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.

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

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 pass.onate 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 no 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 Eleutherarchs," and believed that he posessed the power of operating an immediate change in the minds of men and the state of society. These wild dreams nad 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 eagernessor 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 1818.