Page:Studies in Letters and Life (Woodberry, 1890).djvu/173

Rh below our conception of him, indicative as it is of his purity that his "unpremeditated song" does not fail to reach the height of his great argument. What impresses one most is rather the character of the life itself, of the mind to which "trust in all things high came natural," that moved with equal ease among the things of beauty, on the heights of thought, or amid the common and trivial cares of household life and in the offices of friendship, and knew no difference in the level of his life, so single was his nature and so completely expressed in all he did. In the most ideal passages, in those most impersonal, one does not lose the sense of friendliness in them, of the sweet human relationship which underlies the telling of what he has to say, and keeps the letters in their appropriate sphere. They are not rhapsodies, or soliloquies, or disquisitions; in other words, the visitations of the spirit that came to Shelley, and left record of themselves in this beauty and eloquence and imaginative passion, did not isolate him even momentarily, and could not sever him from his friends. Who these were, we know well enough: Miss Hitchener, the blue-stocking; Hogg, the betrayer;