Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 52.djvu/47

 ‘Sensitive Plant’ and the ‘Skylark’ down to the eight lines for which Landor, ever hyperbolical in praise and dispraise, would have bartered the whole of Beaumont and Fletcher. The year was uneventful until near its end, when Shelley made the acquaintance of the lovely Emilia Viviani, a young Italian lady who had been imprisoned in a convent with a view to extorting her consent to an obnoxious marriage. The first draft of his ‘Epipsychidion’ existed some time before Shelley met Emilia, but his meeting with her supplied the needful impulse to perfect and complete that piece of radiant mysticism and rapturous melody (100 copies, London, 1821, 8vo). It attests the growing influence of Plato whose ‘Banquet’ he had already translated. That influence is even more apparent in another composition of 1821, the ‘Defence of Poetry,’ written in answer to Peacock, almost contemporaneously with ‘Epipsychidion.’ Two additional parts were contemplated, but never written, and the essay remained in manuscript until the publication of Shelley's prose writings in 1840. Before long a further incentive to composition was supplied by the death of Keats, whose memory inspired ‘Adonais’ (Pisa, 1821, 4to), not the most magnificent of Shelley's poems, but perhaps the one of most sustained magnificence. The concluding stanzas more fully than any other passage in his writings embody his ultimate speculative conclusions, substantially identical with Spinoza's, whose ‘Tractatus’ he began to translate about the same time. The chief external incident of the year (1821) was Shelley's visit to Byron at Ravenna, for the sake of seeing Byron's and Claire Clairmont's daughter, the little Allegra, before Byron removed to Pisa. The relations between Byron and Claire, who now taught Lady Mountcashell's daughters in Florence, were a continual source of friction. Shelley's conduct towards both parties was unexceptionable, and showed what progress he had made in calm judgment and self-control. Shelley had refused any further contributions to Godwin, but the latter's demands continued, and Shelley permitted Mary to send to her father the money she received for her new novel, ‘Valperga.’

Byron's residence at Pisa, with all its drawbacks, enlivened and diversified Shelley's life, which was further cheered by the society of the gentle and generous Edward Elliker Williams [q. v.] and of his wife Jane, the subject of Shelley's ‘With a Guitar’ and other exquisite lyrics. In the autumn of 1821 the tidings of the Greek insurrection prompted his ‘Hellas’ (London, 1822, 8vo), an imitation in plan, though not in diction, of the ‘Persæ’ of Æschylus, containing some of his noblest lyrical writing. The indifference of the public seems to have discouraged him from prolonged efforts to which he was not constrained, as he was in this instance, by some overmastering impulse. The tragedy on Charles I, which he began to write early in 1822, made little progress; but his powers as a translator appeared at their best in the scenes from ‘Faust’ and Calderon's ‘Mágico Prodigioso’ which he rendered somewhat later as the basis of papers for the ‘Liberal.’ His appearance and conversation at this time are vividly described by Edward John Trelawny [q. v.], a new addition to the Pisan circle. In April the Shelleys and Williamses removed to Lerici, near Spezzia. The wild scenery and primitive people were most congenial to Shelley, who declared himself ready to say with Faust to the passing hour, ‘Verweile doch, du bist so schön.’ While sailing, studying, listening to Mrs. Williams's music, and writing his ‘Triumph of Life’ as his boat rocked in the moonlight, he heard of the Leigh Hunts' arrival at Pisa, and hastened to meet them. Having made them as comfortable as Byron's moodiness and Mrs. Hunt's apparently mortal sickness permitted, Shelley sailed for Spezzia from Leghorn on 8 July 1822, accompanied by Williams. Scarcely had they embarked when the face of sky and sea darkened ominously. Trelawny watched the little vessel sailing in the company of many others, and graphically describes how all were blotted from view by the squall, and how, when this had passed off, all reappeared except Shelley's, which was never seen again until months afterwards she was dredged up from the bottom of the sea. Some thought that she had been accidentally or designedly run down in the squall, but many circumstances militate against this theory. Shelley's body, best recognised by the volumes of Sophocles and Keats in the pockets, was cast ashore near Viareggio on 18 July, and, after having been buried for some time in the sand, was on 16 Aug., in the presence of Byron, Hunt, and Trelawny, cremated, to allow of the interment of the ashes in the protestant cemetery at Rome. This took place on 7 Dec. immediately under the pyramid of Caius Cestius. Leigh Hunt wrote the Latin epitaph, with the famous Cor Cordium, and Trelawny added three English lines from ‘The Tempest.’ The heart, which would not burn, and had been snatched from the flames by Trelawny, was given to Mary Shelley, and is in the keeping of her family (cf., Gli ultimi giorni di P. B. Shelley, Florence, 1892).