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NOTE ON POEMS OF 1817.

BY THE EDITOR.

The

THE very illness that oppressed, and the aspect of death which had approached so near Shelley, appears 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. "Revolt of Islam," written and printed, was a great effort" Rosalind and Helen" was begunand the fragments and poems 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. Thus in the same book that addresses "Constantia, Sirging," I find these lines :

My spirit like a charmed bark doth swim

Upon the liquid waves of thy sweet singing,
Far away into the regions dim

Of rapture--as a boat with swift sails winging
Its way adown some many-winding river.

And this apostrophe to Music:

No, Music, thou art not the God of Love, Unless Love feeds upon its own sweet self, Till it becomes all music murmurs of.

In another fragment he calls it

The silver key of the fountain of tears,

Where the spirit drinks till the brain is wild; Softest grave of a thousand fears,

Where their mother, Care, like a drowsy child,
Is laid asleep in flowers.

And then again this melancholy trace of the sad thronging thoughts, which were the well whence he drew the idea of Athanase, and express the restless, passion-fraught emotions of one whose sensibility, kindled to too intense a life, perpetually preyed upon itself:

To thirst and find no fill-to wail and wander
With short unsteady steps-to pause and ponder-
To feel the blood run through the veins and tingle
Where busy thought and blind sensation mingle;
To nurse the image of unfelt caresses
Till dim imagination just possesses
The half created shadow.

fitted to sustain one whose whole being was love: In the next page I find a calmer sentiment, better

Wealth and dominion fade into the mass
Of the great sea of human right and wrong,
When once from our possession they must pass;
But love, though misdirected, is among
The things which are immortal, and surpass
All that frail stuff which will be-or which was.

In another book, which contains some passionate outbreaks with regard to the great injustice that he endured this year, the poet writes:

My thoughts arise and fade in solitude,

The verse that would invest them melts away
Like moonlight in the heaven of spreading day:
How beautiful they were, how firm they stood,
Flecking the starry sky like woven pearl!

He had this year also projected a poem on the subject of Otho, inspired by the pages of Tacitus. I find one or two stanzas only, which were to open the subject:

OTHO.

Thou wert not, Cassius, and thou couldst not be,
Last of the Romans, though thy memory claim
From Brutus his own glory-and on thee
Rests the full splendour of his sacred fame:

Nor he who dared make the foul tyrant quail,
Amid his cowering senate with thy name,
Though thou and he were great-it will avail
To thine own fame that Otho's should not fail.

"Twill wrong thee not-thou wouldst, if thou couldst feel,
Abjure such envious fame-great Otho died
Like thee-he sanctified his country's steel,
At once the tyrant and tyrannicide,

In his own blood-a deed it was to buy
Tears from all men-though full of gentle pride,
Such pride as from impetuous love may spring,
That will not be refused its offering.

I insert here also the fragment of a song, though I do not know the date when it was written,- but it was early :-.

ΤΟ

Yet look on me-take not thine eyes away,
Which feed upon the love within mine own,
Which is indeed but the reflected ray

Of thine own beauty from my spirit thrown.

Yet speak to me-thy voice is as the tone
Of my heart's echo, and I think I hear
That thou yet lovest me; yet thou alone

Like one before a mirror, without care

Of aught but thine own features, imaged there;
And yet I wear out life in watching thee;
A toil so sweet at times, and thou indeed
Art kind when I am sick, and pity me.

He projected also translating the Hymns of Homer; his version of several of the shorter ones remain, as well as that to Mercury, already published in the Posthumous Poems. His readings this year were chiefly Greek. Besides the Hymns of Homer and the Iliad, he read the Dramas of Eschylus and Sophocles, 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 Fairy 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 conversation. He was playful—and indulged in the wild spirit that mocked itself and others-not in bitterness, but in sport. The Author of "Nightmare Abbey" seized on some points of his character and some habits of his life when he painted Scythrop. He was not addicted to "port or madeira," but in youth he had read of "Illuminati and Eleutherachs," and believed that he possessed the power of operating an immediate change in the minds of men and the state of society. These wild dreams had faded; sorrow and adversity had struck home; but he struggled with despondency as he did with physical pain. There are few who remember him sailing paper boats, and watching the navigation of his tiny craft with eagerness-— or repeating with wild energy the "Ancient Mariner," and Southey's "Old Woman of Berkeley," but those who do, will recollect that it was in such, and in the creations of his own fancy, when that was most daring and ideal, that he sheltered himself from the storms and disappointments, the pain and sorrow, that beset his life.

POEMS WRITTEN IN MDCCCXVIII. MDCCCXVIII.

ROSALIND AND HELEN.

ADVERTISEMENT

TO

ROSALIND AND HELEN, AND LINES WRITTEN AMONG THE EUGANEAN HILLS.

THE story of ROSALIND and HELEN is, undoubtedly, not an attempt in the highest style of poetry. It is in no degree calculated to excite profound meditation; and if, by interesting the affections and amusing the imagination, it awaken a certain ideal melancholy favourable to the reception of more important impressions, it will produce in the reader all that the writer experienced in the composition. I resigned myself, | as I wrote, to the impulse of the feelings which moulded the conception of the story; and this impulse deter. mined the pauses of a measure, which only pretends to be regular, inasmuch as it corresponds with, and expresses, the irregularity of the imaginations which inspired it.

I do not know which of the few scattered poems 1 left in England will be selected by my bookseller to add to this collection. One, which I sent from Italy, was written after a day's excursion among those lovely mountains which surround what was once the retreat, and where is now the sepulchre, of Petrarch. If any one is inclined to condemn the insertion of the introductory lines, which image forth the sudden relief of a state of deep despondency by the radiant visions disclosed by the sudden burst of an Italian sunrise in autumn, on the highest peak of those delightful mountains, I can only offer as my excuse, that they were not erased at the request of a dear friend, with whom added years of intercourse only add to my apprehension of its value, and who would have had more right than any one to complain, that she has not been able to extinguish in me the very power of delineating sadness.

NAPLES, Dec. 20, 1818.

www.

SCENE.-The Shore of the Lake of Como. ROSALIND, HELEN, and her Child.

HELEN.

COME hither, my sweet Rosalind.
'Tis long since thou and I have met:
And yet methinks it were unkind
Those moments to forget.

Come, sit by me.

I see thee stand

By this lone lake, in this far land,
Thy loose hair in the light wind flying,
Thy sweet voice to each tone of even
United, and thine eyes replying
To the hues of yon fair heaven.
Come, gentle friend! wilt sit by me?
And be as thou wert wont to be
Ere we were disunited?

None doth behold us now: the power
That led us forth at this lone hour
Will be but ill requited

If thou depart in scorn: oh! come,
And talk of our abandoned home.
Remember, this is Italy,

And we are exiles. Talk with me

Of that our land, whose wilds and floods, Barren and dark although they be, Were dearer than these chesnut woods;

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The boy

Lifted a sudden look upon his mother,
And in the gleam of forced and hollow joy
Which lightened o'er her face, laughed with the glee
Of light and unsuspecting infancy,

And whispered in her ear, "Bring home with you That sweet, strange lady-friend." Then off he flew,

But stopped, and beckoned with a meaning smile,
Where the road turned. Pale Rosalind the while,
Hiding her face, stood weeping silently.

In silence then they took the way
Beneath the forest's solitude.
It was a vast and antique wood,
Through which they took their way;

And the grey shades of evening

O'er that green wilderness did fling
Still deeper solitude.

Pursuing still the path that wound
The vast and knotted trees around,

Through which slow shades were wandering,
To a deep lawny dell they came,

To a stone seat beside a spring,

O'er which the columned wood did frame

A roofless temple, like the fane

Where, ere new creeds could faith obtain,
Man's early race once knelt beneath
The overhanging deity.

O'er this fair fountain hung the sky,
Now spangled with rare stars. The snake,
The pale snake, that with eager breath
Creeps here his noontide thirst to slake,
Is beaming with many a mingled hue,
Shed from yon dome's eternal blue,
When he floats on that dark and lucid flood
In the light of his own loveliness;
And the birds that in the fountain dip
Their plumes, with fearless fellowship
Above and round him wheel and hover.
The fitful wind is heard to stir
One solitary leaf on high;
The chirping of the grasshopper
Fills every pause. There is emotion
In all that dwells at noontide here:
Then, through the intricate wild wood,
A maze of life and light and motion
Is woven. But there is stillness now;
Gloom, and the trance of Nature now:
The snake is in his cave asleep;
The birds are on the branches dreaming;
Only the shadows creep;

Only the glow-worm is gleaming;
Only the owls and the nightingales
Wake in this dell when day-light fails,
And grey shades gather in the woods;
And the owls have all fled far away
In a merrier glen to hoot and play,
For the moon is veiled and sleeping now.
The accustomed nightingale still broods
On her accustomed bough,

But she is mute; for her false mate
Has fled and left her desolate.

This silent spot tradition old

Had peopled with the spectral dead.

For the roots of the speaker's hair felt cold
And stiff, as with tremulous lips he told
That a hellish shape at midnight led
The ghost of a youth with hoary hair,
And sate on the seat beside him there,
Till a naked child came wandering by,
When the fiend would change to a lady fair!
A fearful tale! The truth was worse:
For here a sister and a brother
Had solemnised a monstrous curse,
Meeting in this fair solitude:
For beneath yon very sky,
Had they resigned to one another
Body and soul. The multitude,
Tracking them to the secret wood,
Tore limb from limb their innocent child,
And stabbed and trampled on its mother;
But the youth, for God's most holy grace,
A priest saved to burn in the market-place.

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Duly at evening Helen came To this lone silent spot,

From the wrecks of a tale of wilder sorrow
So much of sympathy to borrow
As soothed her own dark lot.
Duly each evening from her home,
With her fair child would Helen come
To sit upon that antique seat,
While the hues of day were pale;
And the bright boy beside her feet
Now lay, lifting at intervals
His broad blue eyes on her;

Now, where some sudden impulse calls
Following. He was a gentle boy
And in all gentle sports took joy;
Oft in a dry leaf for a boat,
With a small feather for a sail,
His fancy on that spring would float,
If some invisible breeze might stir
Its marble calm and Helen smiled
Through tears of awe on the gay child,
To think that a boy as fair as he,
In years which never more may be,
By that same fount, in that same wood,
The like sweet fancies had pursued ;
And that a mother, lost like her,
Had mournfully sate watching him.
Then all the scene was wont to swim
Through the mist of a burning tear.

For many months had Helen known
This scene; and now she thither turned
Her footsteps, not alone.

The friend whose falsehood she had mourned,
Sate with her on that seat of stone.

Silent they sate; for evening,
And the power its glimpses bring
Had, with one awful shadow, quelled
The passion of their grief. They sate
With linked hands, for unrepelled
Had Helen taken Rosalind's.
Like the autumn wind, when it unbinds
The tangled locks of the nightshade's hair,
Which is twined in the sultry summer air
Round the walls of an outworn sepulchre,
Did the voice of Helen, sad and sweet,
And the sound of her heart that ever beat,
As with sighs and words she breathed on her,
Unbind the knots of her friend's despair,
Till her thoughts were free to float and flow;
And from her labouring bosom now,
Like the bursting of a prisoned flame,
The voice of a long-pent sorrow came.

ROSALIND.

I saw the dark earth fall upon
The coffin; and I saw the stone
Laid over him whom this cold breast
Had pillowed to his nightly rest!
Thou knowest not, thou canst not know
My agony. Oh! I could not weep:
The sources whence such blessings flow
Were not to be approached by me!
But I could smile, and I could sleep,
Though with a self-accusing heart.
In morning's light, in evening's gloom,
I watched, and would not thence depart,―
My husband's unlamented tomb.
My children knew their sire was gone
But when I told them, "he is dead,"

They laughed aloud in frantic glee,
They clapped their hands and leaped about,
Answering each other's ecstacy

With many a prank and merry shout,
But I sat silent and alone,

Wrapped in the mock of mourning weed.

They laughed, for he was dead; but I
Sate with a hard and tearless eye,
And with a heart which would deny
The secret joy it could not quell,
Low muttering o'er his loathed name;
Till from that self-contention came
Remorse where sin was none; a hell
Which in pure spirits should not dwell.

I'll tell the truth. He was a man
Hard, selfish, loving only gold,
Yet full of guile: his pale eyes ran
With tears, which each some falsehood told,
And oft his smooth and bridled tongue
Would give the lie to his flushing cheek:
He was a coward to the strong;
He was a tyrant to the weak,
On whom his vengeance he would wreak :
For scorn, whose arrows search the heart,
From many a stranger's eye would dart,
And on his memory cling, and follow
His soul to its home so cold and hollow.
He was a tyrant to the weak,

And we were such, alas the day!
Oft, when my little ones at play,

Were in youth's natural lightness gay,

Or if they listened to some tale

Of travellers, or of fairy land,—

When the light from the wood-fire's dying brand
Flashed on their faces,—if they heard

Or thought they heard upon the stair
His footstep, the suspended word
Died on my lips: we all grew pale;
The babe at my bosom was hushed with fear
If it thought it heard its father near;
And my two wild boys would near my knee
Cling, cowed and cowering fearfully.

I'll tell the truth: I loved another.
His name in my ear was ever ringing,
His form to my brain was ever clinging;
Yet if some stranger breathed that name,
My lips turned white, and my heart beat fast:
My nights were once haunted by dreams of flame,
My days were dim in the shadow cast,

By the memory of the same!

Day and night, day and night,

He was my breath and life and light,

For three short years, which soon were past.

On the fourth, my gentle mother

Led me to the shrine, to be

His sworn bride eternally.

And now we stood on the altar stair,

When my father came from a distant land,
And with a loud and fearful cry,
Rushed between us suddenly.

I saw the stream of his thin grey hair,

I saw his lean and lifted hand,

And heard his words,-and live! O God!
Wherefore do I live?" Hold, hold !"
He cried, "I tell thee 'tis her brother!
Thy mother, boy, beneath the sod

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