NOTE ON THE EARLY POEMS, BY 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.

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 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; and a fortnight of a bright warm July was spent in tracing the Thames to its source. He never spent a season more tranquilly than the summer of 1815. He had just 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, he had chiefly aimed at extending his 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 Rêveries 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.

THERE late was one within whose subtle being,
As light and wind within some delicate 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
First knew the unreserve of mingled being,
He walked along the pathway of a field,
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
Hung on the ashen clouds, and on the points
Of the far level grass and nodding flowers,
And the old dandelion's hoary beard,
And, mingled with the shades of twilight, lay
On the brown massy woods-and in the east
The broad and burning moon lingeringly rose
Between the black trunks of the crowded trees,
While the faint stars were gathering overhead.—
"Is it not strange, Isabel," said the youth,
"I never saw the sun? We will walk here
Tomorrow; thou shalt look on it with me."

That night the youth and lady mingled lay
In love and sleep; but when the morning came
The lady found her lover dead and cold.
Let none believe that God in mercy gave
That stroke. The lady died not nor grew wild,
But year by year lived on:-in truth I think
Her gentleness and patience and sad smiles,
And that she did not die but lived to tend
Her aged father, were a kind of madness,
If madness 'tis to be unlike the world.

For but to see her were to read the tale

Woven by some subtlest bard to make hard hearts
Dissolve away in wisdom-working grief;—

Her eyelashes were worn away with tears,

Her lips and cheeks were like things dead-so pale ;
Her hands were thin, and through their wandering veins
And weak articulations might be seen

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!

"Inheritor of more than earth can give,
Passionless calm and silence unreproved,—
Whether the dead find-oh not sleep-but rest,
And are the uncomplaining things they seem,
Or live, or drop in the deep sea of Love;
Oh that, like thine, mine epitaph were-Peace!"
This was the only moan she ever made.

Bishopgate, Spring 1816.

HYMN TO INTELLECTUAL BEAUTY.

I.

THE awful shadow of some unseen Power

Floats, though unseen, among us; visiting
This various world with as inconstant wing

As summer winds that creep from flower to flower.
Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower,
It visits with inconstant glance

Each human heart and countenance;

Like hues and harmonies of evening,
Like clouds in starlight widely spread,

Like memory of music fled,

Like aught that for its grace may be

Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery.

II.

Spirit of BEAUTY, that dost consecrate

With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon

Of human thought or form, where art thou gone?

Why dost thou pass away, and leave our state, This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate?—

Ask why the sunlight not for ever

Weaves rainbows o'er yon mountain-river;

Why aught should fail and fade that once is shown;
Why fear and dream and death and birth

Cast on the daylight of this earth

Such gloom; why man has such a scope For love and hate, despondency and hope!

III.

No voice from some sublimer world hath ever

To sage or poet these responses given :

Therefore the names of Demon, Ghost, and Heaven, Remain the records of their vain endeavour;

Frail spells, whose uttered charm might not avail to sever From all we hear and all we see,

Doubt, chance, and mutability.

Thy light alone, like mist o'er mountains driven,
Or music by the night-wind sent

Through strings of some still instrument,

Or moonlight on a midnight stream,

Gives grace and truth to life's unquiet dream.

IV.

Love, hope, and self-esteem, like clouds depart
And come, for some uncertain moments lent.
Man were immortal and omnipotent,

Didst thou, unknown and awful as thou art,

Keep with thy glorious train firm state within his heart.

Thou messenger of sympathies

That wax and wane in lovers' eyes!

Thou that to human thought art nourishment,

Like darkness to a dying flame!

Depart not as thy shadow came :

Depart not, lest the grave should be,

Like life and fear, a dark reality!

V.

While yet a boy, I sought for ghosts, and sped Through many a listening chamber, cave, and ruin, And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing 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;
When, musing deeply on the lot

Of life, at that sweet time when winds are wooing
All vital things that wake to bring
News of birds and blossoming,

Sudden thy shadow fell on me :

I shrieked, and clasped my hands in exstasy!

VI.

I vowed that I would dedicate my powers

To thee and thine: have I not kept the vow?
With beating heart and streaming eyes, even now

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:
They know that never joy illumed my brow,
Unlinked with hope that thou wouldst free
This world from its dark slavery;

That thou, O awful Loveliness,

Wouldst give whate'er these words cannot express.

VII.

The day becomes more solemn and serene
When noon is past: there is a harmony

In autumn, and a lustre in its sky,

Which through the summer is not heard or seen,

As if it could not be, as if it had not been.

Thus let thy power, which like the truth
Of Nature on my passive youth
Descended, to my onward life supply
Its calm, to one who worships thee,
And every form containing thee,
Whom, Spirit fair, thy spells did bind
To fear himself, and love all humankind.