mystery. TO COLERIDGE ΔΑΚΡΥΣΙ ΔΙΟΙΣΩ ΠΟΤΜΟΝ 'ΑΠΟΤΜΟΝ Oh! THERE are spirits of the air, And genii of the evening breeze, As star-beams among twilight trees :- The winds are still, or the dry church- With mountain winds, and babbling tower grass Knows not their gentle motions as they pass. Thou too, aërial Pile! whose pinnacles Point from one shrine like pyramids of fire, Obeyest in silence their sweet solemn spells, Clothing in hues of heaven thy dim and distant spire, springs, And moonlight seas, that are the voice When they did answer thee; but they away. And thou hast sought in starry eyes Beams that were never meant for thine, Around whose lessening and invisible Another's wealth:-tame sacrifice height Gather among the stars the clouds of Still dost thou hope that greeting hands, To a fond faith! still dost thou pine? Voice, looks, or lips, may answer thy demands? night. The dead are sleeping in their sepulchres: And, mouldering as they sleep, a thrill- Ah! wherefore didst thou build thine ing sound Half sense, half thought, among the darkness stirs, Breathed from their wormy beds all living things around, hope On the false earth's inconstancy? Of love, or moving thoughts to thee? And mingling with the still night and Could steal the power to wind thee in mute sky Its awful hush is felt inaudibly. their wiles. Yes, all the faithless smiles are fled Whose falsehood left thee brokenhearted; The glory of the moon is dead; Night's ghosts and dreams have now Thine own soul still is true to thee, departed; But changed to a foul fiend through misery. That loveliest dreams perpetual watch This fiend, whose ghastly presence ever Beside thee like thy shadow hangs, did keep. Its frozen dew, and thou didst lie Where the bitter breath of the naked sky Might visit thee at will. recovered from a severe pulmonary attack ; the weather was warm and pleasant. He lived near Windsor Forest; and his life was spent under its shades or on the water, meditating subjects for verse. Hitherto, NOTE ON THE EARLY POEMS, BY he had chiefly aimed at extending his MRS. SHELLEY THE remainder of Shelley's Poems will be arranged in the order in which they were written. Of course, mistakes will occur in placing some of the shorter ones; for, as I have said, many of these were thrown aside, and I never saw them till I had the misery of looking over his writings after the hand that traced them was dust; and some were in the hands of others, and I never saw them till now. The subjects of the poems are often to me an unerring guide; but on other occasions I can only guess, by finding them in the pages of the same manuscript book that contains poems with the date of whose composition I am fully conversant. In the present arrangement all his poetical translations will be placed together at the end. political doctrines, and attempted so to do by appeals in prose essays to the people, exhorting them to claim their rights; but he had now begun to feel that the time for action was not ripe in England, and that the pen was the only instrument wherewith to prepare the way for better things. In the scanty journals kept during those years I find a record of the books that Shelley read during several years. During the years of 1814 and 1815 the list is extensive. It includes, in Greek, Homer, Hesiod, Theocritus, the histories of Thucydides and Herodotus, and Diogenes Laertius. In Latin, Petronius, Suetonius, some of the works of Cicero, a large proportion of those of Seneca and Livy. In English, Milton's Poems, Wordsworth's Excursion, Southey's Madoc and Thalaba, Locke On the Human Understanding, Bacon's Novum Organum. In Italian, Ariosto, Tasso, and Alfieri. In French, the Réveries d'un Solitaire of Rousseau. To these may be added several modern books of travels. He read few novels. POEMS WRITTEN IN 1816 THE SUNSET The loss of his early papers prevents my being able to give any of the poetry of his boyhood. Of the few I give as Early Poems, the greater part were published with Alastor; some of them were written previously, some at the same period. The poem beginning "Oh, there are spirits in the air" was addressed in idea to Coleridge, whom he never knew; and at whose character he could only guess imperfectly, through his writings, and accounts he heard of him from some who knew him well. He regarded his change of opinions as rather an act of will than As light and wind within some delicate conviction, and believed that in his inner heart he would be haunted by what Shelley considered the better and holier aspirations of his youth. The summer evening that suggested to him the poem written in the churchyard of Lechlade occurred during his voyage up the Thames in 1815. He had been advised by a physician to live as much as possible in the open air; THERE late was One within whose subtle being, cloud That fades amid the blue noon's burning sky, Genius and death contended. None may know The sweetness of the joy which made his breath Fail, like the trances of the summer air, When, with the Lady of his love, who then and a fortnight of a bright warm July was spent in tracing the Thames to its source. He never spent a season more tranquilly First knew the unreserve of mingled than the summer of 1815. He had just being, He walked along the pathway of a field Her eyes were black and lustreless and Which to the east a hoar wood shadowed o'er, But to the west was open to the sky. There now the sun had sunk, but lines of gold wan: Her eyelashes were worn away with tears, Her lips and cheeks were like things dead-so pale; Hung on the ashen clouds, and on the Her hands were thin, and through their wandering veins points Of the far level grass and nodding flowers | And weak articulations might be seen And the old dandelion's hoary beard, And, mingled with the shades of twilight, lay "Is it not strange, Isabel," said the youth, "I never saw the sun? We will walk here To-morrow; thou shalt look on it with me. Day's ruddy light. The tomb of thy dead self Which one vexed ghost inhabits, night and day, Is all, lost child, that now remains of thee! Or live, or drop in the deep sea of Oh, that like thine, mine epitaph were That night the youth and lady mingled This was the only moan she ever made. lay In love and sleep-but when the morn ing came The lady found her lover dead and cold. Let none believe that God in mercy gave HYMN TO INTELLECTUAL BEAUTY I That stroke. The lady died not, nor THE awful shadow of some unseen And that she did not die, but lived to As summer winds that creep from flower tend to flower, Her aged father, were a kind of mad- Like moonbeams that behind some piny ever Hopes of high talk with the departed dead. I called on poisonous names with which our youth is fed; I was not heard-I saw them not- Tosage or poet these responses given Of life, at the sweet time when winds Therefore the names of Demon, Ghost, and Heaven, Remain the records of their vain endea are wooing I call the phantoms of a thousand hours Each from his voiceless grave: they have in visioned bowers Of studious zeal or love's delight Outwatched with me the envious night |