TO WORDSWORTH.

In the earlier stages of the French Revolution Wordsworth strongly sympathized with the party of progress; subsequently he became intensely conservative. The events of the time and the innate tendencies of Wordsworth's mind sufficiently account for this change; but some radical enthusiasts of the day regarded him as a deserter, and his acceptance of an appointment under the government in 1813 caused an outburst of indignation against him among these more ardent spirits. The change in Wordsworth's attitude to political questions also suggested Browning's Lost Leader.

HYMN TO INTELLECTUAL BEAUTY.

Mrs. Shelley tells us that this poem was conceived during Shelley's voyage with Lord Byron around the Lake of Geneva in the summer of 1816. In the conception of "Intellectual Beauty" we have a thought characteristic of Shelley and recurring continually in his works. The idea is borrowed from Plato, and will be best grasped through the reading of Diotima's speech in Plato's Symposium, as translated by Shelley himself (see in Forman's edition of the Prose Works, Vol. III, especially pp. 219-222). In this speech Diotima explains how the love of beautiful objects leads on to the love of the beautiful in soul and thought, and, finally, to the conception of universal beauty, of perfect abstract beauty, "eternal, unproduced, indestructible; neither subject to increase nor decay; not, like other things, partly beautiful and partly deformed; not at one time beautiful and at another time not; not beautiful in relation to one thing and deformed in relation to another; not here beautiful and there deformed; not beautiful in the estimation of one person and deformed in that of another; nor can this supreme beauty be figured to the imagination like a beautiful face, or beautiful hands, or any portion of the body, nor like any discourse, nor any science. Nor does it subsist in any other that lives and is, either in earth, or in heaven, or in any other place; but it is eternally uniform and consistent, and monoeidic with itself. All other things are beautiful through a participation of it, with this condition, that, although they are subject to production and decay, it never becomes more or less, or endures any change. When any one, ascending from the correct system of Love, begins to contemplate this supreme beauty,

he already touches the consummation of his labour. For such as discipline themselves upon this system, or are conducted by another beginning to ascend through these transitory objects which are beautiful, towards that which is beauty itself, proceeding as on steps from the love of one form to that of two, and from that of two, to that of all forms which are beautiful; and from beautiful forms to beautiful habits and institutions, and from institutions to beautiful doctrines; until, from the meditation of many doctrines, they arrive at that which is nothing else than the doctrine of supreme beauty itself, in the knowledge and contemplation of which at length they repose."

Through the perception of such beauty, the soul receives, according to Shelley, its highest and best stimulus. The desire of this beauty lifts us above the petty and ignoble. Unfortunately, it is only at times that we are fully conscious of it. Its absence is lamented, and its power celebrated in the Hymn before us. It will be noted that there

is a certain parallelism between this poem and Wordsworth's Ode on Intimations of Immortality; in the latter Wordsworth laments the vanishing in mature life of the perception of the divine beauty of the universe.

28 25-36. The attempts to solve the mystery of the universe have failed; nothing serves to lighten the world except the perception of the beauty which lies behind it.

28 26.

29 45.

29 49-52.

these responses: the responses to the questions of stanza ii. The simile seems scarcely appropriate.

Cf. Alastor, 11. 23-29.

29 50-51. Shelley probably pronounced pursuing' pursuin'; at the present time in England this is at once a fashionable and a vulgar error. The same imperfect rhyme is found in Wordsworth, e.g., Ode on Intimations of Immortality, 11. 43–46.

30 73 ff. Compare the opening of the last stanza of Wordsworth's Ode on the Intimations of Immortality.

ON FANNY GODWIN.

Fanny Godwin (daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and adopted by William Godwin, hence the elder half-sister of Mary Shelley) poisoned herself October 9, 1816. She was of a tender, melancholy nature, and the only reason she assigned for her act was that she brought trouble to others. Shelley had seen her a short time before her death.

OZYMANDIAS.

First published in The Examiner of January 11, 1818. The Greek historian Diodorus gives an account of the statue referred to in the poem. It was reputed, he says, the largest in Egypt, the foot exceeding seven cubits in length; the inscription was, "I am Ozymandias, king of kings; if any one wishes to know what I am and where I lie, let him surpass me in some of my exploits " (see Diodorus, I, 47; or Wilkinson's Ancient Egypt, Vol. I, chap. ii).

The freedom, or even carelessness, of Shelley's treatment of the laws of the regular sonnet and the success of the poem, notwithstanding, are characteristic of his art. Presumably, lines 2 and 4, 9 and II are intended to rhyme.

31 7.

the statue.

31 8.

survive: inasmuch as they are depicted on the features of

The hand of the sculptor.

them: the passions.

the heart

of the monarch.

PASSAGE OF THE APENNINES.

329. lay: note the violation of grammar for the sake of rhyme, and cf. Byron's Childe Harold, IV, 1. 1620.

LINES WRITTEN AMONG THE EUGANEAN HILLS.

This poem was written at a villa near Este where the Shelleys lived for a short time during the autumn of 1818. "We looked from the garden," writes Mrs. Shelley, “over the plains of Lombardy,.bounded to the west by the far Apennines, while to the east the horizon was lost in misty distance." A few weeks before this poem was written the Shelleys had been in Venice, where Byron was then living. There their infant daughter died. Sorrow and ill health combined to make this a season of deep depression to the poet.

34 43. are the grammar is defective.

34 45-65.

These lines contain a concrete illustration of the assertions in the passage immediately preceding.

34 47-48. The bones still occupy the position which was given to them when the unhappy wretch stretched himself out for the last time. 35 71-89. “I saw once from a tower that overlooked two rookeries, this very thing. The moment the sun's disk had fully climbed over the edge of a distant wood, the whole band of rooks, from both their homes, silent before, rose, all the birds together, with a great 'hail,' into the air, and, hovering for a second or two, streamed down the wind towards the sun" (Stopford Brooke's note).

36 97. Amphitrite: a daughter of Oceanus.

36 114. If there is a reference to any particular temple here, it is probably that at Delphi, where Apollo chiefly uttered his oracles; in a Greek temple there would not be a dome.

37 122-133. Venice was at this time under the dominion of Austria. 38 152. Celtic Anarch: Austria. The Celts for a long time represented the northern barbarians to the Romans, and here the term Celtic seems to be applied vaguely to the northern barbarians as distinguished from the natives of Italy.

38 167-205. This passage on Byron was interpolated after the MS. of the poem had been sent to the printer.

39 195. Scamander: a river near Troy.

39 200-1. Arqua, where Petrarch, the great Italian poet (1304-74) lived, died, and is buried, is in the neighborhood.

39 206.

day.

It will be noted that the poem follows the course of the

40 219-230. These lines refer to Italy being under foreign domination.

40 238. In speaking of Sin and Death here, the poet is probably thinking of these personages as described in Paradise Lost, II, 11. 648 ff.

40 239. Ezzelin: Ezzelino da Romano (1194–1259), a famous Ghibelline chief. In the Divine Comedy he is represented by Dante as among the tyrants who are expiating the sin of cruelty.

42 292. The point, etc.: the zenith.

42 296-8.

of frost.

The reference is to the coloring of foliage by the action

42 315-319. The poet has been saying that the plains, leaves, vines, etc., and even his own sad spirit, are all interpenetrated and lightened 'by the glory of the sky." What that "glory of the sky" is he does not venture to define; whether it is love, or light, etc., or the universal spirit of beauty which exists in all these things, or something which the poet's own mind bestows upon external objects, that mind which by its imaginative power lends life to the dead universe. The whole

passage is a poetic expression for the fact that Shelley, as he gazes upon the scene, forgets the sadness of his life, and feels the joy and beauty of the world about him; there is, in addition, a suggestion of Shelley's mystical philosophy.

43 333. its: the antecedent is "the frail bark of this lone being." 43 342-373. 422 ff.

Cf. the description of the island in Epipsychidion, 11.

SONNET("Lift not the painted veil ").

Although the phenomena of life are merely the superficial appearances which conceal the real forces that lie beneath, do not seek to penetrate beyond the former. All that you will attain will be vague conjectures which spring from your hopes and fears.

44 1. The same metaphor is employed in the Essay on Life (Prose Works, Vol. II, p. 259) in speaking of the philosophical theory that nothing exists except as it is perceived, – —a theory held by the poet himself.

44 6. sightless: invisible; frequently used in this sense by Shelley; cf. Alastor, 1. 610.

STANZAS WRITTEN IN DEJECTION.

Speaking of the period when this poem was composed, Mrs. Shelley says: "At this time Shelley suffered greatly in health. ... Constant and poignant physical suffering exhausted him; and though he preserved the appearance of cheerfulness, and often greatly enjoyed our. wanderings in the environs of Naples, and our excursions on its sunny sea, yet many hours were passed when his thoughts shadowed by illness, became gloomy, and then he escaped to solitude, and in verses which he hid from fear of wounding me, poured forth morbid but too natural bursts of discontent and sadness. . . . We lived in utter solitude and such is often not the nurse of cheerfulness." Medwin connects this poem with the fate of the mysterious lady who is said to have followed the poet from England to Naples, and to have died there (see Dowden's Life, Vol. II, p. 252).

46 22. Shelley may have had some particular "sage" in mind, but such content is a common attribute of sages, - of the Stoics, for example.