DIRGE FOR THE YEAR.

ORPHAN hours, the year is dead,

Come and sigh, come and weep!
Merry hours, smile instead,

For the year is but asleep:
See, it smiles as it is sleeping,
Mocking your untimely weeping.

As an earthquake rocks a corse

In its coffin in the clay,
So White Winter, that rough nurse,

Rocks the dead-cold year to-day;
Solemn hours ! wail aloud
For
your

mother in her shroud.

As the wild air stirs and

sways
The tree-swung cradle of a child,
So the breath of these rude days

Rocks the year :-be calm and mild,
Trembling hours; she will arise
With new love within her

eyes.

January grey is here,

Like a sexton by her grave;
February bears the bier,

March with grief doth howl and rave,
And April weeps-but, О ye hours !
Follow with May's fairest flowers.

VOL. III,

N

A FRAGMENT.

They were two cousins, almost like two twins,
Except that from the catalogue of sins
Nature had razed their love—which could not be
But by dissevering their nativity.
And so they grew together, like two flowers
Upon one stem, which the same beams and showers
Lull or awaken in their purple prime,
Which the same hand will gather—the same clime
Shake with decay. This fair day smiles to see
All those who love, and who e'er loved like thee,
Fiordispina ? Scarcely Cosimo,
Within whose bosom and whose brain now glow
The ardours of a vision which obscure
The very idol of its portraiture;
He faints, dissolved into a sense of love;
But thou art as a planet sphered above,
But thou art Love itself—ruling the motion
Of his subjected spirit:such emotion
Must end in sin or sorrow, if sweet May
Had not brought forth this morn-your wedding-day.

ΤΟ.

ONE word is too often profaned

For me to profane it,
One feeling too falsely disdained

For thee to disdain it.
One hope is too like despair

For prudence to smother, And Pity from thee more dear

Than that from another.

1

I can give not what men call love,

But wilt thou accept not
The worship the heart lifts above

And the Heavens reject not:
The desire of the moth for the star,

Of the night for the morrow,
The devotion to something afar

From the sphere of our sorrow?

NOTE ON THE POEMS OF 1821.

BY THE EDITOR.

My task becomes inexpressibly painful as the year draws near that which sealed our earthly fate ; and each poem

and each event it records, has a real or mysterious connexion with the fatal catastrophe. I feel that I am incapable of putting on paper the history of those times. The heart of the man, abhorred of the poet,

Who could peep and botanize upon his mother's grave,

does not appear to me less inexplicably framed than that of one who can dissect and probe past woes, and repeat to the public ear the groans drawn from them in the throes of

their agony.

The year 1821 was spent in Pisa, or at the baths of San Giuliano. We were not, as our wont had been, alonefriends had gathered round us. Nearly all are dead ; and when memory recurs to the past, she wanders

among

tombs : the genius with all his blighting errors and mighty powers ; the companion of Shelley's ocean-wanderings, and the sharer of his fate, than whom no man ever existed more gentle, generous, and fearless ; and others, who found in Shelley's society, and in his great knowledge and warm sympathy,

delight, instruction and solace, have joined him beyond the grave. A few survive who have felt life a desert since he left it. What misfortune can equal death? Change can convert every other into a blessing, or heal its sting—death alone has no cure ; it shakes the foundations of the earth on which we tread, it destroys its beauty, it casts down our shelter, it exposes us bare to desolation ; when those we love have passed into eternity, “life is the desert and the solitude,” in which we are forced to linger—but never find comfort more.

There is much in the Adonais which seems now more applicable to Shelley himself, than to the young and gifted poet whom he mourned. The poetic view he takes of death, and the lofty scorn he displays towards his calumniators, are as a prophecy on his own destiny, when received among immortal names, and the poisonous breath of critics has vanished into emptiness before the fame he inherits.

Shelley's favourite taste was boating ; when living near the Thames, or by the lake of Geneva, much of his life was spent on the water. On the shore of every lake, or stream, or sea, near which he dwelt, he had a boat moored. He had latterly enjoyed this pleasure again. There are no pleasureboats on the Arno, and the shallowness of its waters except in winter time, when the stream is too turbid and impetuous for boating, rendered it difficult to get any skiff light enough to float. Shelley, however, overcame the difficulty ; he, together with a friend, contrived a boat such as the huntsmen carry about with them in the Maremma, to cross the sluggish but deep streams that intersect the forests, a boat of laths and pitched canvas ; it held three persons, and he was often seen on the Arno in it, to the horror of the Italians, who