X. QUEM TU, MELPOMENE 183

210. The reflective reader can scarcely but have begun to doubt, by this time, the accuracy of my statement that I took no harm from Byron.¹ But he need not. The particular form of expression which my folly took was indeed directed by him; but this form was the best it could have taken. I got better practice in English by imitating the Giaour and Bride of Abydos than I could have had under any other master, (the tragedy was of course Shakespearian!) and the state of my mind was-my mind’s own fault, and that of surrounding mischance or mismanagement-not Byron’s. In that same year, 1836, I took to reading Shelley also, and wasted much time over the Sensitive Plant and Epipsychidion; and I took a good deal of harm from him, in trying to write lines like “prickly and pulpous and blistered and blue”; or “it was a little lawny islet by anemone and vi’let,-like mosaic paven,” etc.;² but, in the state of frothy fever I was in, there was little good for me to be got out of anything. The perseverance with which I tried to wade through the Revolt of Islam, and find out (I never did, and don’t know to this day) who revolted against whom, or what, was creditable to me; and the Prometheus really made me understand something of Æschylus. I am not sure that, for what I was to turn out, my days of ferment could have been got over much easier: at any rate, it was better than if I had been learning to shoot, or hunt, or smoke, or gamble. The entirely inscrutable thing to me, looking back on myself, is my total want of all reason, will, or design in the business: I had neither the resolution to win Adèle, the courage to do without her, the sense to consider what was at last to come of it all, or the grace to think how disagreeable I was making myself at the time to everybody about me. There was really no more capacity nor

¹ [See above, p. 143.]

² [See The Sensitive Plant, iii. 60; and The Isle, i. 3. On Ruskin’s admiration for Shelley at this time, and his subsequent change of view, see Vol. I. pp. 253-254 n. See also Fiction, Fair and Foul, Vol. XXXIV. p. 397.]

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