They have taken thy brother and sister dear,
They have made them unfit for thee;
They have withered the smile and dried the tear,
Which should have been sacred to me.

To a blighting faith and a cause of crime
They have bound them slaves in youthly time,

And they will curse my name and thee,

Because we fearless are and free.

Come thou, beloved as thou art!
Another sleepeth stili,

Near thy sweet mother's anxious heart,
Which thou with joy wilt fill;

With fairest smiles of wonder thrown
On that which is indeed our own,
And which in distant lands will be

The dearest playmate unto thee.

Fear not the tyrants will rule for ever,
Or the priests of the evil faith;
They stand on the brink of that raging river,
Whose waves they have tainted with death.
It is fed from the depth of a thousand dells,
Around them it foams and rages and swells;
And their swords and their sceptres I floating see,
Like wrecks on the surge of eternity.

Rest, rest, shriek not, thou gentle child!
The rocking of the boat thou fearest,
And the cold spray and the clamour wild?
There sit between us two, thou dearest;

Me and thy mother-well we know
The storm at which thou tremblest so,
With all its dark and hungry graves,
Less cruel than the savage slaves

Who hunt thee o'er these sheltering waves.

This hour will in thy memory

Be a dream of days forgotten;

We soon shall dwell by the azure sea
Of serene and golden Italy,

Or Greece, the mother of the free;
And I will teach thine infant tongue
To call upon their heroes old

In their own language, and will mould
Thy growing spirit in the flame

Of Grecian lore; that by such name

A patriot's birthright thou mayst claim.

I ought to observe that the fourth verse of this effusion is introduced in Rosalind and Helen.

When afterwards this child died at Rome, he wrote, apropos of the English burying-ground in that city, "This spot is the repository of a sacred loss, of which the yearnings of a parent's heart are now prophetic; he is rendered immortal by love, as his memory is by death. My beloved child lies buried here. I envy death the body far less than the oppressors the minds of those whom they have torn from me. The one can only kill the body, the other crushes the affections." In this new edition I have added to the poems of this year "Peter Bell the Third." A critique on Wordsworth's Peter Bell reached us at Leghorn, which amused Shelley exceedingly and suggested this poem.

I need scarcely observe that nothing personal to the Author of Peter Bell is intended in this poem. No man ever admired Wordsworth's poetry more; he read it perpetually, and taught others to appreciate its beauties. This poem is, like all others written by Shelley, ideal. He conceived the idealism of a poet-a man of lofty and creative genius,-quitting the glorious calling of discovering and aunouncing the beautiful and good, to support and propagate ignorant prejudices and pernicious errors; imparting to the unenlightened, not that ardour for truth and spirit of toleration which Shelley looked on as the sources of the moral improvement and happiness of mankind; but false and injurious opinions, that vil was good, and that ignorance and force were the best allies of purity and virtue. His idea was that a man gifted ven as transcendently as the Author of Peter Bell, with the

highest qualities of genius, must, if he fostered such errors, be infected with dulness. This poem was written, as a warning-not as a narration of the reality. He was unac quainted personally with Wordsworth or with Coleridge, (to whom he alludes in the fifth part of the poem,) and therefore, I repeat, his poem is purely ideal;-it contains something of criticism on the compositions of these great poets, but nothing injurious to the men themselves.

No poem contains more of Shelley's peculiar views, with regard to the errors into which many of the wisest have fallen, and of the pernicious effects of certain opinions on society. Much of it is beautifully written-and though, like the burlesque drama of Swellfoot, it must be looked on as a plaything, it has so much merit and poetry-so much of himself in it, that it cannot fail to interest greatly, and by right belongs to the world for whose instruction and benefit it was written.

POEMS WRITTEN IN 1820.