Is yet unstained with tears of those who wake
To weep each day the wrongs on which it dawns;
Whose sacred silent air owns yet no echo
Of formal blasphemies; nor impious rites
Wrest man's free worship, from the God who loves,
To the poor worm who envies us His love!
Receive, thou young
of Paradise.

These exiles from the old and sinful world!

This glorious clime, this firmament, whose lights
Dart mitigated influence through their veil
Of pale blue atmosphere; whose tears keep green
The pavement of this moist all-feeding earth;
This vaporous horizon, whose dim round
Is bastioned by the circumfluous sea,
Repelling invasion from the sacred towers,
Presses upon me like a dungeon's grate,
A low dark roof, a damp and narrow wall.
The boundless universe

Becomes a cell too narrow for the soul

30

35

40

45

That owns no master; while the loathliest ward

Of this wide prison, England, is a nest

Of cradling peace built on the mountain tops,-

50

To which the eagle spirits of the free,

Which range through heaven and earth, and scorn the storm

Of time, and gaze upon the light of truth,

Return to brood on thoughts that cannot die

And cannot be repelled.

Like eaglets floating in the heaven of time,

They soar above their quarry, and shall stoop
Through palaces and temples thunderproof.

SCENE V

55

Archy. I'll go live under the ivy that overgrows the terrace, and count the tears shed on its old [roots?] as the [wind?] plays the song of

'A widow bird sate mourning

Upon a wintry bough.'

[Sings]

Heigho! the lark and the owl!

One flies the morning, and one lulls the night:-
Only the nightingale, poor fond soul,

Sings like the fool through darkness and light.

34 To the poor 1870; Towards the 1824. 46 boundless 1870; mighty 1824. ward 1870; spot 1824.

turn... repelled 1870;

5

38 their 1870; the 1824.

48 owns no 1824; owns a 1870. cradled 1824.

50 cradling 1870;

That cannot die, and may not be repelled 1824.

54, 55 Re

56 8 Like... thunderproof 1870; omitted 1824. Scene V. 1-9 I'll . . light 1870; omitted 1824.

[Composed at Lerici on the Gulf of Spezzia in the spring and early summer of 1822-the poem on which Shelley was engaged at the time of his death. Published by Mrs. Shelley in the Posthumous Poems of 1824, pp. 73-95. Several emendations, the result of Dr. Garnett's examination of the Boscombe MS., were given to the world by Miss Mathilde Blind, Westminster Review, July, 1870. The poem was, of course, included in the Poetical Works, 1839, both edd. See Editor's Notes.]

SWIFT as a spirit hastening to his task

Of glory and of good, the Sun sprang forth
Rejoicing in his splendour, and the mask
Of darkness fell from the awakened Earth-
The smokeless altars of the mountain snows
Flamed above crimson clouds, and at the birth
Of light, the Ocean's orison arose,

To which the birds tempered their matin lay.
All flowers in field or forest which unclose
Their trembling eyelids to the kiss of day,
Swinging their censers in the element,
With orient incense lit by the new ray
Burned slow and inconsumably, and sent
Their odorous sighs up to the smiling air;
And, in succession due, did continent,

Isle, ocean, and all things that in them wear
The form and character of mortal mould,
Rise as the Sun their father rose, to bear

5

15

Their portion of the toil, which he of old
Took as his own, and then imposed on them:
But I, whom thoughts which must remain untold

20

Had kept as wakeful as the stars that gem
The cone of night, now they were laid asleep
Stretched my faint limbs beneath the hoary stem

10-17 A widow... sound 1870; omitted here 1824 ; printed as 'A Song,' 1824, p. 217.

Which an old chestnut flung athwart the steep
Of a green Apennine: before me fled

The night; behind me rose the day; the deep

Was at my feet, and Heaven above my head,-
When a strange trance over my fancy grew
Which was not slumber, for the shade it spread

Was so transparent, that the scene came through
As clear as when a veil of light is drawn
O'er evening hills they glimmer; and I knew
That I had felt the freshness of that dawn
Bathe in the same cold dew my brow and hair,
And sate as thus upon that slope of lawn
Under the self-same bough, and heard as there
The birds, the fountains and the ocean hold
Sweet talk in music through the enamoured air,
And then a vision on my brain was rolled.

25

30

35

40

As in that trance of wondrous thought I lay,
This was the tenour of my waking dream:-
Methought I sate beside a public way

Thick strewn with summer dust, and a great stream
Of people there was hurrying to and fro,
Numerous as gnats upon the evening gleam,

45

All hastening onward, yet none seemed to know
Whither he went, or whence he came, or why
He made one of the multitude, and so

Was borne amid the crowd, as through the sky
One of the million leaves of summer's bier;
Old age and youth, manhood and infancy,
Mixed in one mighty torrent did appear,

50

Some flying from the thing they feared, and some
Seeking the object of another's fear;

55

And others, as with steps towards the tomb,
Pored on the trodden worms that crawled beneath,
And others mournfully within the gloom

Of their own shadow walked, and called it death;
And some fled from it as it were a ghost,
Half fainting in the affliction of vain breath:

60

But more, with motions which each other crossed,
Pursued or shunned the shadows the clouds threw,
Or birds within the noonday aether lost,

34, 35 dawn Bathe Mrs. Shelley (later edd.); dawn, Bathed 1824, 1839. 63 shunned Boscombe MS.; spurned 1824, 1839.

Upon that path where flowers never grew,
And, weary with vain toil and faint for thirst,
Heard not the fountains, whose melodious dew

Out of their mossy cells forever burst;

65

Nor felt the breeze which from the forest told

Of grassy paths and wood-lawns interspersed

70

With overarching elms and caverns cold,

And violet banks where sweet dreams brood, but they
Pursued their serious folly as of old.

And as I gazed, methought that in the way
The throng grew wilder, as the woods of June

75

When the south wind shakes the extinguished day,

And a cold glare, intenser than the noon,
But icy cold, obscured with blinding light

The sun, as he the stars. Like the young moon-
When on the sunlit limits of the night
Her white shell trembles amid crimson air,
And whilst the sleeping tempest gathers might—
Doth, as the herald of its coming, bear
The ghost of its dead mother, whose dim form
Bends in dark aether from her infant's chair,--
So came a chariot on the silent storm
Of its own rushing splendour, and a Shape
So sate within, as one whom years deform,
Beneath a dusky hood and double cape,
Crouching within the shadow of a tomb;

And o'er what seemed the head a cloud-like crape

Was bent, a dun and faint aethereal gloom
Tempering the light. Upon the chariot-beam
A Janus-visaged Shadow did assume

The guidance of that wonder-winged team;
The shapes which drew it in thick lightenings
Were lost-I heard alone on the air's soft stream

The music of their ever-moving wings.
All the four faces of that Charioteer
Had their eyes banded; little profit brings

Speed in the van and blindness in the rear,

Nor then avail the beams that quench the sun,

Or that with banded eyes could pierce the sphere

70 Of... interspersed Boscombe MS.; Of grassy paths and wood, lawninterspersed 1824; wood-lawn-interspersed 1839. 84 form] frown 1824. 93 light... beam] light upon the chariot beain; 1824.

96 it omitted

Of all that is, has been or will be done;
So ill was the car guided-but it passed
With solemn speed majestically on.

The crowd gave way, and I arose aghast,
Or seemed to rise, so mighty was the trance,
And saw, like clouds upon the thunder-blast,

The million with fierce song and maniac dance
Raging around such seemed the jubilee
As when to greet some conqueror's advance

Imperial Rome poured forth her living sea
From senate-house, and forum, and theatre,
When

upon the free'

Had bound a yoke, which soon they stooped to boar.
Nor wanted here the just similitude
Of a triumphal pageant, for where'er

The chariot rolled, a captive multitude

Was driven;-all those who had grown old in power
Or misery, all who had their age subdued

By action or by suffering, and whose hour
Was drained to its last sand in weal or woe,

105

110

115

120

So that the trunk survived both fruit and flower;

125

All those whose fame or infamy must grow
Till the great winter lay the form and name
Of this green earth with them for ever low;-

All but the sacred few who could not tame
Their spirits to the conquerors-but as soon

As they had touched the world with living flame,

130

Fled back like eagles to their native noon,
Or those who put aside the diadem
Of earthly thrones or gems..

Were there, of Athens or Jerusalem,
Were neither mid the mighty captives seen,
Nor mid the ribald crowd that followed them,
Nor those who went before fierce and obscene.
The wild dance maddens in the van, and those
Who lead it--fleet as shadows on the green,
Outspeed the chariot, and without repose
Mix with each other in tempestuous measure
To savage music, wilder as it grows,
They, tortured by their agonizing pleasure,
Convulsed and on the rapid whirlwinds spun
Of that fierce Spirit, whose unholy leisure

109 thunder Boscombe MS.; thunders 1824; thunder's 1839. Boscombe MS.; meet 1824, 1839. 131-4 See Editor's Note.

135

140

145 112 greet