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Dark is the realm of grief: but human His chains and tears, yea let him weep With rage to see thee freshly risen,

things

с

Like strength from slumber, from the When once from our possession they

prison,

In which he vainly hoped the soul to bind

must pass;

But love, though misdirected, is among

Which on the chains must prey that The things which are immortal, and

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FRAGMENT: LOVE IMMORTAL

WEALTH and dominion fade into the

mass

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HONEY from silkworms who can gather,
Or silk from the yellow bee?

Of the great sea of human right and The grass may grow in winter weather

wrong,

As soon as hate in me.

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NOTE ON POEMS OF 1817, BY
MRS. SHELLEY

THE very illness that oppressed, and the aspect of death which had approached sa near Shelley, appear 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 begun--and 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.

He projected also translating the Hymns of Homer; his version of several of the shorter ones remains, as well as that to Mercury already published in the Posthumous Poems. His readings this year were chiefly Greek. Besides the Hymns Dramas of Eschylus and Sophocles, the of Homer and the Iliad, he read 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 Faerie Queen; and other modern works, the production of his contemporaries, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Moore, and Byron.

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 man. He was eloquent when philosophy or politics or taste were the subjects of con

over his wrongs and woes, and was impelled to shed the grace of his genius over the uncontrollable emotions of his heart. 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

versation. 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 Eleutherarchs," and believed that he
possessed the power of operating an im-
mediate 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 de-
spondency 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 re-affections."
peating with wild energy The Ancient
Mariner, and Southey's Old Woman of
Berkeley; but those who do will recol-
lect that it was in such, and in the crea-
tions 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 1818

TO THE NILE

MONTH after month the gathered rains
descend

Drenching yon secret Æthiopian dells,
And from the desert's ice-girt pinnacles
Where Frost and
Heat in strange

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, On Atlas, fields of moist snow half in which there breathes, besides haughty

embraces blend

depend.

Tempest dwells

indignation, all the tenderness of a father's Girt there with blasts and meteors love, which could imagine and fondly dwell upon its loss and the consequences. 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

By Nile's aerial urn, with rapid spells
Urging those waters to their mighty end.
O'er Egypt's land of Memory floods are

level

And they are thine O Nile--and well thou knowest

torn from us. He did not hesitate to That soul-sustaining airs and blasts of evil resolve, if such were menaced, to abandon | And fruits and poisons spring where'er country, fortune, everything, and to escape with his child; and I find some unfinished stanzas addressed to this son, whom after

wards we lost at Rome, written under the idea that we might suddenly be forced to cross the sea, so to preserve him. This poem, as well as the one previously quoted, were not written to exhibit the pangs of distress to the public; they were the spontaneous outbursts of a man who brooded

thou flowest.

Beware O Man-for knowledge must to thee

Like the great flood to Egypt, ever be.

PASSAGE OF THE APENNINES

LISTEN, listen, Mary mine,
To the whisper of the Apennine,

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