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h the same laborious artlessness as the songs in a musical comedy. Megalena, though suffering from excruciating mental agony, finds leisure to scratch several verses on the walls of her cell. It would indeed be a poor-spirited heroine who could not deftly turn a sonnet to night or to the moon, however profound her woes. Superhuman strength and courage is an endowment necessary to all who would dwell in the realms of terror and survive the fierce struggle for existence. Peacock, in _Nightmare Abbey_, paints the Shelley of 1812 in Scythrop, who devours tragedies and German romances, and is troubled with a "passion for reforming the world." "He slept with _Horrid Mysteries_ under his pillow, and dreamed of venerable eleutherarchs and ghastly confederates holding midnight conventions in subterranean caves... He had a certain portion of mechanical genius which his romantic projects tended to develop. He constructed models of cells and recesses, sliding panels and secret passages, that would have baffled the skill of the Parisian police." His bearing was that of a romantic villain: "He stalked about like the grand Inquisitor, and the servants flitted past him like familiars." Although Shelley outgrew his youthful taste for horrors, his early reading left traces on the imagery and diction of his poetry. There is an unusual profusion in his vocabulary of such words as ghosts, shades, charnel, tomb, torture, agony, etc., and supernatural similes occur readily to his mind. In _Alastor_ he compares himself to "an inspired and desperate alchymist Staking his very life on some dark hope," and cries: "O that the dream Of dark magician in his visioned cave Raking the cinders of a crucible For life and power, even when his feeble hand Shakes in its last decay, were the true law Of this so lonely world." In the _Ode to the West Wind_ his memories of an older and finer kind of romance suggested the fantastic comparison of the dead leaves to "ghosts from an enchanter fleeing," and in _Prometheus Unbound_ Panthea sees "unimaginable shapes Such as ghosts dream dwell in the lampless deeps." The poem _Ginevra_, which describes an enforced wedding and the death of the bride at the sight of her real lover, may well have been inspired by reading the romances of terror, where such events are an everyday occurrence. The gruesome descriptions in _The Revolt of Islam_, the decay of the garden in _The
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