flight of shafts which skilfully avoid the vital parts.

We do not, therefore, suspect Shelley of exaggeration: he was, no doubt,
in terrible misery. Those who think otherwise must forget their own
past. Most people, we suppose, _must_ forget what they were like when
they were children: otherwise they would know that the griefs of their
childhood were passionate abandonment, _dechirants_ (to use a
characteristically favourite phrase of modern French literature) as the
griefs of their maturity. Children's griefs are little, certainly; but
so is the child, so is its endurance, so is its field of vision, while
its nervous impressionability is keener than ours. Grief is a matter of
relativity; the sorrow should be estimated by its proportion to the
sorrower; a gash is as painful to one as an amputation to another. Pour
a puddle into a thimble, or an Atlantic into Etna; both thimble and
mountain overflow. Adult fools, would not the angels smile at our
griefs, were not angels too wise to smile at them?

So beset, the child fled into the tower of his own soul, and raised the
drawbridge. He threw out a reserve, encysted in which he grew to
maturity unaffected by the intercourses that modify the maturity of
others into the thing we call a man. The encysted child developed until
it reached years of virility, until those later Oxford days in which Hogg
encountered it; then, bursting at once from its cyst and the university,
it swam into a world not illegitimately perplexed by such a whim of the
gods. It was, of course, only the completeness and duration of this
seclusion--lasting from the gate of boyhood to the threshold of
youth--which was peculiar to Shelley. Most poets, probably, like most
saints, are prepared for their mission by an initial segregation, as the
seed is buried to germinate: before they can utter the oracle of poetry,
they must first be divided from the body of men. It is the severed head