I MET a traveller from an antique land LINES. THAT time is dead for ever, child, Drowned, frozen, dead for ever! We look on the past, And stare aghast At the spectres wailing, pale, and ghast, NOTE ON POEMS OF 1817. BY THE EDITOR. 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. The "Revolt of Islam," written and printed, was a great effort" Rosalind and Helen" was begunand 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. Thus in the same book that addresses "Constantia, Singing," I find these lines : My spirit like a charmed bark doth swim Upon the liquid waves of thy sweet singing, Of rapture-as a boat with swift sails winging 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 their mother, Care, like a drowsy child, 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 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 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 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, Nor he who dared make the foul tyrant quail, "Twill wrong thee not-thou wouldst, if thou couldst feel, In his own blood-a deed it was to buy 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, Of thine own beauty from my spirit thrown. Yet speak to me-thy voice is as the tone Like one before a mirror, without care Of aught but thine own features, imaged there; 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. man. 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 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. ROSALIND AND HELEN. ADVERTISEMENT ΤΟ ROSALIND AND HELEN, AND LINES WRITTEN AMONG I do not know which of the few scattered poems I 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 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 impres-peak of those delightful mountains, I can only offer as sions, 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 determined 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. 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. SCENE.-The Shore of the Lake of Como. HELEN. COME hither, my sweet Rosalind. None doth behold us now: the power If thou depart in scorn: oh! come, And we are exiles. Talk with me Of that our land, whose wilds and floods, Those heathy paths, that inland stream, ROSALIND. Is it a dream, or do I see And hear frail Helen? I would flee Seeks yet its lost repose in thee. I share thy crime. I cannot choose But weep for thee: mine own strange grief The boy Lifted a sudden look upon his mother, 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, In silence then they took the way And the grey shades of evening O'er that green wilderness did fling Pursuing still the path that wound Through which slow shades were wandering, 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, O'er this fair fountain hung the sky, Only the glow-worm is gleaming; But she is mute; for her false mate This silent spot tradition old Had peopled with the spectral dead. |