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INTEODUCTOEY ESSAY. 31
And when we see him at so early an age,
casting out, under the influence of such a
sympathy, letters and pamphlets on every
side, we accept it as the simple exempHfication
of the sincerity, with which, at the
close of his life, he spoke of himself, as—
" One whose heart a stranger's tear might wear
As water-drops the sandy fountain stone;
Who loved and pitied all things, and could moan
For woes which others hear not, and could see
The absent with the glass of phantasy,
And near the poor and trampled sit and weep,
Following the captive to his dungeon deep—•
One who was as a nerve o'er which do creep
The else-uufelt oppressions of this earth."
Such sympathy with his kind was evidently
developed in him to an extraordinary and
even morbid degree, at a period when the
general inteUectual powers it was impatient to
put in motion, were immature or deficient.
I conjecture, from a review of the various
pubHcations of Shelley's youth, that one of
the causes of his failure at the outset, was
the peculiar practicalness of his mind, which