AN old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king,- Rulers, who neither see, nor feel, nor know, ODE TO HEAVEN. CHORUS OF SPIRITS. FIRST SPIRIT. PALACE-ROOF of cloudless nights! Deep, immeasurable, vast, Which art now, and which wert then! Of acts and ages yet to come! Glorious shapes have life in thee, Living globes which ever throng And green worlds that glide along; And swift stars with flashing tresses; And icy moons most cold and bright, And mighty suns beyond the night, Atoms of intensest light. Even thy name is as a god, Of that power which is the glass Thou remainest such alway. SECOND SPIRIT. Thou art but the mind's first chamber, But the portal of the grave, Where a world of new delights Will make thy best glories seemi THIRD SPIRIT. Peace! the abyss is wreathed with scorn What are suns and spheres which flee With the instinct of that spirit Of which ye are but a part? Drops which Nature's mighty heart Drives through thinnest veins. Depart! What is heaven? a globe of dew, Some eyed flower, whose young leaves waken On an unimagined world: Constellated suns unshaken, Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams Beside a pumice isle in Baia's bay, *This poem was conceived and chiefly written in a wood that skirts the Arno, near Florence, and on a day when that tempestuous wind, whose temperature is at once mild and animating, was collecting the vapours which pour down the autumnal rains. They began, as I foresaw, at sunset, with a violent tempest of hail and rain, attended by that magnificent thunder and lightning peculiar to the Cisalpine regions. The phenomenon alluded to at the conclusion of the third stanza is well known to naturalists. The vegetation at the bottom of the sea, of rivers, and of lakes, sympathises with that of the land in the change of seasons, and is consequently influenced by the winds which announce it. All overgrown with azure moss and flowers Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below Thy voice, and suddenly grow grey with fear, And tremble and despoil themselves: Oh hear ! IV. If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear; The impulse of thy strength, only less free The comrade of thy wanderings over heaven, As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need. I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed ! A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud. V. Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is : Drive my dead thoughts over the universe Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth The trumpet of a prophecy! O wind, AN EXHORTATION. CAMELEONS feed on light and air: Poets could but find the same Would they ever change their hue As the light cameleons do, Suiting it to every ray Twenty times a-day? NOTE ON THE POEMS OF 1819. BY THE EDITOR. THOUGH Shelley's first eager desire to excite his countrymen to resist openly the oppressions existent during "the good old times" had faded with early youth, still his warmest sympathies were for the people. He was a republican, and loved a democracy. He looked on all human beings as inheriting an equal right to possess the dearest privileges of our nature, the necessaries of life, when fairly earned by labour, and intellectual instruction. His hatred of any despotism, that looked upon the people as not to be consulted or protected from want and ignorance, was intense. He was residing near Leghorn, at Villa Valsovano, writing The Cenci, when the news of the Manchester Massacre reached us; it roused in him violent emotions of indignation and compassion. The great truth that the many, if accordant and resolute, could control the few, as was shown some years after, made him long to teach his injured countrymen how to resist. Inspired by these feelings, he wrote the Masque of Anarchy, which he sent to his friend, Leigh Hunt, to be inserted in the Examiner, of which he was then the Editor. "I did not insert it," Leigh Hunt writes in his valuable and interesting preface to this poem, when he printed it in 1832, "because I thought that the public at large had not become sufficiently discerning to do justice to the sincerity and kindheartedness of his spirit, that walked in this flaming robe of verse." Days of outrage have passed away, and with them the exasperation that would cause such an appeal to the many to be injurious. Without being aware of them, they at one time acted on his suggestions, and gained the day; but they rose when human life was respected by the minister in power; such was not the case during the administration which excited Shelley's abhorrence. The poem was written for the people, and is therefore in a more popular tone than usual; portions strike as abrupt and unpolished, but many stanzas are all his own. I heard him repeat, and admired those beginning, My Father Time is old and grey, before I knew to what poem they were to belong. But the most touching passage is that which describes the blessed effects of liberty; they might make a patriot of any man, whose heart was not wholly closed against his humbler fellow-crea tures. Shelley loved the people, and respected them as often more virtuous, as always more suffering, and, therefore, more deserving of sympathy, than the great. He believed that a clash between the two classes of society was inevitable, and he eagerly ranged himself on the people's side. He had an idea of publishing a series of poems adapted expressly to commemorate their circumstances prosecution for libel they could not be printed. and wrongs he wrote a few, but in those days of They are not among the best of his productions, a writer being always shackled when he endeavours to write down to the comprehension of those who could not understand or feel a highly imaginative style; but they show his earnestness, and with what heartfelt compassion he went home to the direct point of injury-that oppression is detestable, as being the parent of starvation, nakedness, and ignorance. Besides these outpourings of compassion and indignation, he had meant to adorn the cause he loved with loftier poetry of glory and triumph-such is the scope of the Ode to the Assertors of Liberty. He sketched also a new version of our national anthem, as addressed to Liberty. God prosper, speed, and save, Pave with swift victory See, she comes throned on high, God save the Queen! Millions on millions wait God save the Queen! She is thine own pure soul God save the Queen! She is thine own deep love Rained down from heaven above, Wherever she rest or move, God save our Queen! Wilder her enemies In their own dark disguise, God save our Queen! All earthly things that dare Strip them, as kings are, bare; Be her eternal throne God save the Queen! Let the oppressor hold O'er our hearts Queen. Lips touched by seraphim Sweet as if Angels sang, God save the Queen! Shelley had suffered severely from the death of our son during this summer. His heart, attuned to every kindly affection, was full of burning love for his offspring. 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, in which there breathes, besides haughty indignation, all the tenderness of a father's love, which could imagine and fondly dwell upon its loss and the consequences. It is as follows: TO THE LORD CHANCELLOR. THY country's curse is on thee, darkest Crest Plead, loud as thunder, at Destruction's throne. And whilst that slow sure Angel, which aye stands, Watching the beck of Mutability, Delays to execute her high commands, And, though a nation weeps, spares thine and thee; O let a father's curse be on thy soul, And let a daughter's hope be on thy tomb, And both on thy grey head, a leaden cowl, To weigh thee down to thine approaching doom! *The Star Chamber. : I curse thee by a parent's outraged love, By hopes long cherished and too lately lost, Which were a fire within a stranger's hearth, By those unpractised accents of young speech, By all the happy see in children's growth, By all the days under a hireling's care Of dull constraint and bitter heaviness,O wretched ye, if ever any were, Sadder than orphans, yet not fatherless! By the false cant, which on their innocent lips, By thy most impious Hell, and all its terrors, By thy complicity with lust and hate, Thy thirst for tears, thy hunger after gold, The ready frauds which ever on thee wait, The servile arts in which thou hast grown old; By thy most killing sneer, and by thy smile, By all the acts and snares of thy black den, And-for thou canst outweep the crocodile,By thy false tears-those millstones braining men; By all the hate which checks a father's love, Yes, the despair which bids a father groan, And cry, my children are no longer mine; The blood within those veins may be mine own, But, Tyrant, their polluted souls are thine. I curse thee, though I hate thee not; O slave! 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 torn from us. He did not hesitate to resolve, if such were menaced, to abandon country, fortune, everything, and to escape with his child; and I find some unfinished stanzas addressed to this son, whom |