was not the inevitable penalty of the ethical anarch, can only be
ascribed to this same child-like irrationality--though in such a form it
is irrationality hardly peculiar to Shelley. Pity, if you will, his
spiritual ruins and the neglected early training which was largely their
cause; but the pity due to his outward circumstances has been strangely
exaggerated. The obloquy from which he suffered he deliberately and
wantonly courted. For the rest, his lot was one that many a young poet
might envy. He had faithful friends, a faithful wife, an income small
but assured. Poverty never dictated to his pen; the designs on his
bright imagination were never etched by the sharp fumes of necessity.

If, as has chanced to others--as chanced, for example, to Mangan--outcast
from home, health and hope, with a charred past and a bleared future, an
anchorite without detachment and self-cloistered without
self-sufficingness, deposed from a world which he had not abdicated,
pierced with thorns which formed no crown, a poet hopeless of the bays
and a martyr hopeless of the palm, a land cursed against the dews of
love, an exile banned and proscribed even from the innocent arms of
childhood--he were burning helpless at the stake of his unquenchable
heart, then he might have been inconsolable, then might he have cast the
gorge at life, then have cowered in the darkening chamber of his being,
tapestried with mouldering hopes, and hearkened to the winds that swept
across the illimitable wastes of death. But no such hapless lot was
Shelley's as that of his own contemporaries--Keats, half chewed in the
jaws of London and spit dying on to Italy; de Quincey, who, if he
escaped, escaped rent and maimed from those cruel jaws; Coleridge, whom
they dully mumbled for the major portion of his life. Shelley had
competence, poetry, love; yet he wailed that he could lie down like a
tired child and weep away his life of care. Is it ever so with you, sad
brother; is it ever so with me? and is there no drinking of pearls except