thompson, with surface lightness, tells us, in _A
Renegade Poet on the Poet:_