Most of them are pervaded by a brooding spirit of
melancholy of the 'moping' rather than the 'musical' sort, and
consequently rather ineffective as an artistic motive. Students of
Shelley occasionally scan those pages with a view to pick some obscure
'hints and indirections', some veiled reminiscences, in the stories of
the adventures and misfortunes of _The Last Man_ or _Lodore_. And the
books may be good biography at times--they are never life.
Altogether there is a curious contrast between the two aspects,
hitherto revealed, of Mary Shelley's literary activities. It is as if
the pulse which had been beating so wildly, so frantically, in
_Frankenstein_ (1818), had lapsed, with _Valperga_ (1823) and the
rest, into an increasingly sluggish flow.
The following pages may be held to bridge the gap between those two
extremes in a felicitous way. A more purely artistic mood, instinct
with the serene joy and clear warmth of Italian skies, combining a
good deal of youthful buoyancy with a sort of quiet and unpretending
philosophy, is here represented. And it is submitted that the little
classical fancies which Mrs. Shelley never ventured to publish are
quite as worthy of consideration as her more ambitious prose works.
For one thing they give us the longest poetical effort of the writer.
Pages:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25