Chapter II Principal Writings

The true visionary is often a man of action, and Shelley was a
very peculiar combination of the two. He was a dreamer, but he
never dreamed merely for the sake of dreaming; he always rushed
to translate his dreams into acts. The practical side of him
was so strong that he might have been a great statesman or
reformer, had not his imagination, stimulated by a torrential
fluency of language, overborne his will. He was like a boat
(the comparison would have pleased him) built for strength and
speed, but immensely oversparred. His life was a scene of
incessant bustle. Glancing through his poems, letters,
diaries, and pamphlets, his translations from Greek, Spanish,
German, and Italian, and remembering that he died at thirty,
and was, besides, feverishly active in a multitude of affairs,
we fancy that his pen can scarcely ever have been out of his
hand. And not only was he perpetually writing; he read
gluttonously. He would thread the London traffic, nourishing
his unworldly mind from an open book held in one hand, and his
ascetic body from a hunch of bread held in the other. This
fury for literature seized him early. But the quality of his
early work was astonishingly bad. An author while still a
schoolboy, he published in 1810 a novel, written for the most
part when he was seventeen years old, called 'Zastrozzi', the
mere title of which, with its romantic profusion of sibilants,
is eloquent of its nature. This was soon followed by another
like it, 'St. Irvyne, or the Rosicrucian'. Whether they are
adaptations from the German [2] or not, these books are merely
bad imitations of the bad school then in vogue, the