That piece of sculpture has never been executed; but it would hardly have been more inappropriate than the two chief monuments that have been erected, the one in Christchurch Priory, Hants, the other at University College, Oxford; for what could be less in keeping with the impression left by Shelley’s ethereal genius than to figure him, as is done in both these works, as a dead body, stretched limp and pitiful like some suicide’s corpse at the Morgue? Let us rid our thoughts of all such ghastly and funereal notions of Shelley, and think of him as what he is, the poet not of death but of life,[22] that nobler life to which mankind shall yet attain, when they have learnt, in his own words: To live as if to love and live were one. The most human portrait of Shelley, to my thinking, is the one painted by a young American artist, William West, who met him at Byron’s villa near Leghorn, in 1822, and being greatly struck by his personality, made a rough sketch which he afterwards finished and took back to America. There it was preserved after West’s death, and reproduced for the first time in the _Century Magazine_ in October, 1905, with an explanatory article by its present owner, Mrs. John Dunn. By the courtesy of Mrs. Dunn, I was able to use this portrait as a frontispiece to a revised edition of my study of Shelley, published in 1913. Mr. Buxton Forman told me that he did not believe in the genuineness of the picture; but readers of _Letters about Shelley_ (1917) will see that Dr. Richard Garnett held a contrary opinion, and so, as I know, did Mr. W. M. Rossetti. Some account of West’s meeting with Shelley, and of his recollections of Byron, may be found in Henry Theodore Tuckerman’s _Book of the Artists_. His portrait of Byron is well known; and there seems to be no inherent improbability in the account given of the origin and preservation of the other picture, which certainly impresses one as being more in agreement with the verbal descriptions of Shelley in his later years than the almost boyish countenance so familiar in engravings. Shelley is the greatest of the poet-pioneers of civilization, and his influence is still very far from having reached its zenith: he is “the poet of the young” in the sense that future generations will be better and better able to understand him. Thy wisdom lacks not years, thy wisdom grows With _our_ growth and the growth of time unborn.[23] VIII VOICES CRYING IN THE WILDERNESS I suffer mute and lonely, yet another Uplifts his voice to let me know a brother Travels the same wild paths though out of sight. JAMES THOMSON (B.V.).