The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1858)
by Thomas Jefferson Hogg (9780217557917)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: to Eliza and the exiles, who for poetical, not political offences, had voluntarily banished themselves to the ungenial climate of Keswick. Madame Cottin has not made them the subject of a moral tale, and they kept but few records, or reports, of their proceedings ; little, therefore, can be told of them. An extract from a letter written by Coleridge affirms, and no doubt truly, that the writer, had he fortunately been at Keswick when Shelley visited it, would have treated him less like a prig than Southey did; it is, moreover, in spirit candid, tolerant, and judicious:? EXTRACT FROM A LETTER OF COLERIDGE. " I think as highly of Shelley's genius?yea, and of his heart?as you can do. Soon after he left Oxford, he went to the Lakes, poor fellow and with some wish, I have understood, to see me; but I was absent, and Southey received him instead. Now?the very reverse of what would have been the case in ninety-nine instances of a hundred? I might have been of use to him, and Southey could not; for I should have sympathised with his poetics, metaphysical reveries, and the very word metaphysics is an abomination to Southey, and Shelley would have felt that I understood him. His discussions? tending towards Atheism of a certain sort?wouldnot have scared me; for me it would have been a semi-transparent Larva, soon to be sloughed, and through which I should have seen the true image,? the final metamorphosis. Besides, I have ever thought that sort of Atheism the next best religion to Christianity; nor does the better faith I have learnt from Paul and John interfere with the cordial reverence I feel for Benedict Spinoza. As far as Robert Southey was concerned with him, I am quite certain that his harshness arose entirely from the frightful reports that had been made to him respecting ...

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