Most of
these attributes can be summed up under one heading--that of extreme
sensitiveness and susceptibility, which meet with no response or
sustainment, but rather with misjudgment, repulse, and outrage. Some
readers may think that Shelley insists upon this aspect of his character
to a degree rather excessive, and dangerously near the confines of
feminine sensibility, rather than virile fortitude. Apart from this
predominant type of character, Shelley describes his spirit as
'beautiful and swift'--which surely it was: and he says that, having
gazed upon Nature's naked loveliness, he had suffered the fate of a
second Actseon, fleeing 'o'er the world's wilderness,' and pursued by
his own thoughts like raging hounds. By this expression Shelley
apparently means that he had over-boldly tried to fathom the depths of
things and of mind, but, baffled and dismayed in the effort, suffered,
as a man living among men, by the very tension and vividness of his
thoughts, and their daring in expression. See what he says of himself,
in prose, on p. 92.
11. 4, 5. _He, as I guess, Had gazed,_ &c. The use of the verb 'guess'
in the sense of 'to surmise, conjecture, infer,' is now mostly counted
as an Americanism.
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