This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1877 edition. Excerpt: ...with her arms, and we might still have been savages and idolaters; or what is worse, might have arrived at such a stagnant and miserable state of social institutions as China and Japan possess." It is this grand capacity of going out of himself, and becoming not only the patriot of his own nation but a citizen of the world, which makes the poets song so deathless, and covers him with a fadeless glory in the eyes of posterity. Again and again did this cosmopolitan spirit manifest itself in Shelley. " I have seen Dantes tomb, and worshipped the sacred spot," he writes in one letter, and in others gives full utterance to his reverence for genius and his passion fpr liberty. To follow Shelley through his entire sojourn in Italy is not my present intention. These details are to be read elsewhere; but in coming towards the close of his brief life it is impossible to avoid reflecting what sorrow the world must have engraved upon that heart which, before it throbbed for the last time, caused its owner to exclaim with melancholy pathos, "If I die tomorrow, I have lived to be older than my father; I am ninety years of age." Only twenty-nine is the real record; and even before these were attained his hair had become partially white. Had he avoided the catastrophe which resulted in his death, there is reason to fear he would not have passed middle life. A few short years had made strange and rapid changes in him, and on looking back at what he was, he might have exclaimed with "Wycherley (though at the close of a different career), when the dramatist gazed in old age upon a portrait representing him in the bloom of youth--" Quantum mutatus ab illo" I shall not linger over the closing scenes of Shelleys life, but some facts have recently...