We spent the summer of 1820 at the Baths of San Giuliano, four miles
from Pisa. These baths were of great use to Shelley in soothing his
nervous irritability. We made several excursions in the neighbourhood.
The country around is fertile, and diversified and rendered
picturesque by ranges of near hills and more distant mountains. The
peasantry are a handsome intelligent race; and there was a gladsome
sunny heaven spread over us, that rendered home and every scene we
visited cheerful and bright. During some of the hottest days of
August, Shelley made a solitary journey on foot to the summit of Monte
San Pellegrino--a mountain of some height, on the top of which there
is a chapel, the object, during certain days of the year, of many
pilgrimages. The excursion delighted him while it lasted; though he
exerted himself too much, and the effect was considerable lassitude
and weakness on his return. During the expedition he conceived the
idea, and wrote, in the three days immediately succeeding to his
return, the "Witch of Atlas". This poem is peculiarly characteristic
of his tastes--wildly fanciful, full of brilliant imagery, and
discarding human interest and passion, to revel in the fantastic ideas
that his imagination suggested.
The surpassing excellence of "The Cenci" had made me greatly desire
that Shelley should increase his popularity by adopting subjects that
would more suit the popular taste than a poem conceived in the
abstract and dreamy spirit of the "Witch of Atlas". It was not only
that I wished him to acquire popularity as redounding to his fame; but
I believed that he would obtain a greater mastery over his own powers,
and greater happiness in his mind, if public applause crowned his
endeavours. The few stanzas that precede the poem were addressed to me
on my representing these ideas to him. Even now I believe that I was
in the right. Shelley did not expect sympathy and approbation from the
public; but the want of it took away a portion of the ardour that
ought to have sustained him while writing. He was thrown on his own
resources, and on the inspiration of his own soul; and wrote because
his mind overflowed, without the hope of being appreciated. I had not
the most distant wish that he should truckle in opinion, or submit his
lofty aspirations for the human race to the low ambition and pride of
the many; but I felt sure that, if his poems were more addressed to
the common feelings of men, his proper rank among the writers of the
day would be acknowledged, and that popularity as a poet would enable
his countrymen to do justice to his character and virtues, which in
those days it was the mode to attack with the most flagitious
calumnies and insulting abuse. That he felt these things deeply cannot
be doubted, though he armed himself with the consciousness of acting
from a lofty and heroic sense of right. The truth burst from his heart
sometimes in solitude, and he would writes few unfinished verses that
showed that he felt the sting; among such I find the following:--
'Alas! this is not what I thought Life was.
I knew that there were crimes and evil men,
Misery and hate; nor did I hope to pass
Untouched by suffering through the rugged glen.
In mine own heart I saw as in a glass
The hearts of others...And, when
I went among my kind, with triple brass
Of calm endurance my weak breast I armed,
To bear scorn, fear, and hate--a woful mass!'
I believed that all this morbid feeling would vanish if the chord of
sympathy between him and his countrymen were touched. But my
persuasions were vain, the mind could not be bent from its natural
inclination. Shelley shrunk instinctively from portraying human
passion, with its mixture of good and evil, of disappointment and
disquiet. Such opened again the wounds of his own heart; and he loved
to shelter himself rather in the airiest flights of fancy, forgetting
love and hate, and regret and lost hope, in such imaginations as
borrowed their hues from sunrise or sunset, from the yellow moonshine
or paly twilight, from the aspect of the far ocean or the shadows of
the woods,--which celebrated the singing of the winds among the pines,
the flow of a murmuring stream, and the thousand harmonious sounds
which Nature creates in her solitudes. These are the materials which
form the "Witch of Atlas": it is a brilliant congregation of ideas
such as his senses gathered, and his fancy coloured, during his
rambles in the sunny land he so much loved.
