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(5) The Greeks expect a Saviour from the omnia tellus."' Let these great names be my authority and my excuse.

west [P. 443].

It is reported that this Messiah had arrived at a seaport near Lacedæmon in an American brig. The association of names and ideas is irresistibly ludicrous, but the prevalence of such a rumour strongly marks the state of popular enthusiasm in Greece.

(6) The sound as of the assault of an

Imperial city [p. 447].

For the vision of Mahmud of the taking of Constantinople in 1453. see Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,

vol. xii. p. 223.

The manner of the invocation of the spirit of Mahomet the Second will be censured as over subtle. I could easily have made the Jew a regular conjuror, and the Phantom an ordinary ghost. I have preferred to represent the Jew as disclaiming all pretension, or even belief, in supernatural agency, and as tempting Mahmud to that state of mind in which ideas may be supposed to assume the force of sensations through the confusion of thought with the objects of thought, and the excess of passion animating the creations of imagination.

It is a sort of natural magic, susceptible of being exercised in a degree by any one who should have made himself master of the secret associations of another's thoughts.

(7) The Chorus [p. 451].

The final chorus is indistinct and

obscure, as the event of the living drama
whose arrival it foretells. Prophecies of
wars, and rumours of wars, etc., may
safely be made by poet or prophet in any
age, but to anticipate however darkly a
period of regeneration and happiness is a
more hazardous exercise of the faculty
which bards possess or feign.
It will
remind the reader "magno nec proximus
intervallo" of Isaiah and Virgil, whose
ardent spirits overleaping the actual reign
of evil which we endure and bewail, already
saw the possible and perhaps approaching
state of society in which the lion shall
lie down with the lamb," and "omnis feret

"

(8) Saturn and Love their long repose shall burst [p. 452].

of a real or imaginary state of innocence Saturn and Love were among the deities and happiness. All those who fell, or the Gods of Greece, Asia, and Egypt; the One who rose, or Jesus Christ, at whose appearance the idols of the Pagan World were amerced of their worship; and the of the idolatry of China, India, the Anmany unsubdued, or the monstrous objects tarctic islands, and the native tribes of America, certainly have reigned over the in succession, during periods in which all understandings of men in conjunction or

we know of evil has been in a state of

portentous, and, until the revival of learn-
ing and the arts, perpetually increasing
activity. The Grecian gods seem indeed
although it cannot be said, that as far as
to have been personally more innocent,
they gave so edifying an example as their
temperance and chastity are concerned,

successor. The sublime human character
of Jesus Christ was deformed by an im-
puted identification with a power, who
tempted, betrayed, and punished the
innocent beings who were called into
existence by his sole will; and for the
period of a thousand years, the spirit of
this most just, wise, and benevolent of
men, has been propitiated with myriads
of hecatombs of those who approached the
nearest to his innocence and wisdom,
sacrificed under every aggravation of
The
horrors of the Mexican, the Peruvian, and
atrocity and variety of torture.
the Indian superstitions are well known.

NOTE ON HELLAS, BY MRS.

SHELLEY

THE South of Europe was in a state of great political excitement at the beginning of the year 1821. The Spanish Revolution had been a signal to Italy; secret societies were formed; and, when Naples rose to declare the Constitution, the call was responded to from Brundusium to the foot of the Alps. To crush these

attempts to obtain liberty, early in 1821 the Austrians poured their armies into the Peninsula: at first their coming rather seemed to add energy and resolution to a people long enslaved. The Piedmontese asserted their freedom; Genoa threw off the yoke of the King of Sardinia; and, as if in playful imitation, the people of the little state of Massa and Carrara gave the congé to their sovereign, and set up a republic.

Tuscany alone was perfectly tranquil. It was said that the Austrian minister presented a list of sixty Carbonari to the Grand Duke, urging their imprisonment; and the Grand Duke replied, "I do not know whether these sixty men are Carbonari, but I know, if I imprison them, I shall directly have sixty-thousand start up." But, though the Tuscans had no desire to disturb the paternal government beneath whose shelter they slumbered, they regarded the progress of the various Italian revolutions with intense interest, and hatred for the Austrian was warm in every bosom. But they had slender hopes; they knew that the Neapolitans would offer no fit resistance to the regular German troops, and that the overthrow of the constitution in Naples would act as a decisive blow against all struggles for liberty in Italy.

We have seen the rise and progress of reform. But the Holy Alliance was alive and active in those days, and few could dream of the peaceful triumph of liberty. It seemed then that the armed assertion of freedom in the South of Europe was the only hope of the liberals, as, if it prevailed, the nations of the north would imitate the example. Happily the reverse has proved the fact. The countries accustomed to the exercise of the privileges of freemen, to a limited extent, have extended, and are extending, these limits. Freedom and knowledge have now a chance of proceeding hand in hand; and, if it continue thus, we may hope for the durability of both. Then, as I have saidin 1821-Shelley, as well as every other lover of liberty, looked upon the struggles in Spain and Italy as decisive of the destinies of the world, probably for centuries to

come. The interest he took in the progress of affairs was intense. When Gezua declared itself free, his hopes were at their highest. Day after day he read the bulletins of the Austrian army, and sought eagerly to gather tokens of its defeat He heard of the revolt of Genoa with emotions of transport. His whole heart and soul were in the triumph of the cause We were living at Pisa at that time; and several well-informed Italians, at the head! of whom we may place the celebrated Vaccà, were accustomed to seek for sym pathy in their hopes from Shelley: they did not find such for the despair they too generally experienced, founded on cuntempt for their southern countrymen.

While the fate of the progress of the Austrian armies then invading Naples was yet in suspense, the news of another revolution filled him with exultation. We had formed the acquaintance at Pisa, of several Constantinopolitan Greeks, of the family of Prince Caradja, formerly Hos podar of Wallachia; who, hearing that the bowstring, the accustomed finale of his viceroyalty, was on the road to him. escaped with his treasures, and took up his abode in Tuscany. Among these was the gentleman to whom the drama of Hellas is dedicated. Prince Mavrocond to was warmed by those aspirations for the independence of his country which filled the hearts of many of his countrymen. He often intimated the possibility of an insurrection in Greece; but we had no idea of its being so near at hand, when, on the 1st of April 1821, he called on Shelley, bringing the proclamation of his cousin, Prince Ypsilanti, and, radiant with exultation and delight, declared that henceforth Greece would be free.

Shelley had hymned the dawn of liberty in Spain and Naples, in two odes dictated by the warmest enthusiasm; he felt himself naturally impelled to decorate with poetry the uprise of the descendants of that people whose works he regarded with deep admiration, and to adopt the vaticinatory character in prophesying their success. Hellas was written in a moment of enthusiasm. It is curious to remark how well he overcomes the difficulty of

forming a drama out of such scant materials. His prophecies, indeed, came true in their general, not their particular, purport. He did not foresee the death of Lord Londonderry, which was to be the epoch of a change in English politics, particularly as regarded foreign affairs; nor that the navy of his country would fight for instead of against the Greeks, and by the battle of Navarino secure their enfranchisement from the Turks. Almost against reason, as it appeared to him, he resolved to believe that Greece would prove triumphant; and in this spirit, auguring ultimate good, yet grieving over the vicissitudes to be endured in the interval, he composed his drama.

Hellas was among the last of his compositions, and is among the most beautiful. The choruses are singularly imaginative, and melodious in their versification. There are some stanzas that beautifully exemplify Shelley's peculiar style; as, for instance, the assertion of the intellectual empire which must be for ever the inheritance of the country of Homer, Sophocles, and Plato:

"But Greece and her foundations are

Built below the tide of war;

Based on the crystalline sea

Of thought and its eternity."

the individuals who composed our intimate society, but left unfinished. I have preserved a sketch of the story as far as it had been shadowed in the poet's mind.

An Enchantress, living in one of the islands of the Indian Archipelago, saves the life of a Pirate, a man of savage but noble nature. She becomes enamoured of him; and he, inconstant to his mortal love, for a while returns her passion; but at length, recalling the memory of her whom he left, and who laments his loss, he escapes from the Enchanted Island, and returns to his lady. His mode of life makes him again go to sea, and the Enchantress seizes the opportunity to bring him, by a spirit-brewed tempest, back to her Island. M. W. S.

SCENE, BEFORE THE CAVERN OF THE INDIAN ENCHANTRESS. The ENCHANTRESS comes forth.

Enchantress.

HE came like a dream in the dawn of life,

He fled like a shadow before its noon;

And again, that philosophical truth felici- He is gone, and my peace is turned to

tously imaged forth

"Revenge and Wrong bring forth their kind: The foul cubs like their parents are; Their den is in the guilty mind,

And Conscience feeds them with despair." The conclusion of the last chorus is

strife,

And I wander and wane like the
weary moon.

Oh, sweet Echo, wake,
And for my sake

Make answer the while my heart shall break!

among the most beautiful of his lyrics.
The imagery is distinct and majestic;
the prophecy, such as poets love to dwell
upon, the Regeneration of Mankind-But
and that regeneration reflecting back
splendour on the foregone time, from
which it inherits so much of intellectual
wealth, and memory of past virtuous
deeds, as must render the possession of
happiness and peace of tenfold value.

FRAGMENTS OF

my heart has a music which Echo's lips,

Though tender and true, yet can

answer not,

And the shadow that moves in the soul's eclipse

Can return not the kiss by his now forgot;

AN UNFINISHED DRAMA
THE following fragments are part of a Cast
Drama undertaken for the amusement of

Sweet lips! he who hath

On my desolate path

the darkness of absence, worse than death!

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Young as thou art thou canst afford to weep.

Lady. Oh! would that I could claim From all the bitterness of that sweet exemption

A good Spirit, who watches over the Pirate's fate, leads, in a mysterious manner, the lady of his love to the Enchanted Isle; and has also led thither a Youth, who loves the lady, but whose passion she returns only with a sisterly affection. The ensuing scene takes place between I loved, I love, and when I love no them on their arrival at the Isle, where

name.

more

they meet, but without distinct mutual Let joys and grief perish, and leave recognition.

[ANOTHER SCENE] INDIAN YOUTH and LADY.

Indian. And, if my grief should still be dearer to me

Than all the pleasures in the world beside,

despair

To ring the knell of youth. He stood beside me,

The embodied vision of the brightest dream,

Which like a dawn heralds the day of life;

The shadow of his presence made my world

A paradise. All familiar things he touched,

Why would you lighten it?
Lady.
I offer only
That which I seek, some human sym- All
pathy

In this mysterious island.

Indian.
Oh! my friend,
My sister, my beloved!- What do I

say

My brain is dizzy, and I scarce know whether

common words he spoke, became

to me

Like forms and sounds of a diviner
world.

He was as is the sun in his fierce youth,
As terrible and lovely as a tempest;
He came, and went, and left me what
I am.

Alas! Why must I think how oft we From such an islet, such a river

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Over that islet paved with flowers and Of the same lot, so that the sufferers May feel another's sorrow as their own, While the musk-rose leaves, like flakes And find in friendship what they lost in

moss,

love.

Showered on us, and the dove mourned That cannot be: yet it is strange that

of crimson snow,

[blocks in formation]

Whose love had made my sorrows dear For he seemed stormy, and would often

seem

to him, Even as my sorrow made his love to A quenchless sun masked in portentous me!

clouds;

Indian. One curse of Nature stamps For such his thoughts, and even his in the same mould actions were ;

The features of the wretched; and they But he was not of them, nor they of

are

As like as violet to violet,

When memory, the ghost, their odours keeps

'Mid the cold relics of abandoned joy.— Proceed.

Lady.

cent boy.

him,

But as they hid his splendour from the earth.

Some said he was a man of blood and

peril,

And steeped in bitter infamy to the lips. He was a simple inno- | More need was there I should be inno

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cent,

More need that I should be most true

and kind,

And much more need that there should be found one

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