Not less affecting are the lines written In fifiction near Naples Despondency.* How horrible is the calm in the tempest of his affection-how exquisite the pathos conveyed by the closing stanza :— "Yet now despair itself is mild, My heart grow cold, and hear the sea Breathe o'er my outworn brain its last monotony." The line stands thus in my copy-outworn for dying. And again, after her death, whether a violent or a natural one I know not, what a desolation of spirit there is in * Mrs. Shelley has omitted a line in the transcript of a stanza of this poem. It stood thus: "Blue bills and snowy mountains wear "I sit upon the sands alone The lightning of the noontide ocean Is flashing round me---and a tone Arises from its mingled motion, How sweet! if any heart could share in my emotion." I imagine also that we owe the beautiful gem entitled To a Faded Violet, which made its first appearance anonymously, in, I think, The Indicator, to this occurrence. "A withered, lifeless, vacant form, I weep-my tears revive it not. I sigh-it breathes none back to me. Is such as mine must be." Shelley told me that his departure from Naples was precipitated by this event. The letters he wrote from thence furnish another among the many proofs what an imperfect and little-to-be-trusted medium they are for biography. Who would have supposed from their tenor, that his mind was subject to any extraordinar excitement? Retreading his steps through the Pontine marshes, so graphically described in his Fragment Mazinghi, as, "Deserted by the fever-stricken serf, All overgrown with weeds and long rank grasses, And where the huge and speckled aole made, Rooted in stones, a broad and pointed shade," he reached Rome for the the second time in March, 1819, and there took up his abode, having completed, before his departure, the first Act of his Prometheus Unbound. His impressions of the City of the World, as contained in his communications to Mr. Peacock, are clothed in such glowing and eloquent language, as to make us regret that their correspondence should so soon have been discontinued; for with the exception of about eighteen letters addressed to that gentleman, although everything he writes is valuable, as tending to develope his life and character, the remaining forty-nine are of very inferior interest. There is something inspiring in the very atmosphere of Rome. Is it fanciful, that being encircled with images of beauty-that in contemplating works of beauty, such as Rome and the Vatican can only boast-that by gazing on the scattered limbs of that mighty Colossus, whose shadow eclipsed the world,—we should catch a portion of the sublime—become a portion of that around us? Schiller, in his Don Carlos, makes Posa say,- "In his Escurial The Artist sees, and gloats upon some work Certain it is, that such produce at Rome, what they are incapable of conceiving elsewhere, and at which they are themselves most sincerely astonished. No wonder, then, that Shelley should here have surpassed himself in all that he produced. He drenched his spirit to intoxication in the deep-blue sky of Rome. were the baths of Caracalla. Among his haunts Situate as they are at a considerable distance outside the present walls of Rome, they are but little frequented, and their solitude made them an especial favourite with the poet. He seems to have known "all the intricate labyrinths of the ruins, and to have traced every narrow and ill-defined footpath that winds among their entangled wildernesses of myrtle, myrtelus, and bay, and flowering laurestinus, and a thousand nameless plants, sown by the wandering winds-an undecaying investitute of Nature, to soften down their vast desolation." Here, he told me, he completed two more acts of his Prometheus. The chorus in the second act, scene 2, was doubtless inspired by this scene. "Some cloud of dew Drifted along the earth-creeping breeze, |