Page:Shelley, a poem, with other writings (Thomson, Debell).djvu/86

68 between the changing and passing away and the being re-absorbed into the universe.

There are other questions of far finer subtlety and far broader scope suggested by this sublime lyrical drama, as well as some interesting points of textual criticism, whose discussion I must here forego. But as these notes may appear of a depreciatory tendency, I may be permitted to remark that the peculiarities of structure I have pointed out, the unessential self-contradictions and inadvertences, are not only pardonable as instances of the "brave neglect" which Pope here and there discovered in Homer, but have a certain wild charm of their own as characteristics proving that in Shelley the poet and the man were one. We all know how conspicuous in his life was a sort of quasi-freedom from the usual limitations of time and space, a disregard of men's common hours and seasons, a restless flying hither and thither and anywhither from men's common settled domesticity; and we know, moreover, in what a confusion of dreams or visions or hallucinations with worldly realities he was often involved. Jefferson Hogg| has told us delightfully of his most uncustomary customs, his irregular hours and modes of eating and sleeping and so forth, his sudden mysterious flittings and reappearances; Trelawny has noted how he would glide into the home circle and vanish from it, as if the very Ariel whose name he assumed; Leigh Hunt has left on record how he gave the impression of a spirit that had wandered from its proper sphere; and these eerie, lawless ways and traits only intensified the fascination wrought by his ardent purity and goodness and genius upon all who knew him well, being worthy to know him.