No More Learning

'I have read and considered all that you say about my general powers,
and the particular instance of the poem in which I have attempted to
develop them. Nothing can be more satisfactory to me than the interest
which your admonitions express. But I think you are mistaken in some
points with regard to the peculiar nature of my powers, whatever be
their amount. I listened with deference and self-suspicion to your
censures of "The Revolt of Islam"; but the productions of mine which
you commend hold a very low place in my own esteem; and this reassures
me, in some degree at least. The poem was produced by a series of
thoughts which filled my mind with unbounded and sustained enthusiasm.
I felt the precariousness of my life, and I engaged in this task,
resolved to leave some record of myself. Much of what the volume
contains was written with the same feeling--as real, though not so
prophetic--as the communications of a dying man. I never presumed
indeed to consider it anything approaching to faultless; but, when I
consider contemporary productions of the same apparent pretensions, I
own I was filled with confidence. I felt that it was in many respects
a genuine picture of my own mind. I felt that the sentiments were
true, not assumed. And in this have I long believed that my power
consists; in sympathy, and that part of the imagination which relates
to sentiment and contemplation. I am formed, if for anything not in
common with the herd of mankind, to apprehend minute and remote
distinctions of feeling, whether relative to external nature or the
living beings which surround us, and to communicate the conceptions
which result from considering either the moral or the material
universe as a whole. Of course, I believe these faculties, which
perhaps comprehend all that is sublime in man, to exist very
imperfectly in my own mind. But, when you advert to my Chancery-paper,
a cold, forced, unimpassioned, insignificant piece of cramped and
cautious argument, and to the little scrap about "Mandeville", which
expressed my feelings indeed, but cost scarcely two minutes' thought
to express, as specimens of my powers more favourable than that which
grew as it were from "the agony and bloody sweat" of intellectual
travail; surely I must feel that, in some manner, either I am mistaken
in believing that I have any talent at all, or you in the selection of
the specimens of it. Yet, after all, I cannot but be conscious, in
much of what I write, of an absence of that tranquillity which is the
attribute and accompaniment of power.
This feeling alone would make
your most kind and wise admonitions, on the subject of the economy of
intellectual force, valuable to me. And, if I live, or if I see any
trust in coming years, doubt not but that I shall do something,
whatever it may be, which a serious and earnest estimate of my powers
will suggest to me, and which will be in every respect accommodated to
their utmost limits.

[Shelley to Godwin. ]

***


PRINCE ATHANASE.

A FRAGMENT.

(The idea Shelley had formed of Prince Athanase was a good deal
modelled on "Alastor". In the first sketch of the poem, he named it
"Pandemos and Urania". Athanase seeks through the world the One whom
he may love. He meets, in the ship in which he is embarked, a lady who
appears to him to embody his ideal of love and beauty. But she proves
to be Pandemos, or the earthly and unworthy Venus; who, after
disappointing his cherished dreams and hopes, deserts him. Athanase,
crushed by sorrow, pines and dies. 'On his deathbed, the lady who can
really reply to his soul comes and kisses his lips' ("The Deathbed of
Athanase"). The poet describes her [in the words of the final
fragment, page 164]. This slender note is all we have to aid our
imagination in shaping out the form of the poem, such as its author
imagined. [Mrs. Shelley's Note.