singular, or else both in the plural. The only question is—which of these two alternatives to adopt. I think the singular must be correct; "the floods of the lake" might seem an overstrained expression, whereas "the wood" is entirely consistent with what appears at the beginning of the poem— I have rescued these lines (with some consciousness of audacity) from the vexatious grammatical solecism of the original— It is strange to observe how insular even such an Englishman as Shelley can be on occasion. Venice, unless renovated by freedom, is to go to the dogsleaving one only memory, that Lord Byron lived there for a while after quitting England! Oh shades of Dandolo, of Marco Polo, of Bellini, Carpaccio, Giorgione, Titian, Tintoret, Veronese, and how many another immortal -There happens to be evidence that this whole passage about Byron was an interpolated afterthought; for Mr. Frederick Locker possesses the original MS. of the passage, headed by Shelley with a note to say where it is to be inserted. P. 46. "Count Maddalo is a Venetian nobleman." It can scarcely be needful to observe that Count Maddalo represented, in fact, not a Venetian but an English nobleman-Lord Byron. Julian represented Shelley himself. The poem of Julian and Maddalo was sent by Shelley to Leigh Hunt in a letter which contains the following remarks: "It was composed last year at Este. Two of the characters you will recognize; and the third is also, in some degree, a painting from nature, but, with respect to time and place, ideal. I have employed a certain familiar style of language to express the actual way in which people talk with each other whom education and a certain refinement of sentiment have placed above the use of vulgar idioms. I use the word 'vulgar' in its most extensive sense. The vulgarity of rank and fashion is as gross, in its way, as that of poverty; and its cant terms equally expressive of bare conceptions, and therefore equally unfit for poetry. Not that the familiar style is to be admitted in the treatment of a subject wholly ideal, or in that part of any subject (which relates to common life) where the passion, exceeding a certain limit, touches the boundaries of that which is ideal. Strong passion expresses itself in metaphor borrowed from objects alike remote or near, and casts over all the shadow of its own greatness. I leave you to judge whether it is best to throw it [Julian and Maddalo] into the fire (!), or to publish it."-A letter to Mr. Ollier dated 15th December 1819 (Shelley Memorials) says:Have you seen my poem, Julian and Maddalo? I mean to write three other poems, the scenes of which will be laid at Rome, Florence, and Naples, but the subjects of which will be all drawn from dreadful or beautiful realities, as that of this was.' Alas that these poems remained unwritten !—and one might say unattempted, were it not that, in the case of Florence, Ginevra may be assumed to fulfil this intention. Or Fiordispina, the precise locality of which is not indicated in the extant fragmentary lines, might be one of them. P. 46. "The unconnected exclamations of his agony will perhaps be found a sufficient comment for the text of every heart." It strikes me that this would read more naturally if it stood inverted: "a sufficient text for the comment of every heart,"-i.e., text sufficient for every heart to comment on. But apparently Shelley meant to imply that the exclamations of the madman constituted a comment on misfortunes resembling "many other stories of the same kind "-stories which form "the text of every heart." P. 47. "I rode one evening with Count Maddalo Upon the bank of land which breaks the flow Of Adria towards Venice." This is the Lido. It may be interesting to quote here the account which Shelley, in a letter to his wife, gave of his first ride on the Lido with Lord Byron.' "He took me in his gondola across the laguna to a long sandy island which defends Venice from the Adriatic. When we disembarked, we found his horses waiting for us; and we rode along the sands of the sea, talking. Our conversation consisted in histories of his wounded feelings, and questions as to my affairs, and great professions of friendship and regard for me. He said that, if he had been in England at the time of the Chancery affair, he would have moved heaven and earth to have prevented such a decision. We talked of literary matters; his Fourth Canto [of Childe Harold], which he says is very good, and indeed repeated some stanzas of great energy to me." In the same letter Shelley had already said that "the weather here is extremely cold"; of which likewise a reminiscence may be traceable in Julian and Maddalo. His reference to gondolas is worth citing also. "These gondolas are the most beautiful and convenient boats in the world. They are finely carpeted, and furnished with black, and painted black. The couches on which you lean are extraordinarily soft, and are so disposed as to be the most comfortable to those who lean or sit. The windows have at will either Venetian plate-glass flowered, or Venetian blinds or blinds of black cloth to shut out the light." And again:"The gondolas themselves are things of a most romantic and picturesque appearance: I can only compare them to moths of which a coffin might have been the chrysalis. They are hung with black, and painted black, and carpeted with grey. They curl at the prow and stern; and, at the former, there is a nondescript beak of shining steel, which glitters at the end of its long black mass.' P. 49. "A windowless, deformed, and dreary pile." " Mr. Browning affirms that the "windowless " building described by Shelley is not what he supposed it to be, the madhouse, but a "penitentiary for rebellious priests, to the west between Venice and the Lido," on the islet of San Clemente. In 1851 Mr. Browning convinced himself of this at Venice; "San Servolo, with its madhouse, far from being 'windowless,' is as full of windows as a barrack." Yet Medwin had said (Life of Shelley, vol. i. p. 318), "The madhouse so graphically drawn on the island I know well." The writer of the present notes likewise knows both buildings by sight, but would not venture, of his own direct knowledge, to pronounce which is which possibly Medwin also only knew by sight a windowless building, and took Shelley's word for it that this was a madhouse. It had occurred to me as possible that the two edifices might have interchanged inmates since Shelley's time, but I believe there is no ground for such a surmise; or windows might have been opened between 1818 and 1851. 'Essays, Letters from Abroad, &c., vol. ii p. 109. The line which terminates with these words is left rhymeless. P. 52. "The clap of tortured hands, Fierce yells, and howlings, and lamentings keen." This is a probably conscious reminiscence from the famous lines of Dante : You and thou are mixed up in this poem, so far as the madman's speech is concerned. It was probably mere carelessness on Shelley's part: but there might be some greater plausibility in the mixture here than elsewhere, considering the bewilderment of the speaker's mind, his sudden changes of mood, and the greater or less degree of familiarity indicated by a foreigner's use of “thou' and "you." P. 59. "The air Closes upon my accents, as despair Upon my heart-let death upon despair!" Such is the reading in the Posthumous Poems, and in the MS. fortunately brought to light by Mr. Forman, which sets many things right that were wrong heretofore. Later editions give "let death upon my care!" This has a makerhyme sound. P. 61. "His dog was dead: his child had now become It would seem that Shelley wrote the opening words under the impression that Maddalo's dog had already been mentioned in the earlier part of the poem. No such mention, however, occurs. The reader will not need to be reminded that this alleged return of Shelley (Julian) to Venice, after an interval of years in which a daughter of Byron (Maddalo) has developed from a small child into a woman, is altogether imaginary. Byron's daughter Allegra, the child here referred to, preceded even Shelley to the tomb, dying when scarcely past infancy. P. 63. "From the Baths of Lucca, in 1818." I have added these introductory words. Mrs. Shelley's note on Julian and Maddalo (in the collected editions) has hitherto followed on along with her note on Rosalind and Helen; both being mixed up in one consecutive "Note on Poems of 1818." I have adhered to this date, 1818, given in the collected editions but, in its first form of publication (the volume of Posthumous Poems, 1824), Julian and Maddalo is dated "Rome, May 1819." Probably the poem was not finished until this later date. Internal evidence favours, I think, the surmise that the termination of the poem, beginning with the last paragraph of p. 60, or thereabouts, was written after some interval of time from the preceding portion; written rather with a view to concluding the poem somehow than with the same degree of impulse and interest which had prompted the earlier verses, or with the same amplitude of treatment. P. 64. "Audisne hæc, Amphiarae, sub terram abdite?" This grand line is quoted by Cicero (Tusc. Disp. ii. 60) from the Epigoni of an unknown author. P. 64. This poem was chiefly written upon the mountainous ruins of the Baths of Caracalla." The few words which Shelley here gives to this matter are divinely beautiful : but the reader will not object to see them supplemented by some others, taken from a letter which the poet wrote to Mr. Peacock on the 23rd March 1819.1 "I think I told you of the Coliseum, and its impression on me, on my first visit to this city. The next most considerable relic of antiquity, considered as a ruin, is the Thermæ of Caracalla. These consist of six enormous chambers, above 200 feet in height, and each enclosing a vast space like that of a field. There are in addition a number of towers and labyrinthine recesses, hidden and woven over by the wild growth of weeds and ivy. Never was any desolation more sublime and lovely. The perpendicular wall of ruin is cloven into steep ravines filled up with flowering shrubs, whose thick twisted roots are knotted in the rifts of the stones. At every step, the aërial pinnacles of shattered stone group into new combinations of effect, and tower above the lofty yet level walls, as the distant mountains change their aspect to one travelling rapidly along the plain. These walls surround green and level spaces of lawn, on which some elms have grown, and which are interspersed towards their skirts by masses of the fallen ruin, overtwined with the broad leaves of the creeping weeds. The blue sky canopies it, and is as the everlasting roof of these enormous halls.—But the most interesting effect remains. In one of the buttresses that supports an immense and lofty arch which bridges the very winds of heaven,' are the crumbling remains of an antique winding staircase, whose sides are open in many places to the precipice. This you ascend, and arrive on the summit of these piles. There grow on every side thick entangled wildernesses of myrtle, and the myrletus, and bay, and the flowering laurestinus (whose white blossoms are just developed), the white fig, and a thousand nameless plants sown by the wandering winds. These woods are intersected on every side by paths, like sheep-tracks through the copsewood of steep mountains, which wind to every part of the immense labyrinth. From the midst rise those pinnacles and masses, themselves like mountains, which have been seen from below. In one place you wind along a narrow strip of weed-grown ruin. On one side is the immensity of earth and sky; on the other, a narrow chasm which is bounded by an arch of enormous size, fringed by the many-coloured foliage and blossoms, and supporting a lofty and irregular pyramid, overgrown, like itself, with the all-prevailing vegetation. Around rise other crags and other peaks; all arrayed, and the deformity of their vast desolation softened down, by the undecaying investiture of Nature. Still further, winding up one half of the shattered pyramids, by the path through the blooming copsewood, you come to a little mossy lawn surrounded by the wild shrubs. It is overgrown by anemones, wallflowers, and violets, whose stalks pierce the starry moss, and with radiant blue flowers whose names I know not, and which scatter through the air the divinest odour-which, as you recline under the shade of the ruin, produces sensations of voluptuous faintness, like the combinations of sweet music. The paths still wind on, threading the perplexed windings, other labyrinths, other lawns, and deep dells of wood, and lofty rocks, and terrific chasms. When I tell you that these ruins cover several acres, and that the paths above penetrate at least half their extent, your imagination will fill up all that I am unable to express of this astonishing scene.' Prometheus and Adonais were viewed by Shelley with more complacency than his other poems. It will be interesting to collect here some of his expres 'Essays, Letters from Abroad, &c., vol. ii. pp. 58-60. sions concerning the former, in addition to the phrases cited by Mrs. Shelley from a letter dated 6th April 1819.-6th Sept. 1819. My Prometheus is, in my judgment, of a higher character than anything I have yet attempted, and is perhaps less an imitation of anything that has gone before it."—15th Oct. 1819. "The Prometheus, a poem in my best style, whatever that may amount to, will arrive with it: it is the most perfect of my productions." 15th Dec. 1819. My Prometheus is the best thing I ever wrote."-6th March 1820 (to Mr. Ollier). Prometheus Unbound, I must tell you, is my favourite poem: I charge you therefore specially to pet him, and feed him with fine ink and good paper. Cenci is written for the multitude, and ought to sell well : I think, if I may judge by its merits, the Prometheus cannot sell beyond twenty copies."8th June 1821. "You may announce for publication a poem entitled Adonais. I shall send it you either printed at Pisa, or transcribed in such a manner as it shall be difficult for the reviser to leave such errors as assist the obscurity of the Prometheus" [which the Gisbornes had been requested to revise, with the co-operation of Mr. Ollier himself: Mr. Peacock, however, seems to have taken the principal part].-10th April 1822. Prometheus was never intended for more than five or six persons."-[Conversation reported by Trelawny.] "My friends say my Prometheus is too wild, ideal, and perplexed with imagery: it may It has no resemblance to the Greek drama: it is original, and cost me severe labour. Authors, like mothers, prefer the children who have given them most trouble." be so. P. 66. " "What a Scotch philosopher characteristically terms 'a passion for reforming the world.'" This phrase is in Forsyth's Principles of Moral Science. P. 70. "Speak, Spirit! From thine inorganic voice, I only know that thou art moving near, And love. How cursed I him ?" Taking this passage exactly as it stands, I understand it to mean: "I only know that thou [the Spirit of the Earth] art moving near me, and that Love is also moving near me." This seems to be the direct sense: but how far is it significant in, and consistent with, its context? The idea that "Love" is near Prometheus in his agony seems to be very abruptly and startlingly introduced. Driven to seek for some reason why Love should thus be near, the reader may be fain to think he has found it in the fact that Panthea and Ione are there, to comfort Prometheus, as far as the conditions of the case allow. But this does not seem admissible; for the statement made by Prometheus is that he knows the presence of the Earth-Spirit and of Love from the "inorganic voice" of the former. If we attempt a verbal alteration, the first that suggests itself is to read "I only know that thou art moving near, i.e., "that thou are present with, and lovingly disposed towards, me." But neither does this look consistent with what Prometheus had said in his last preceding speech to the Earth "Mother, thy sons and thou Scorn him without whose all-enduring will Another emendation occurs to me: but I confess that it is an audacious onemuch too audacious to be intruded into the text: "Speak, Spirit! From thine inorganic voice, I only know that thou art moving near: |