Their tears fell on the dear companion cold
Of pleasures now departed; then was knolled
The bell of death, and soon the priests arrived,
And finding death their penitent had shrived,
Returned like ravens from a corpse whereon
A vulture has just feasted to the bone.
And then the mourning women came.—

*

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THE DIRGE.

Old winter was gone

In his weakness back to the mountains hoar,

And the spring came down

From the planet that hovers upon the shore

Where the sea of sunlight encroaches

On the limits of wintry night;—

If the land, and the air, and the sea
Rejoice not when spring approaches,
We did not rejoice in thee,

Ginevra!

She is still, she is cold

On the bridal couch,

One step to the white death-bed,

And one to the bier,

And one to the charnel-and one, O where?

The dark arrow fled

In the noon.

Ere the sun through heaven once more has rolled,

The rats in her heart

Will have made their nest,

And the worms be alive in her golden hair,1

1 I trust the proposal set forth in Mr. Rossetti's edition, to read breast

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for heart may never be carried out,or that of reading rest for sleep as the

While the spirit that guides the sun,
Sits throned in his flaming chair,
She shall sleep.

EVENING.

PONTE A MARE, PISA.1

I.

THE sun is set; the swallows are asleep;
The bats are flitting fast in the grey air;
The slow soft toads out of damp corners creep,
And evening's breath, wandering here and there
Over the quivering surface of the stream,
Wakes not one ripple from its summer2 dream.

II.

There is no dew on the dry grass to-night,
Nor damp within the shadow of the trees;
The wind is intermitting, dry, and light;

And in the inconstant motion of the breeze
The dust and straws are driven up and down,
And whirled about the pavement of the town.

III.

Within the surface of the fleeting river
The wrinkled image of the city lay,
Immovably unquiet, and for ever

final word; but probably if these changes be made upon conjecture, the emendator will find it necessary to accommodate the colour of the dead Ginevra's hair to that she wore when living. by a hateful innovation that would do almost as much to spoil the poem as the other emendation pro

posed. See p. 104, line 16,-"her dark locks."

1 First published by Mrs. Shelley in the Posthumous Poems.

2 In the Posthumous Poems and first edition of 1839, the word here is silent; in the second edition summer is substituted.

It trembles, but it never fades away;

Go to the...

You, being changed, will find it then as now.

IV.

The chasm in which the sun has sunk is shut
By darkest barriers of cinereous1 cloud,
Like mountain over mountain huddled-but
Growing and moving upwards in a crowd,
And over it a space of watery blue,
Which the keen evening star is shining through.

THE BOAT ON THE SERCHIO.2

OUR boat is asleep on3 Serchio's stream,
Its sails are folded like thoughts in a dream,
The helm sways idly, hither and thither;

Dominic, the boat-man, has brought the mast,
And the oars and the sails; but 'tis sleeping fast,
Like a beast, unconscious of its tether.

The stars burnt out in the pale blue air,
And the thin white moon lay withering there,
To tower, and cavern, and rift and tree,
The owl and the bat fled drowsily.

Day had kindled the dewy woods,

And the rocks above and the stream below, And the vapours in their multitudes,

1 So in the MS. at Boscombe, but enormous in Mrs. Shelley's editions.

2 The greater part of this poem was first given by Mrs. Shelley in the Posthumous Poems, with the date "July, 1821," affixed. Mr. Rossetti

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obtained considerable additions to it from the note-book containing Charles the First; and these were first given to the world in his edition in 1870.

3 In the Posthumous Poems, in; but on in the collected editions.

And the Apennine's shroud of summer snow, And clothed with light of aëry gold

The mists in their eastern caves uprolled.

Day had awakened all things that be,

The lark and the thrush and the swallow free,
And the milkmaid's song and the mower's scythe,
And the matin-bell and the mountain bee:
Fire-flies were quenched on the dewy corn,
Glow-worms went out on the river's brim,
Like lamps which a student forgets to trim:
The beetle forgot to wind his horn,

The crickets were still in the meadow and hill:

Like a flock of rooks at a farmer's gun
Night's dreams and terrors, every one,
Fled from the brains which are their prey
From the lamp's death to the morning ray.

All rose to do the task He set to each,

Who shaped us to his ends and not our own ; The million rose to learn, and one to teach What none yet ever knew or2 can be known.

And many rose

Whose woe was such that fear became desire ;Melchior and Lionel3 were not among those; They from the throng of men had stepped aside, And made their home under the green hill side. It was that hill, whose intervening brow

Screens Lucca from the Pisan's envious eye,4

gests, "these names symbolize Williams and Shelley."

4 In retouching Medwin's version of the Ugolino episode in the Inferno (canto XXXIII), Shelley used almost the same words,-"the steep ascent that from the Pisan is the screen of Lucca": only the italicized words are

Which the circumfluous plain waving below,
Like a wide lake of green fertility,

With streams and fields and marshes bare,

Divides from the far Apennines-which lie Islanded in the immeasurable air.

"What think you, as she lies in her green cove,
Our little sleeping boat is dreaming of?"
"If morning dreams are true, why I should guess
That she was dreaming of our idleness,

And of the miles of watery way

We should have led her by this time of day."—1

"Never mind," said Lionel,

Give care to the winds, they can bear it well
About yon poplar tops; and see

The white clouds are driving merrily,

And the stars we miss this morn will light
More willingly our return to-night.—
How it whistles, Dominic's long black hair!2
List my dear fellow; the breeze blows fair:
Hear how it sings into the air."

'Of us and of our lazy motions,"
Impatiently said Melchior,

"If I can guess a boat's emotions;

And how we ought, two hours before,
To have been the devil knows where."
And then, in such transalpine Tuscan
As would have killed a Della-Cruscan,

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