The Silent Isle by A.C. Benson

It is often said that poets have no biographies but their own works, but that is only a half-truth. It is to me one of the most delightful things in the world to follow the footsteps of a poet about, in scenes perhaps familiar to myself; to see how the simple sights of earth and sky struck fire from his mind, to realise what he thought about under commonplace conditions. I have often stayed, for instance, at Tan-yr-allt in North Wales, where Shelley spent some months, and where the strange adventure of the night-attack by the assassin occurred a story never satisfactorily unravelled; it was a constant pleasure there to feel that one was looking at the fine crags which Shelley loved, so nobly weather-stained and ivy-hung, that one was threading the same woodland paths, and rambling on the open moorland where he so often paced.

The interest, the inspiration of the process comes from the fact that one sees how genius transmutes the dull elements of life, those elements which are in reach of all of us, into thoughts rich and strange. I often think of the plum-tree in the tiny garden of Wentworth Place, where Keats, one languid spring day, sate to hear the nightingale sing, and scribbled the _Ode_ on loose half-sheets of paper, careless if they were preserved or no. It makes one discern the quality of genius to realise how there is food for it everywhere, and how little right one has to blame one's surroundings for not being more suggestive. Indeed, I cannot help feeling that the very vulgarity of Keats' circle, with its ill-flavoured jokes, its provincial taint, is even more impressive than the romance in which Shelley lived, because it marks his genius more impressively. Shelley was at least in contact with interesting personalities, while Keats' circle was on the whole a depressing one.