they be dissolved in biting tears? "Which of us has his desire, or
having it is satisfied?"

It is true that he shared the fate of nearly all the great poets
contemporary with him, in being unappreciated. Like them, he suffered
from critics who were for ever shearing the wild tresses of poetry
between rusty rules, who could never see a literary bough project beyond
the trim level of its day but they must lop it with a crooked criticism,
who kept indomitably planting in the defile of fame the "established
canons" that had been spiked by poet after poet. But we decline to
believe that a singer of Shelley's calibre could be seriously grieved by
want of vogue. Not that we suppose him to have found consolation in that
senseless superstition, "the applause of posterity." Posterity!
posterity which goes to Rome, weeps large-sized tears, carves beautiful
inscriptions over the tomb of Keats; and the worm must wriggle her
curtsey to it all, since the dead boy, wherever he be, has quite other
gear to tend. Never a bone less dry for all the tears!

A poet must to some extent be a chameleon and feed on air. But it need
not be the musty breath of the multitude. He can find his needful
support in the judgement of those whose judgement he knows valuable, and
such support Shelley had:

La gloire
Ne compte pas toujours les voix;
Elle les pese quelquefois.

Yet if this might be needful to him as support, neither this, nor the
applause of the present, nor the applause of posterity, could have been
needful to him as motive: the one all-sufficing motive for a great poet's