The palace of the monarch-slave had That mingled slowly with their native mocked earth: Famine's faint groan, and penury's silent There the broad beam of day, which tear, A heap of crumbling ruins stood, and Lighted the cheek of lean captivity With a pale and sickly glare, then freely

threw

Year after year their stones upon the

field,

Wakening a lonely echo; and the leaves
Of the old thorn, that on the topmost

tower

Usurped the royal ensign's grandeur, shook

In the stern storm that swayed the topmost tower

And whispered strange tales in the whirlwind's ear.

Low through the lone cathedral's roofless aisles

The melancholy winds a death-dirge
sung:

It were a sight of awfulness to see
The works of faith and slavery, so vast,
So sumptuous, yet so perishing withal!
Even as the corpse that rests beneath
its wall.

A thousand mourners deck the pomp of
death

To-day, the breathing marble glows
above

To decorate its memory, and tongues
Are busy of its life: to-morrow, worms
In silence and in darkness seize their
prey.

feebly once

Within the massy prison's mouldering With all the fear and all the hope they

courts,

Fearless and free the ruddy children

played,

Weaving gay chaplets for their innocent brows

With the green ivy and the red wallflower,

That mock the dungeon's unavailing gloom;

The ponderous chains, and gratings of The gradual paths of an aspiring change: For birth and life and death, and that

strong iron,

There rusted amid heaps of broken stone

strange state

Before the naked soul has found its And presaging the truth of visioned bliss. Are there not hopes within thee, which this scene

home,

All tend to perfect happiness, and urge

The restless wheels of being on their Of linked and gradual being has conway, firmed?

Whose flashing spokes, instinct with Whose stingings bade thy heart look infinite life, further still,

Bicker and burn to gain their destined When, to the moonlight walk by Henry

goal:

For birth but wakes the spirit to the

sense

Of outward shows, whose unexperienced shape

led,

Sweetly and sadly thou didst talk of death?

And wilt thou rudely tear them from thy breast,

New modes of passion to its frame may Listening supinely to a bigot's creed,

lend;

Life is its state of action, and the store
Of all events is aggregated there
That variegate the eternal universe;
Death is a gate of dreariness and gloom,
That leads to azure isles and beaming
skies

And happy regions of eternal hope.
Therefore, O Spirit! fearlessly bear on :
Though storms may break the primrose

on its stalk,

Though frosts may blight the freshness of its bloom,

Yet spring's awakening breath will woo the earth,

To feed with kindliest dews its favourite flower,

That blooms in mossy banks and darksome glens,

Lighting the green wood with its sunny smile.

Or tamely crouching to the tyrant's rod,
Whose iron thongs are red with human

gore?

Never but bravely bearing on, thy will
Is destined an eternal war to wage
With tyranny and falsehood, and uproot
The germs of misery from the human
heart.

Thine is the hand whose piety would
soothe

The thorny pillow of unhappy crime,
Whose impotence an easy pardon gains,
Watching its wanderings as a friend's
disease:

Thine is the brow whose mildness would
defy

Its fiercest rage, and brave its sternest will,

When fenced by power and master of the world.

Thou art sincere and good; of resolute mind,

Fear not then, Spirit, death's disrobing Free from heart-withering custom's cold

hand,

So welcome when the tyrant is awake,

So welcome when the bigot's hell-torch

burns;

control,

Of passion lofty, pure and unsubdued. Earth's pride and meanness could not vanquish thee,

'Tis but the voyage of a darksome hour, And therefore art thou worthy of the The transient gulph-dream of a startling

sleep.

Death is no foe to virtue: earth has seen

boon

Which thou hast now received: virtue shall keep

Love's brightest roses on the scaffold Thy footsteps in the path that thou hast

Mingling with freedom's fadeless laurels And many days of beaming hope shall bless

there,

Earth floated then below:
The chariot paused a moment there;
The Spirit then descended :
The restless coursers pawed the ungenial
soil,

Snuffed the gross air, and then, their
errand done,

Unfurled their pinions to the winds of heaven.

SHELLEY'S NOTES

I.-PAGE 5

The sun's unclouded orb

Rolled through the black concave. BEYOND our atmosphere the sun would appear a rayless orb of fire in the midst of a black concave. The equal diffusion of its light on earth is owing to the refraction of the rays by the atmosphere, and their reflection from other bodies. Light con

sists either of vibrations propagated through a subtle medium, or of numerous minute particles repelled in all directions from the luminous body. Its velocity greatly exceeds that of any substance with which we are acquainted: observations on the eclipses of Jupiter's satellites have demonstrated that light takes up no more than 8' 7" in passing from the sun to the earth, a distance of 95,000,000 miles. - Some idea may be gained of the immense distance of the fixed stars when it is computed that many years would elapse before light could reach this earth from the nearest of them; yet in one year light travels 5,422,400,000,000 miles, which is a distance 5,707,600 times greater than that of the sun from the earth.

I. PAGE 5

Whilst round the chariot's way
Innumerable systems rolled.

The plurality of worlds, -the indefinite immensity of the universe is a most awful

The Body and the Soul united subject of contemplation. He who rightly then,

feels its mystery and grandeur is in no

A gentle start convulsed Ianthe's danger of seduction from the falsehoods

frame:

Her veiny eyelids quietly unclosed;
Moveless awhile the dark blue orbs

remained :

of religious systems, or of deifying the principle of the universe. It is impossible to believe that the Spirit that pervades this infinite machine begat a son

She looked around in wonder and be- upon the body of a Jewish woman; or is

angered at the consequences of that All that miserable tale of the Devil, and necessity, which is a synonym of itself.

Eve, and an Intercessor, with the childish mummeries of the God of the Jews, is irreconcilable with the knowledge of the stars. The works of his fingers have borne witness against him.

A finer feast for thy hungry ear
Is the news that I bring of human woe.

VICE

And, secret one, what hast thou done,
To compare, in thy tumid pride, with me?
I, whose career, through the blasted year,
Has been tracked by despair and agony.

FALSEHOOD

And loosed her bloodhounds from the den.

They started from dreams of slaughtered

men,

And, by the light of her poison eye,
Did her work o'er the wide earth frightfully:
The dreadful stench of her torches' flare,
Fed with human fat, polluted the air:
The curses, the shrieks, the ceaseless cries
Of the many-mingling miseries,
As on she trod, ascended high

What have I done! I have torn the And trumpeted my victory!—

robe

From baby truth's unsheltered form,
And round the desolated globe
Borne safely the bewildering charm:
My tyrant-slaves to a dungeon-floor
Have bound the fearless innocent,
And streams of fertilising gore
Flow from her bosom's hideous rent,
Which this unfailing dagger gave.

I dread that blood!-no more--this day
Is ours, though her eternal ray

Must shine upon our grave.

Yet know, proud Vice, had I not given
To thee the robe I stole from heaven,
Thy shape of ugliness and fear
Had never gained admission here.

VICE

And know, that had I disdained to toil,
But sate in my loathsome cave the while,
And ne'er to these hateful sons of heaven,
GOLD, MONARCHY, and MURDER,

given;

Hadst thou with all thine art essayed
One of thy games then to have played,
With all thine overweening boast,
Falsehood! I tell thee thou hadst lost!-
Yet wherefore this dispute?—we tend,
Fraternal, to one common end;
In this cold grave beneath my feet,
Will our hopes, our fears, and our labours,

meet.

FALSEHOOD

Brother, tell what thou hast done.

VICE

I have extinguished the noonday sun,
In the carnage-smoke of battles won:
Famine, murder, hell and power
Were glutted in that glorious hour
Which searchless fate had stamped for me
With the seal of her security. .

For the bloated wretch on yonder throne
Commanded the bloody fray to rise.
Like me he joyed at the stifled moan
Wrung from a nation's miseries;
While the snakes, whose slime even him

defiled,

In ecstasies of malice smiled:

They thought 'twas theirs,-but mine the
deed!

Theirs is the toil, but mine the meed-
Ten thousand victims madly bleed.
They dream that tyrants goad them there
With poisonous war to taint the air:
These tyrants, on their beds of thorn,
Swell with the thoughts of murderous fame,
And with their gains to lift my name
Restless they plan from night to morn:
I-I do all ; without my aid

Thy daughter, that relentless maid,
Could never o'er a death-bed urge
The fury of her venomed scourge.

FALSEHOOD

Brother, well:-the world is ours;
And whether thou or I have won,

I brought my daughter, RELIGION, on The pestilence expectant lours earth:

On all beneath yon blasted sun.

She smothered Reason's babes in their | Our joys, our toils, our honours meet
In the milk-white and wormy winding.

birth;

But dreaded their mother's eye severe, -
So the crocodile slunk off slily in fear,

sheet:

A short-lived hope, unceasing care,