No Beast Provokes Human
Hatred Like That Old Coiling Serpent.
Long and cruel must have been his
reign for the memory to have lingered - how many years?
Let us say, in
order to be on the safe side, a million. Here, then, is another ghost of
the past, a daylight ghost.
And look around you; the world is full of them. We live amid a legion of
ancestral terrors which creep from their limbo and peer in upon our
weaker moments, ready to make us their prey. A man whose wits are not
firmly rooted in earth, in warm friends and warm food, might well live a
life of ceaseless trepidation. Many do. They brood over their immortal
soul - a ghost. Others there are, whose dreams have altogether devoured
their realities. These live, for the most part, in asylums.
There flits, along this very shore, a ghost of another kind - that of
Shelley. Maybe the spot where they burnt his body can still be pointed
out. I have forgotten all I ever read on that subject. An Italian
enthusiast, the librarian of the Laurentian Library in Florence,
garnered certain information from ancient fishermen of Viareggio in
regard to this occurrence and set it down in a little book, a book with
white covers which I possessed during my Shelley period. They have
erected a memorial to the English poet in one of the public squares
here. The features of the bust do not strike me as remarkably etherial,
but the inscription is a good specimen of Italian adapted to lapidary
uses - it avoids those insipid verbal terminations which weaken the
language and sometimes render it almost ridiculous.
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