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