Grief is a matter of relativity; the sorrow
should be estimated by its proportion to the
sorrower; a gash is as painful to one as an
amputation to another. Pour a .puddle into
a thimble, or an Atlantic into Etna; both
thimble and mountain overflow. Adult fools !
would not the angels smile at our griefs, were
not angels too wise to smile at them ?

So beset, the child fled into the tower of
his own soul, and raised the drawbridge. He
threw out a reserve, encysted in which he
grew to maturity unaffected by the intercourses
that modify the maturity of others into the
thing we call a man. The encysted child



SHELLEY



developed until it reached years of virility,
until those later Oxford days in which Hogg
encountered it; then, bursting at once from
its cyst and the university, it swam into a
world not illegitimately perplexed by such
a whim of the gods. It was, of course, only
the completeness and duration of this seclu-
sion — lasting from the gate of boyhood to
the threshold of youth — which was peculiar
to Shelley. Most poets, probably, like most
saints, are prepared for their mission by an
initial segregation, as the seed is buried to
germinate : before they can utter the oracle of
poetry, they must first be divided from the
body of men. It is the severed head that
makes the seraph.
