TWO FRAGMENTS TO MARY.

I.

My dearest Mary, wherefore hast thou gone,
And left me in this dreary world alone!
Thy form is here indeed a lovely one-
But thou art fled, gone down the dreary road,
That leads to Sorrow's most obscure abode;
Thou sittest on the hearth of pale despair,

Where

For thine own sake I cannot follow thee.

II.

The world is dreary,

And I am weary

Of wandering on without thee, Mary;
A joy was erewhile

In thy voice and thy smile,

And 'tis gone, when I should be gone too, Mary.

ON THE MEDUSA OF LEONARDO DA

VINCI,

IN THE FLORENTINE GALLERY.

I.

Ir lieth, gazing on the midnight sky,
Upon the cloudy mountain peak supine;
Below, far lands are seen tremblingly;
Its horror and its beauty are divine.
Upon its lips and eyelids seems to lie

Loveliness like a shadow, from which shine
Fiery and lurid, struggling underneath,
The agonies of anguish and of death.

II.

Yet it is less the horror than the grace Which turns the gazer's spirit into stone; Whereon the lineaments of that dead face Are graven, till the characters be grown Into itself, and thought no more can trace; 'Tis the melodious hue of beauty thrown Athwart the darkness and the glare of pain, Which humanize and harmonize the strain.

III.

And from its head as from one body grow,
As
grass out of a watery rock,
Hairs which are vipers, and they curl and flow
And their long tangles in each other lock,
And with unending involutions show

Their mailed radiance, as it were to mock
The torture and the death within, and saw
The solid air with many a ragged jaw.

IV.

And from a stone beside, a poisonous eft
Peeps idly into those Gorgonian eyes;
Whilst in the air a ghastly bat, bereft

Of sense, has flitted with a mad surprise
Out of the cave this hideous light had cleft,
And he comes hastening like a moth that
hies

After a taper; and the midnight sky
Flares, a light more dread than obscurity.

V.

'Tis the tempestuous loveliness of terror;

For from the serpents gleams a brazen glare Kindled by that inextricable error,

Which makes a thrilling vapour of the air Become a and ever-shifting mirror

Of all the beauty and the terror there— A woman's countenance, with serpent locks, Gazing in death on heaven from those wet rocks.

LOVE'S PHILOSOPHY.'

I.

THE Fountains mingle with the River
And the Rivers with the Ocean,
The winds of Heaven mix for ever
With a sweet emotion;'
Nothing in the world is single;
All things by a law divine
In one spirit meet and mingle.
Why not I with thine?-

II.

See the mountains kiss high Heaven
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister-flower would be forgiven
If it disdained its brother,

And the sunlight clasps the earth
And the moonbeams kiss the sea:
What is all this sweet work worth
If thou kiss not me?

1 Under the title of An Anacreontic this poem occurs in the Harvard College manuscript book, with slight variations from the texts already familiar to Shelley's readers. Shelley was indebted to a French song beginning with the words "Les vents baisent les nuages."-ED.

POEMS WRITTEN IN 1820.

ARETHUSA.

ARETHUSA arose

I.

From her couch of snows

In the Acroceraunian mountains,—

From cloud and from crag,

With many a jag,

Shepherding her bright fountains.

А

She leapt down the rocks, With her rainbow locks Streaming among the streams ;Her steps paved with green The downward ravine Which slopes to the western gleams: And gliding and springing

She went, ever singing,

In murmurs as soft as sleep;

The Earth seemed to love her, And Heaven smiled above her, As she lingered towards the deep.

II.

Then Alpheus bold,

On his glacier cold,

With his trident the mountains strook

And opened a chasm

In the rocks;-with the spasm

All Erymanthus shook.

And the black south wind

It concealed behind

The urns of the silent snow,
And earthquake and thunder
Did rend in sunder

The bars of the springs below:
The beard and the hair
Of the River-god were
Seen through the torrent's sweep,
As he followed the light
Of the fleet nymph's flight
To the brink of the Dorian deep.

III.

"Oh, save me! Oh, guide me!
And bid the deep hide me,
For he grasps me now by the hair!"
The loud Ocean heard,

To its blue depth stirred,
And divided at her prayer;
And under the water
The Earth's white daughter

Fled like a sunny beam;

Behind her descended

Her billows, unblended

With the brackish Dorian stream:Like a gloomy stain

On the emerald main

Alpheus rushed behind,

As an eagle pursuing

A dove to its ruin

Down the streams of the cloudy wind.

IV.

Under the bowers

Where the Ocean Powers Sit on their pearled thrones, Through the coral woods Of the weltering floods,