think that the shore of the Aral Sea is here referred to, but the Caspian in "sea-shore" of 1. 275. This would obviate the difficulty referred to below; but it is improbable that the writer would so abruptly omit all reference to the wanderer's journey from the Aral to the Caspian. In truth, it is needless to trouble ourselves to follow on the map the course of the hero's wanderings; the poet selected, doubtless, from his memories of classical history and literature, euphonious names which had suitable associations, more or less vague.

11 272-5. The hero first pauses where the marshes begin, a point which may be roughly called the shore; then a strong impulse urges him to the actual shore, the margin of the sea.

12 293. Its precious charge: the vision described in 11. 148–191.

12 294. a shadowy lure: the hope that the ideal might be found beyond death.

13 338-9.

Cf. 11. 3-4 of A Summer-evening Church-yard,

And pallid evening twines its beaming hair

In duskier braids around the languid eyes of day.

13 340 ff. In describing the voyage in the boat, Shelley had evidently in mind Thalaba, XI, stanzas 34 ff.

14 363. The sea discharges itself through an underground passage which the boat follows; at 1. 370 river and boat emerge into the open air.

14 374-412.

The flood plunges down a vast chasm, but a puff of

wind carries the boat safely into a quiet cove.

the boat; the rest of his journeying is on foot.

Here the hero leaves

15 412-413. Shelley seems sometimes to have decked his hair in this fashion; see Introduction, p. lx.

15 412-420. Careless of everything else, he is driven onward by his yearning for the ideal.

15 420 ff. A typical Shelleyan forest, with its vastness and eerie mystery; cf. the similar description in Rosalind and Helen, 11. 95 ff.

16 445-8. The patches of sky seen through the foliage, by daylight or moonlight, change their shapes with the movement of the boughs. 16 455-7. Cf. A Summer-evening Church-yard, 11. 5–6.

17 457-468. Shelley is wont to dwell with particular delight on reflections of scenery in the water; see To Jane The Recollection, 11. 53 ff.

17 479-491.

The hero feels himself in communion with the all-pervading spirit of nature, but is drawn onward by the sense of the ideal.

17 484-6. Forman explains this: "The spirit, assuming for speech the undulating woods, etc., held commune with the poet."

17 489-490.

The eyes which he had beheld in dream still seemed to hover over him.

18 493. The hero now follows the downward course of a rivulet which has its source in the well mentioned in 1. 457.

19 528. windlestrae: the stalks of certain grasses; the ordinary form is "windlestraw." Scott (Old Mortality, chap. vi) makes Lady Bellenden say: "I had rather the rigs of Tillietudlem bare naething but windlestraes and sandy lavrocks."

19 533-9. Here the poet seems to indicate the meaning of his symbolism.

19 535. irradiate: shining, brilliant.

19 543-550. This obscure passage has been much discussed. Mr. Rossetti explains: “Rocks rose, lifting their pinnacles; and the precipice (precipitous sides or archway) of the ravine, obscuring the said ravine with its shadow, did unclose (opened, was rifted), aloft, amid toppling stones," etc. The interpretation of 'disclosed' seems farfetched.

Mr. Swinburne says (Essays and Studies, p. 197): "I suspect the word 'its' to be wrong, and either a blind slip of the pen or a printer's error. If it is not and we are to assume that there is any break in the sentence, the parenthesis must surely extend thus far: 'its precipice obscuring the ravine'; i.e., the rocks opened or 'disclosed' where the precipices above the ravine obscured it. But I take 'disclosed' to be the participle: 'its precipice darkened the ravine (which was) disclosed above.' The sentence is left hanging loose and ragged, short by a line at least, and never wound up to any end at all. Such a sentence we, too, certainly find, once at least, in the Prometheus Unbound, II, iv, 12-18."

Mr. Forman suggests, but does not read, "amidst precipices," for "and its precipices"; he further connects obscuring' with 'rocks,' 'disclosed' (as a participle) with 'ravine,'' amid toppling stones,' etc., with 'lifted.'

Professor Dowden, in a letter quoted in the preface to Mr. Dobell's reprint of Alastor, explains the passage as follows: "As the ravine narrows, its rocky sides rise in height, so that the ravine grows dark below from the sheer height of its precipitous sides; but above, in the rocky heights, can be discerned openings in the crags, and caverns, amid which the voice of the stream echoes. Such is the sense I get, and I extract it from Shelley's text by considering the relative 'which' following rocks' as nominative, not only to the verb 'lifted,' but also

to the verb 'disclosed'; and this verb 'disclosed' has as its accusative or object the words 'black gulphs and yawning caves.' The words 'its precipice obscuring the ravine,' I take to be parenthetical, and as meaning the height of its rocky sides darkening the ravine. Pointed thus, my meaning may be clearer :

On every side now rose

Rocks, which, in unimaginable forms
Lifted their black and barren pinnacles
In the light of evening, and (its precipice
Obscuring the ravine) disclosed above

('Mid toppling stones) black gulphs, etc.

I separate 'toppling stones,' as governed by the preposition "mid,' from 'black gulphs,' etc., which is governed by the verb 'disclosed.'

is an adverb, not a preposition, and means in the upper region."

Above'

The objection to Professor Dowden's explanation is the putting of the "black gulphs" and "yawning caves" at the top of the ravine. But either this explanation or Mr. Swinburne's suggestion that the sentence is left unfinished seems to be the best solution of the difficulty.

20 589-596. One human step: the step of the hero. One voice must also be the hero's voice, though, as Mr. Rossetti says (Shelley Society's Note Book, p. 22), "It is rather anomalous to say that his own voice led his form." Mr. Rossetti suggests, as a possible explanation, that, since the voice "inspired the echoes," it may have been by following the echoes that the hero found the nook.

21 602-5. its mountains: the mountains on the "horizon's verge." The moon was low in the horizon; its light flowed from behind the mountains, and illuminated the mist which filled the atmosphere.

21 610. sightless: invisible; cf. Epipsychidion, 1. 240.

21 611. Skeleton: the "Skeleton " is Death, as we see from 1. 619. 21 612. its: the career of the storm mentioned in 1. 610.

21 619-624. The meaning of this passage appears to be that if Death will devour all that Ruin has made ready for him, he will be satisfied, and will no more make sudden and violent attacks. Men would, in that case, die by the natural slow processes of age, like flowers.

22 650. divided: the horns of the moon are divided by the intervention of a "jagged hill," as is shown by 1. 654.

23 667-671. The hero is compared to a lute, a bright stream, a dream of youth; the lute is "still," the stream is "dark and dry," the dream is "unremembered."

23 672.

Medea: the daughter of Aëtes, king of Colchis, and wife of Jason, the winner of the Golden Fleece; she possessed magical powers. In this reference to her "wondrous alchemy," the poet is thinking of Ovid's Metamorphoses, VII, 257–285, where it is related that under the influence of Medea's incantation: Vernat humus, floresque et mollia pabula surgunt (1. 284).

23 676. the chalice of immortality.

23 677. one living man: the Wandering Jew, to whom immortality was given as a curse. The Wandering Jew was often in Shelley's mind; in boyhood he wrote a poem on the subject; and the Jew figures, also, both in Queen Mab and in Hellas.

23 678. Vessel of deathless wrath: cf. Romans, ix. 22: “What if God, willing to shew his wrath and to make his power known, endured with much long-suffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction." 23 681. the dream: that there is an elixir of life.

24 709-710. speak, etc.: show their lack of power by their feeble attempts to image this woe.

24 712. deep for tears:

To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

(Wordsworth's Ode on Intimations of Immortality.)

A SUMMER-EVENING CHURCH-YARD.

"The summer evening that suggested to him the poem written in the church-yard of Lechlade occurred during his voyage up the Thames, in the autumn of 1815" (Mrs. Shelley's note). For a description of this voyage, see Dowden's Life, Vol. I, pp. 526–530.

25 13.

aërial Pile: the clouds above the setting sun.

LINES ("The cold earth slept below").

Given under the title "November, 1815," in The Literary Pocketbook for 1823. "There can be no great rashness in suggesting that the subject of the poem is the death of Harriet Shelley, who drowned herself on the 9th of November, 1816. In that case, 1815 and raven hair were used as a disguise, Harriet's hair having been a light brown' (Forman's note).

26 17. raven: Mrs. Shelley's edition reads tangled.

TO WORDSWORTH.

In the earlier stages of the French Revolution Wordsworth strongly sympathized with the party of progress; subsequently he became intensely conservative. The events of the time and the innate tendencies of Wordsworth's mind sufficiently account for this change; but some radical enthusiasts of the day regarded him as a deserter, and his acceptance of an appointment under the government in 1813 caused an outburst of indignation against him among these more ardent spirits. The change in Wordsworth's attitude to political questions also suggested Browning's Lost Leader.

HYMN TO INTELLECTUAL BEAUTY.

Mrs. Shelley tells us that this poem was conceived during Shelley's voyage with Lord Byron around the Lake of Geneva in the summer of 1816. In the conception of "Intellectual Beauty" we have a thought characteristic of Shelley and recurring continually in his works. The idea is borrowed from Plato, and will be best grasped through the reading of Diotima's speech in Plato's Symposium, as translated by Shelley himself (see in Forman's edition of the Prose Works, Vol. III, especially pp. 219-222). In this speech Diotima explains how the love of beautiful objects leads on to the love of the beautiful in soul and thought, and, finally, to the conception of universal beauty, of perfect abstract beauty, "eternal, unproduced, indestructible; neither subject to increase nor decay; not, like other things, partly beautiful and partly deformed; not at one time beautiful and at another time not; not beautiful in relation to one thing and deformed in relation to another; not here beautiful and there deformed; not beautiful in the estimation of one person and deformed in that of another; nor can this supreme beauty be figured to the imagination like a beautiful face, or beautiful hands, or any portion of the body, nor like any discourse, nor any science. Nor does it subsist in any other that lives and is, either in earth, or in heaven, or in any other place; but it is eternally uniform and consistent, and monoeidic with itself. All other things are beautiful through a participation of it, with this condition, that, although they are subject to production and decay, it never becomes more or less, or endures any change. When any one, ascending from the correct system of Love, begins to contemplate this supreme beauty,