During his residence in Italy, he lived in many different places, and was, upon the whole, considerably improved in health. His mode of life was studious and retired, and it was now that he produced some of the finest and most powerful of his works. Whilst residing at Rome, he wrote his notable classic drama of "Prometheus Unbound." "This poem," he says, 66 was chiefly written upon the mountainous ruins of the Baths of Caracalla, among the flowery glades and thickets of odoriferous blossoming trees, which are extended in ever-winding labyrinths upon its immense platforms, and dizzy arches suspended in the air. The bright, blue sky of Rome, and the effect of the vigorous awakening of spring in that divinest climate, and the new life with which it drenches the spirits even to intoxication, were the inspiration of this drama." The title sufficiently explains the subject; it is the image of the old Titan warring with oppression, and conquering through the might of a grand endurance. The moral inculcated is the power of a lofty stoicism, and it is thus splendidly summed up in the concluding lines :Gentleness, Virtue, Wisdom, and Endurance, These are the seals of that most firm assurance

Which bars the pit over Destruction's strength;

And if, with infirm hand, Eternity,
Mother of many acts and hours, should free
The serpent that would clasp her with his
length,

These are the spells by which to reassume
An empire o'er the disentangled doom:

To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite; To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;

To defy Power, which seems omnipotent; To love and bear; to hope till Hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;

Neither to change, nor flatter, nor repent; This, like thy glory, Titan! is to be Good, great, and joyous, beautiful and free; This is alone life, joy, empire, and victory!

Shelley's next work was his tragedy of "The Cenci," published in 1819, and dedicated to his friend, Leigh Hunt. This production is written. without any of the peculiar feelings and opinions which characterise the poet's other compositions; he having attended, as he declares, " simply to the impartial development of such characters as it is probable the persons represented really were, together with the greatest degree of popular

effect to be produced by such a deve

lopment."* It is founded upon a popular Italian story, of an eminently dramatic character, though signally disfigured by the revolting nature of the catastrophe. It is a dark and gloomy painting of a most unnatural reality. The author remarks in the dedication:-"These writings which I have hitherto published have been little else than visions which impersonate my own apprehensions of the beautiful and the just. I can also perceive in them the literary defects incidental to youth and impatience; they are dreams of what ought to be, or may be. The drama which I now present to you is a sad reality. I lay aside the presumptuous attitude of an instructor, and am content to paint, with such colours as my own heart furnishes, that which has been." This tragedy, in spite of manifest defects, is unquestionably one of the best of modern times, and is incomparably the most popular of the poet's compositions. His principal remaining works are "Hellas" (a lyrical drama), "The Witch of Atlas,' "Adonais” (an elegy on the death of the poet Keats), and a variety of shorter pieces, some of which are of remarkable originality and beauty. The exquisite odes to the Skylark and the Clouds are among the finest things to be found within the range of our poetical literature. Take, in the way of example, the following verses from the "Skylark," and note the fulness and perfection of the poetry :— All the earth and air

With thy voice is loud,
As, when night is bare,
From one lonely cloud,

The moon rains out her beams, and heaven is overflowed.

What thou art we know not;

What is most like thee?

From rainbow clouds there flow not
Drops so bright to see,

As from thy presence showers a rain of melody.
Like a poet hidden

In the light of thought,
Singing hymns unbidden,

Till the world is wrought

To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded

not.

Like a high-born maiden

In a palace-tower,

Soothing her love-laden

Soul in secret hour,

With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower.

Letters from Italy. No. 20.

the month, he received intelligence of the arrival of Leigh Hunt and his family at Genoa. Shelley, always prompt in the offices of friendship, left home to meet and welcome him. Boating habits having made him familiar with the sea, he went, with his friend Williams, in his own boat to Leghorn, making the run in about seven hours and a-half. Here he met the Hunts, whose affairs detained him some days, and whom he subsequently accompanied to Pisa, in order to see them fixed in the house which he had provided for them. In a day or two Shelley took his leave, to return to Lerici for the rest of the season, meaning, however, to see his friends occasionally in the interval. Leigh Hunt says: "I spent one delightful day with him, wandering about Pisa, and visiting the cathedral. On the night of the same day he took a post-chaise for Leghorn, intending next morning to sign his will in that city, and then depart with his friend Captain Williams for Lerici. I entreated him, if the weather was violent, not to give way to his daring spirit, and to venture to sea. He promised me he would not, and it seems that he did set off later than he otherwise would have done, and apparently at a more favourable moment. I never beheld him more."

That night, indeed-the 8th of July, 1822-there arose a tremendous storm of thunder and lightning; and still earlier in the day there had been a heavy squall at sea. Shelley and Williams were then sailing for St. Arenzo, their boat being visible to Captain Medwin in an English vessel, and to Captain Roberts from the lighthouse at Leghorn. After the storm had passed, it was observed that the little skiff had disappeared. She had gone down with her sails full set. Shelley had been reading Keats's "Eve of St. Agnes," as was concluded from the open volume being found with his hand in the breast of his waistcoat. It was Leigh Hunt's copy; and had been lent with the direction that it was to be kept till Shelley could give it back with his own hands.

So, says

Hunt, "I would not have it from any other;" and it shared the fate of his friend's remains. There was an interval of several days before the bodies were discovered; the widows and friends of the deceased suffering mean

while the most painful anxiety and suspense. When at length their worst fears were confirmed, the bodies were brought together and burnt, after the good ancient fashion, upon the shore. The ashes were afterwards gathered into coffers, and those of Shelley were interred in the Protestant burialground at Rome, the place which he has touchingly described in the "Adonais," in recording its reception of John Keats.

"The ceremony of the burning," says Leigh Hunt, was alike beautiful and distressing. Trelawney, who had been the chief person concerned in ascertaining the fate of his friends, completed his kindness by taking the most active part on this last mournful occasion. He and his friend Captain Shenley were first upon the ground, attended by proper assistants. Lord Byron and myself arrived shortly afterwards. His lordship got out of the carriage, but wandered away from the spectacle, and did not see it. I remained inside the carriage, now looking on, now drawing back with feelings that were not to be witnessed.

"None of the mourners, however, refused themselves the little comfort of supposing, that lovers of books and antiquity, like Shelley and his companion-Shelley, in particular, with his Greek enthusiasm-would not have been sorry to foresee this part of their fate. The mortal part of him, too, was saved from corruption, not the least extraordinary part of his history. Among the materials for burning, as many of the gracefuler and more classical articles as could be procuredfrankincense, wine, &c., were not forgotten; and to these Keats's volume was added. The beauty of the flame, arising from the funeral pile, was extraordinary. The weather was beautifully fine. The Mediterranean, now soft and lucid, kissed the shore as if to make peace with it. The yellow sand and blue sky were intensely contrasted with one another; marble mountains touched the air with coolness; and the flame of the fire bore away towards heaven in vigorous amplitude, waving and quivering with a brightness of inconceivable beauty. It seemed as though it contained the glassy essence of vitality. You might have expected a seraphic countenance to look out of it, turning once more

before it departed, to thank the friends that had done their duty."

Shelley, when he died, was only in. the thirtieth year of his age. He was of tall and slight figure, and is said to have had a constitutional tendency to consumption. Though well-turned, his shoulders were a little bent, owing, not unlikely, to premature thought and trouble. The same causes had touched his hair with grey; and, though his habits of rigid temperance and exercise had given him a remarkable degree of strength, it is not supposed that he could have lived many years. As it was, he used to say that he had lived three times as long as the calendar represented. His eyes were large and animated, with a certain dash of wildness in them, and, altogether, of surprising beauty. He was of a delicate and fair complexion, with a faint colour in the cheeks; and his hair, which was originally brown, surmounted his face with good effect, being soft, and copious, and flowing. His features were small and somewhat irregular; but, when fronting and looking at you attentively, his aspect, as it has been described, had " tain seraphical character that would have suited a portrait of John the Baptist."

a cer

Like John the Baptist, too, he was as the "voice of one crying in the wilderness, prepare the ways, make the paths straight," for the coming of the kingdom of truth and righteousness. Strike down everywhere the remnants of superstition, selfishness and falsehood; that Virtue may have room to prosper, and the inborn dignity of man have scope for free development. Sometimes unwisely, but yet manfully, fearlessly, most earnestly did he preach this gospel; teaching likewise, that, by reverent submission and adherence to the sublime laws and order of the universe, to the sacred suggestions of reason, conscience, and affection, the life and powers of men in time might be ultimately perfectionised, and the visible earth become the "reality of heaven."

BARTHOLD GEORGE NIEBUHR. "Ir always gives me a melancholy feeling when a great man writes his life. It is already evening with him then; and, that he relates how he lived, shows that he no longer lives quite

from the root." So said Barthold George Niebuhr, when he took up the life of Goethe. Yet Niebuhr himself has furnished us with an autobiography that bears none of the evidences of this senility; written not when the autumn of life had brought with it the sear and yellow leaf; but from week to week, and day to day, as his career developed itself,-in the charming series of letters to his kinsfolk, begun when a boy first removed from his father's house, and continued with a regularity, and a fidelity and minuteness of detail which supplies a perfect history both of his inner and outer life. Of these letters we shall largely avail ourselves in the memorabilia which follow.

Barthold Niebuhr was one of those strange combinations of the student and the politician; the man of patient research, and of restless, energetie action, the examples of which are rarer in England than in several countries of the Continent. Our own public men are frequently not more eminent for administrative and senatorial talent, than for the more brilliant gifts of wit and fancy. But in Niebuhr we see the singular spectacle of a man intensely interested in political affairs; holding high offices of public trust in exciting times; watching, with keen anxiety, the progress of warlike movements; and himself, caught by the military fever, going through the exercise, and volunteering to serve in the ranks; and, at the same time, pursuing the most abstruse investigations into the dry details of chronology; trying, by heaping together the fragmentary fruits of minute research, to rebuild the past; bringing his surprising industry and genius to elucidate the questions of race, and track, through the obscurity of distant tradition, the early march of civilisation. His studies were such as lead to dusty tomes, and turn men into recluses and pedagogues. Yet, a passionate interest in the active politics of his times was the master-spring of his life, and made him, as a writer, an inspirer and director of the popular enthusiasm of Germany. He was the ornament of his University; and his literary productions exhibit an elaboration and maturity that show how thoroughly congenial to him this work was. But his citizenship vindicated itself amid all the attractions of his student life; and

it is clearly established by his own expressions of despondency, and by the testimony of his friends, that the proximate cause of his death was the intense anxiety and grief with which he contemplated the position of public affairs, when the French Revolution of 1830 threatened to involve his country in a second desolating career of conquest and tyranny.

He was but fifty years old when he sank to slumber on the banks of the Rhine; but, in those fifty years, how much had he lived! Niebuhr was a man in boyhood, in the extent of his knowledge, the sagacity of his judgment, and the maturity of his affections. While yet a lad he knew twenty languages, and had so mastered the geography of Europe and the characters of the military commanders, that he could predict the various operations of the war which had then begun to break over the Continent.

His father, Carsten Niebhur, was a man of some note. A peasant who had qualified himself by privation and hard study for a better destiny, he had been appointed to accompany a Government expedition of discovery to the East; and on his return, after an absence of six years and the publication of his memoirs, found himself famous. Carsten married an orphan lady of Copenhagen in 1773 when he was forty years old, and in 1778, two children having been born to him,-Christiana in 1774, and Barthold in 1776,-removed to Meldorf, in Holstein, as secretary of the province of Dithmarsh. Here he and his wife lived and died; and here young Niebuhr passed the years of his childhood. How he passed them, he shall tell for himself, after we have related a few facts which will render his story the plainer. Up to his fifth year, Barthold was a strong, hearty boy; but illness and accidents of various kinds rendered him from that time constitutionally nervous and timid, and his merry romping life was exchanged for one of greater quiet and seclusion. So, the foundation of the exquisite sensibility to outward influences which followed him to the grave, was laid; and so, probably, the taste for calm and unexciting studies became engrafted on his more active temperament. amusements of the boy were translations from such languages as he understood; sketches of little poems and

The

childish essays; and, above all, listening to the tales of travel with which his father used to indulge him at night. "I well remember," he says, "how he used to tell me stories about the East, and the structure of the universe; particularly in the evening, just before bed-time, he would take me on his knee, and feed my imagination with these instead of fairy tales. The history of Mahomet, of the early Caliphs, -especially of Omar and Ali, for whom he had the deepest reverence,—of the conquests and spread of Islamism, and the virtues of the heroes of the new faith, with the history of the Turks, were early imprinted on my memory in the most lively colours; nay, works on these subjects were among the first books put into my hands. I remember, too, how one Christmas-eve, when I must have been in my tenth year, he heightened the delights of the festival by taking out of the almost magnificent chest which held his manuscripts, and was revered by the children and all the household like the ark of the covenant, the volumes which contained the information he had collected in Africa, and reading them with me. He had taught me to draw maps, and, now encouraged and assisted by him, I soon produced maps of Habbesch and Sudan.”

Geography and history were studies to which the boy took kindly from the first dawn of intelligence. His very

amusements, as we have seen, were connected with his pursuit of knowledge. He played with his sister at the sovereignty of an imaginary kingdom, to which he gave the name of Low-England. He drew maps of his territory, promulgated laws for his subjects, waged wars, and made treaties of peace. So, like a young potentate, he looked abroad on the nations of the earth, and made himself familiar with their limits, their history, their productions, and peoples. Barthold soon became an authority on these subjects amongst wise heads; and amidst the grave discussions of his father's house, to which the fame of the great traveller brought many a strange guest, and where the learned Boje and wife were constant visitors, he was often applied to to supply some fact in which others' memories failed. His statistical knowledge was surprising; and he spent a large portion of his time in studies of this nature. Yet Barthold's mind was susceptible enough