English Lands, Letters and Kings, vol. 4: The Later Georges to VictoriaMitchell, Donald Grant
History
English Lands, Letters and Kings, vol. 4: The Later Georges to Victoria
Mitchell, Donald Grant
English literature -- History and criticism; Great Britain -- Intellectual life
Another episode of Byron’s Swiss life was his encounter there, for the
first time, with the poet Shelley.[67] He, too, was under ban, for reasons
that I must briefly make known. Like his brother poet, Shelley was born to
a prospective inheritance of title and of wealth. His father was a
baronet, shrewd and calculating, and living by the harshest and baldest
of old conventionalisms; this father had given a warm, brooding care to
the estate left him by Sir Bysshe Shelley (the grandfather of the poet),
who had an American bringing up--if not an American birth--in the town of
Newark,[68] N. J. The boy poet had the advantages of a place at
Eton[69]--not altogether a favorite there, it would seem; “passionate in
his resistance to an injury, passionate in his love.” He carried thence to
Oxford a figure and a beauty of countenance that were almost effeminate;
and yet he had a capacity for doubts and negations that was wondrously
masculine. His scholarship was keen, but not tractable; he takes a wide
range outside the established order of studies; he is a great and
unstinted admirer of the French philosophers, and makes such audacious
free-thinking challenge to the church dignitaries of Oxford that he is
expelled--like something venomous. His father, too, gives him the cold
shoulder at this crisis, and he drifts to London. There he contrives
interviews with his sisters, who are in school at Clapham; and is decoyed
into a marriage--before he is twenty--with a somewhat pretty and over-bold
daughter of a coffee-house keeper, who has acted as a go-between in
communications with his sisters. The prudent, conventional father is now
down upon him with a vengeance.
But the boy has pluck under that handsome face of his. He sets out, with
his wife--after sundry wanderings--to redeem Ireland; but they who are
used to blunderbusses, undervalue Shelley’s fine periods, and his fine
face. He is some time in Wales, too (the mountains there fastening on his
thought and cropping out in after poems); he is in Edinboro’, in York, in
Keswick--making his obeisance to the great Southey (but coming to
over-hate of him in after years). Meantime he has children. Sometimes
money comes from the yielding father--sometimes none; he is abstemious;
bread and water mostly his diet; his home is without order or thrift or
invitingness--the lapses of the hoydenish girl-wife stinging him over and
over and through and through.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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