Dark is the realm of grief: but human His chains and tears, yea let him weep With rage to see thee freshly risen, things с Like strength from slumber, from the When once from our possession they prison, In which he vainly hoped the soul to bind must pass; But love, though misdirected, is among Which on the chains must prey that The things which are immortal, and FRAGMENT: LOVE IMMORTAL WEALTH and dominion fade into the mass HONEY from silkworms who can gather, Of the great sea of human right and The grass may grow in winter weather wrong, As soon as hate in me. NOTE ON POEMS OF 1817, BY THE very illness that oppressed, and the aspect of death which had approached sa near Shelley, appear to have kindled to yet keener life the Spirit of Poetry in his heart. The restless thoughts kept awake by pain clothed themselves in verse. Much was composed during this year. The Revolt of Islam, written and printed, was a great effort-Rosalind and Helen was begun--and the fragments and poems I can trace to the same period show how full of passion and reflection were his solitary hours. In addition to such poems as have an intelligible aim and shape, many a stray idea and transitory emotion found imperfect and abrupt expression, and then again lost themselves in silence. As he never wandered without a book and without implements of writing, I find many such, in his manuscript books, that scarcely bear record; while some of them, broken and vague as they are, will appear valuable to those who love Shelley's mind, and desire to trace its workings. He projected also translating the Hymns of Homer; his version of several of the shorter ones remains, as well as that to Mercury already published in the Posthumous Poems. His readings this year were chiefly Greek. Besides the Hymns Dramas of Eschylus and Sophocles, the of Homer and the Iliad, he read the Symposium of Plato, and Arrian's Historia Indica. In Latin, Apuleius alone is named. In English, the Bible was his constant study; he read a great portion of it aloud in the evening. Among these evening readings I find also mentioned the Faerie Queen; and other modern works, the production of his contemporaries, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Moore, and Byron. His life was now spent more in thought than action-he had lost the eager spirit which believed it could achieve what it projected for the benefit of mankind. And yet in the converse of daily life Shelley was far from being a melancholy man. He was eloquent when philosophy or politics or taste were the subjects of con over his wrongs and woes, and was impelled to shed the grace of his genius over the uncontrollable emotions of his heart. I ought to observe that the fourth verse of this effusion is introduced in Rosalind and Helen. When afterwards this child died at Rome, he wrote, apropos of the English burying-ground in that city: "This spot is the repository of a sacred loss, of which the yearnings of a parent's heart are now prophetic; he is rendered immortal by love, as his memory is by death. My beloved child lies buried here. I envy death the body far less than the oppressors the minds of those whom they have torn from me. The one can only kill the body, the other crushes the versation. He was playful; and indulged POEMS WRITTEN IN 1818 TO THE NILE MONTH after month the gathered rains Drenching yon secret Æthiopian dells, No words can express the anguish he felt when his elder children were torn from him. In his first resentment against the Chancellor, on the passing of the decree, he had written a curse, On Atlas, fields of moist snow half in which there breathes, besides haughty embraces blend depend. Tempest dwells indignation, all the tenderness of a father's Girt there with blasts and meteors love, which could imagine and fondly dwell upon its loss and the consequences. At one time, while the question was still pending, the Chancellor had said some words that seemed to intimate that Shelley should not be permitted the care of any of his children, and for a moment he feared that our infant son would be By Nile's aerial urn, with rapid spells level And they are thine O Nile--and well thou knowest torn from us. He did not hesitate to That soul-sustaining airs and blasts of evil resolve, if such were menaced, to abandon | And fruits and poisons spring where'er country, fortune, everything, and to escape with his child; and I find some unfinished stanzas addressed to this son, whom after wards we lost at Rome, written under the idea that we might suddenly be forced to cross the sea, so to preserve him. This poem, as well as the one previously quoted, were not written to exhibit the pangs of distress to the public; they were the spontaneous outbursts of a man who brooded thou flowest. Beware O Man-for knowledge must to thee Like the great flood to Egypt, ever be. PASSAGE OF THE APENNINES LISTEN, listen, Mary mine, |