of a less ardent sort. Indeed Byron said of it, "As to friendship, it is
a propensity in which my genius is very limited.... I did not even feel
it for Shelley, however much I admired him." [Footnote: Letter to Mrs.
(Shelley?) undated.] Arnold's _Thyrsis_, Tennyson's _In Memoriam_, and
more recently, George Edward Woodberry's _North Shore Watch_, indicate
that even when the poet has been able to find a human soul which
understood him, the friendship has been cut short by death. In fact, the
premature close of such friendships has usually been the occasion for
their celebration in verse, from classic times onward.

Such friendships, like happy love-affairs, are too infrequent and
transitory to dissipate the poet's conviction that he is the loneliest
of men. "Thy soul was like a star and dwelt apart," might have been
written by almost any nineteenth century poet about any other. Shelley,
in particular, in spite of his not infrequent attachments, is almost
obsessed by melancholy reflection upon his loneliness. In _To a
Skylark_, he pictures the poet "hidden in the light of thought."
Employing the opposite figure in the _Defense of Poetry_, he says,
"The poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer his
own solitude." Of the poet in _Alastor_ we are told,

He lived, he died, he sung, in solitude.

Shelley's sense of his personal loneliness is recorded in _Stanzas
Written in Dejection_, and also in _Adonais_. In the latter poem
he says of himself,

He came the last, neglected and apart,

and describes himself as