"That orbèd maiden with white fire laden Whom mortals call the Moon, Glides glimmering o'er my fleece-like floor By the midnight breezes strewn! And wherever the beat of her unseen feet Which only the angels hear, May have broken the woof of my tent's thin roof, The Stars peep behind her and peer;"
and when it speaks of "the sanguine Sunrise, with his meteor eyes," the poet transports us, by the primitive freshness of his imagination, back to the time when the phenomena of nature in all their newness were transformed into myths.
To Shelley these phenomena were ever new. He lived among them in a way which no poet had done before or has done since. By far the greater part of his short life of thirty years was spent under the open sky. The sea was his passion; he was constantly sailing; his most beautiful poems were written while he lay in his boat with the sun beating on him, browning his soulful face and delicate hands. It was a passion that was the pleasure of his life and the cause of his death. Everything that had to do with boats and sailing had an attraction for him. He had a childlike hobby for floating paper boats; it is said that on one occasion, having no other paper at hand, he launched a £50 bank-note on the pond in Kensington Gardens.
He never learned to swim. At the time when he was constantly, by day and by night, sailing on the Lake of Geneva with Lord Byron, their boat was once very nearly upset. Shelley refused all help, and calmly prepared himself to go down. "I felt in this near prospect of death," he afterwards wrote, in a mixture of sensations, among which terror entered, though but subordinately. My feelings would have been less painful had I been alone, but I knew that my companion would have attempted to save me, and I was overcome with humiliation when I thought that his life might have been risked to preserve mine." A few years later he had no painful feelings at all in contemplating such an end. When some months before his death, Trelawny rescued him from drowning, all he said was: "It's a great temptation; if old women's tales are true, in another minute I might have been in another planet."
In Italy he lived in the open air; now he would be riding with Byron in the country near Venice, Ravenna, or Pisa; now spending whole days in a rowing-boat on the Arno or the Serchio; now out at sea in his yacht. It is interesting to observe how frequently a boat serves him as a simile. He wrote often out at sea, very seldom under the shelter of a roof. _Prometheus_ he wrote in Rome, upon the mountainous ruins of the Baths of Caracalla; wandering among the thickets of odoriferous trees on the immense platforms and dizzy arches, he was inspired by the bright blue sky of Rome and the vigorous, almost intoxicating, awakening of spring in that glorious climate. _The Triumph of Life_ he wrote partly on the roof of his house at Lerici, partly lying out in a boat during the most overpowering heat and drought. Shelley belonged to the salamander species; broiling sunshine was what suited him best.