The intimacy of Shelley and Byron, recorded in _Julian and Maddalo_, was 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 companionless As the last cloud of an expiring storm, Whose thunder is its knell. Victorian poets were not less depressed by reflection upon the poet's lonely life. Arnold strikes the note again and again, most poignantly in _The Buried Life_, of the poet's sensitive apprehension that all human intercourse is mockery, and that the gifted soul really dwells in isolation. _Sordello_ is a monumental record of a genius without friends. Francis Thompson, with surface lightness, tells us, in _A Renegade Poet on the Poet:_ He alone of men, though he travel to the pit, picks up no company by the way; but has a contrivance to avoid scripture, and find a narrow road to damnation. Indeed, if the majority of men go to the nether abodes, 'tis the most hopeful argument I know of his salvation, for 'tis inconceivable that he should ever do as other men. One might imagine that in the end the poet's poignant sense of his isolation might allay his excessive conceit. A yearning for something beyond himself might lead him to infer a lack in his own nature. Seldom, however, is this the result of the poet's loneliness. Francis Thompson, indeed, does feel himself humbled by his spiritual solitude, and characterizes himself,