So we find him, an outcast in London, living in lodgings and almost starving. He met a girl of sixteen, the daughter of a coffee-house proprietor, and hoping to convert her to his sublime faith, he ran away and married her. At the age of twenty we find him in Ireland, issuing an “Address to the Irish People” and circulating it on the streets. The scholarly critics of Shelley speak of this as the absurd extravagance of boyhood; whereas it was plain common sense and the obvious moral duty of every English poet. Infinitely touching it is to read this pamphlet, and note its beauty of spirit and sublimity of faith, not exceeded by the utterances of Jesus. All that was wrong with Shelley’s advice was that it was too good both for Ireland and England. For distributing it Shelley’s servant was sent to jail for six months. The poet’s wife had no understanding of his ideals, and the couple were unhappy. After two years of married life, Shelley met the sixteen-year-old daughter of Godwin, revolutionary philosopher, and ran away with her. That was the crime of his life, for which he was condemned to infamy by his own time, and has hardly yet been pardoned. Two years later his former wife drowned herself; and the British lord chancellor deprived the poet of the custody of their two children, on the ground that he was an unfit person. We shall discuss the ethics of this affair later on. Suffice it for the moment to say that Shelley, broken in heart but not in will, fled to the Continent for refuge, and devoted the last four years of his life to the task of overthrowing the British caste system. A hundred years have passed, and he has not yet succeeded; but let no one be too sure that he will not succeed in the end! He lived in Switzerland and Italy, and worked with desperate intensity, so that he brought on tuberculosis. There are no four years in the life of any other writer which gave us such treasures of the mind and spirit. The critics of Shelley judge him by his boyhood and his horrible scandal. But taking these last years, the impression we get is of maturity of mind, dignity of spirit, firmness of judgment. If you want to know this Shelley, read the wonderful letters he wrote from Switzerland. Read his essay, recently discovered and published, “A Philosophical View of Reform,” in which the whole program of radical propaganda is laid out with perfect insight and beauty of utterance. Read “The Defense of Poetry,” one of the finest pieces of eloquence in English. Note the soundness of his critical judgment, which erred in only one respect--an under-estimate of his own powers. He was humble to Byron, a lesser person both as poet and as man.