about the time of his return to Rome, a thin volume containing Rosalind and Helen, the Lines written among the Euganean Hills, the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, and the Ozymandias sonnet, was published in London. He now revelled in the atmosphere, climate, and surroundings that he found at Rome. The antique statues and architectural monuments impressed him profoundly; and among the mountainous ruins of the Baths of Caracalla, overgrown as they were with shrubs and weeds and flowers, the poetic work given out kept pace with the splendour of the inspiration; for here the second and third acts of his Prometheus were completed. The scheme, indeed, was realized: the work as designed closes with the end of Act III; and it is only to the unexpended energy of a supreme effort in his creative life, and to the inextinguishable vitality of that optimism with which he regarded the destinies of man, that we owe that illustrious lyric achievement the fourth act of Prometheus Unbound, written after an interval of poignant sorrow and of large creation in another line.

While still at Rome Shelley obtained a manuscript account of that grim series of domestic transactions which took place in the family of Count Cenci during the pontificate of Clement VIII, transactions which ended in the murder of the murderous count and the execution of his wife, son, and daughter Beatrice. The portrait of a beautiful young woman, known as that of Beatrice Cenci, and in Shelley's days attributed to Guido Reni, combined with the awful tale of oppression and parricidal vengeance to stimulate Shelley's imagination in the highest degree. He saw in Count Cenci

tyranny embodied in its foulest form, violating all that was most sacred; and in Beatrice he saw beauty and womanly dignity and innocence stung by that bestial tyranny into an attitude of overwhelming command, and impelled to compass the death of her destroyer even though he had given her life. Shelley did not defend directly or indirectly the deed of Beatrice and her accomplices, any more than he defended the bloody excesses of the French Revolution; on the contrary, he condemned in unmistakable terms the act which made Beatrice a tragic character; but he saw in the unutterable crimes of Cenci and the tremendous retaliation of his victims the true elements of a tragic coil and conflict such as the great Greek tragedians were wont to embody in those works with which he lived so much. He realized that to read the passions liberated in this conflict was to learn much concerning the secrets of the human heart; and he saw that, by making the actors in this sixteenth century tragedy live again on the modern stage, those wasted passions might be gathered into a possession of price for all time. The realization of what had passed in that sombre Cenci palace which he had visited charged his receptive imagination with electric turmoil. To the evolution of order from the troubled mass he brought a ripened judgment fresh from the great creative work of realizing a programme too vast for any but the highest genius to have succeeded in bringing into a single action; for it is the whole life of man and the final triumph of suffering and resistant good over tyrannous and seemingly omnipotent ill that his Prometheus depicts. That achievement had given

keenness to his vision and strength to his will; and he saw before him as in a moving pageant the action of what was about to become the one great ideal tragedy of his time and country, the single tragic drama of the first order since Shakespeare.

Not at once, or at one series of sittings, did he accomplish his work of lessening the actual horror of the record and increasing its ideal horror, and so exalting his theme and his characters into an impressiveness not to be surpassed. About the middle of May he began the writing of his tragedy; but its progress was arrested after the lapse of some three weeks by the bitterest sorrow of his own life. His son William was taken dangerously ill. For sixty hours by the little bedside he kept unbroken watch, absorbed in the impending loss of his child. On the 7th of June 1819 the little fellow died. Almost heartbroken himself, and with the aggravation of his wife's frantic grief, he left Rome and took Mary to a house between Leghorn and Monte Nero, Villa Valsovano, to be near Mrs. Gisborne. There, while that charming lady ministered in motherly fashion to the bereaved and suffering Mary, Shelley threw himself once more into that best of solacing worlds, the world of ideal creation, and not only finished his tragedy, but accomplished the arduous task of driving it through the press, notwithstanding all the obstacles that an Italian printinghouse and compositors could put in his way.

The Cenci finished and dedicated to Leigh Hunt in a handsome large octavo volume, the Olliers instructed to publish it on its arrival in England, and Peacock besought to secure its

d

representation on the London stage, Shelley's mind was again free. Passing with Mary to Florence, he there set down in notes his delicate and fresh impressions of the Pitti and Uffizi antique sculptures. Throughout the greater part of 1819, and especially between his arrival at Florence and the birth of his son Percy Florence on the 12th of November, he must have done much lonely wandering and composition, as the mere mass of his work of this time testifies. Under the title Philosophical View of Reform he wrote a prose investigation of the causes of popular distress in Englanda considerable work though left unfinished when he took up The Cenci in May. The "Manchester Massacre," as he called it, goaded him into the utterance of The Mask of Anarchy. The mental attitude of Wordsworth and the news that, on the eve of Peter Bell's publication, John Hamilton Reynolds had produced a very witty spurious Peter Bell, combined to awaken Shelley's sense of the ludicrous, and stung him into attacking the intellectual wastefulness of his great contemporary in a satire which he called Peter Bell the Third. Of that unique satiric drama the Cyclops of Euripides he made a delightful poetic rendering. Some of his highest moods. were recorded in the Ode to the West Wind, the stanzas To a Skylark, and the Ode to Liberty; and the delicate beauty of his imagination found expression in The Sensitive Plant, The Cloud, and Arethusa, not to mention other minor poems and fragments. At length the wondrous year's work was crowned by that "tumult of mighty harmonies" where English song has soared into its highest altitudes and

purest skies, the fourth act of Prometheus Unbound.

The course of his life and occupations from the stay at Este, where he began Prometheus, to the end of December 1819, when he finished the fourth act at Florence, should suffice to account for the flaw which unquestionably exists in the unity of the poem. Far fuller of great poetry and high thought than The Cenci, it yet leaves the tragedy in possession of the field as the one work of Shelley which, while dealing with a theme of the first order on a great scale and in a great manner, maintains a flawless unity of form and conception. Although The Cenci was interrupted in its flow for a brief period of overwhelming anguish, it had the good hap to be, itself, one of the most serious interruptions in the composition of Prometheus.

The Florentine winter tried the ailing health of Shelley; and he moved to Pisa, where he had the advantage of water which suited him and the advice of the physician Vaccà. By March 1820 the sheets of The Cenci had reached England, and the work had been duly published. The issue of Prometheus with a collection of his best lyric poems next engaged his attention; and his wife was dividing her time between her child, the cultivation of her own mind by Greek and other studies, and the transcription of those priceless poems in the production of which she took so sympathetic and serviceable an interest. In the summer Shelley and Mary passed some time at the house of the Gisbornes at Leghorn, while that worthy couple were on a visit to London. It was from her own house that the fortunate lady received the Letter to Maria Gisborne of