¹ All references to the prose works of Shelley are to Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck (eds.), The Complete Works of Shelley: Prose (1929), Vol. vi. On Life occupies pp. 193-197.

² Of the contemporary writers, Mary Shelley is the only one who has anything to say about On Life, and her comment in her preface to the Essays, &c., 1840, has little bearing on the specific contents of the essay. Later writers have mentioned On Life only incidentally.

I have not thought it necessary to attempt to fix a definite date for On Life. I regard it as belonging to 1815 or 1816, between Alastor and the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, which agrees generally with the opinions of W. M. Rossetti, Memoir of Shelley, Shelley Society Publications (1886), p. 149, and H. B. Forman, Shelley's Prose Works (1880), ii, 266. The evidence presented in this paper prevents me from adopting the suggestion of 1819 made by James A. Notopoulos (PMLA, lviii, 489 ff.).

³ The following summary on On Life is mainly in Shelley's own words, even those portions which are not direct quotations.

⁴ For a discussion of Drummond's influence upon Shelley's On Life and other works, see part III of this paper.

⁵ In this paragraph it has been tempting to use these Wordsworthian phrases: “rolls through all things,” “see into the life of things,” “A presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts,” “Intimations of Immortality,” and “philosophic mind.”

⁶ In the light of the concluding lines of the Hymn, and of the connection of the poem with Wordsworth's Ode, I think the interpolation justified.

⁷ This last line is very curious and in itself is inexplicable, for there is nothing in the poem to explain how Intellectual Beauty had taught Shelley either to “fear himself” or to “love all human kind.” If the influence of Wordsworth is admitted, however, the phrases are easily explained, the “fear himself” by lines 67-72, and the “love all human kind” by lines 91-92, of Tintern Abbey. Wordsworth speaks of the time when “like a roe I bounded o'er the mountains … more like a man Flying from something that he dreads than one Who sought the thing he loved”; and then of “The still, sad music of humanity, Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power To chasten and subdue.”

⁸ An entry in Shelley and Mary's List of Books read in 1815. See Shelley and Mary, I, 87. In September 1814, and again in 1815, Shelley read The Excursion. Ibid., I, 20, 57, 88.

⁹ See Paul Mueschke and Earl L. Griggs, “Wordsworth as the Prototype of The Poet in Shelley's Alastor,” PMLA, xlix (March, 1934), 229-245.

¹⁰ The Poetical Works of Wordsworth, ed. William Knight (1896), viii, 189.

¹¹ Works of Shelley, vi, 194-195.

¹² Ode: Intimations of Immortality, line 160.

¹³ Letter to T. J. Hogg, January 12, 1811. The Letters of Shelley, ed. Roger Ingpen (1914), i, 42. ¹⁴ Academical Questions, pp. 218-281.

¹⁵ Works, vi, 55.

¹⁶ Ibid., vi, 43-44.

¹⁷ Pp. 219-220.

¹⁸ Cf. Academical Questions, pp. 404, 409-410.

¹⁹ Cf. Ibid., pp. 407-408.

²⁰ Cf. Ibid., p. xiv.

²¹ Pp. 250-251. Shelley may, of course, have been influenced by the “beauté intellectuelle” of Wieland's Agathon (see N. I. White, Shelley, i, 701) and by Plato.

²² Pp. 20-21.

²³ See also p. 405.

²⁴ I do not agree with N. I. White (Shelley, i, 295-296) that in writing the Refutation Shelley was indulging in irony which afforded him both the pleasure of abusing Christianity and of escaping prosecution. The pamphlet does precisely what the preface says it is intended to do.

²⁵ Works, vi, 57.

²⁶ Ibid., vi, 25.

²⁷ Ibid., vi, 230.

²⁸ Ibid., vi, 231.

²⁹ This topic is discussed at length in F. L. Jones's “The Inconsistency of Shelley's Alaslor,” ELH, xiii, 291-298.

³⁰ ii. iv. 115-120.