It is often sought to deepen our sense of this tragedy by speculating on what Shelley would have done if he had lived. But, if such a question must be asked, there are reasons for thinking that he might not have added much to his reputation. It may indeed be an accident that his last two years were less fertile in first-rate work than the years 1819 and 1820, and that his last unfinished poem, 'The Triumph of Life', is even more incoherent than its predecessors; yet, when we consider the nature of his talent, the fact is perhaps significant. His song was entirely an affair of uncontrolled afflatus, and this is a force which dwindles in middle life, leaving stranded the poet who has no other resource. Some men suffer spiritual upheavals and eclipses, in which they lose their old selves and emerge with new and different powers; but we may be fairly sure that this would not have happened to Shelley, that as he grew older he would always have returned to much the same impressions; for his mind, of one piece through and through, had that peculiar rigidity which can sometimes be observed in violently unstable characters. The colour of his emotion would have fluctuated--it took on, as it was, a deepening shade of melancholy; but there is no indication that the material on which it worked would have changed. 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