FRAGMENT OF A DREAM.

METHOUGHT I was a billow in the crowd

Of common men, that stream without a shore, That ocean which at once is deaf and loud; That I, a man, stood amid many more

By a wayside..., which the aspect bore Of some imperial metropolis,

Where mighty shapes-pyramid, dome, and tower— Gleamed like a pile of crags.

FRAGMENT ON KEATS,

WHO DESIRED THAT ON HIS TOMB SHOULD BE INSCRIBED 1

'HERE lieth One whose name was writ on water."

But, ere the breath that could erase it blew,

Death, in remorse for that fell slaughter,

Death, the immortalizing winter, flew

Athwart the stream,-and time's printless torrent grew A scroll of crystal, blazoning the name

Of Adonais.

FRAGMENT: INSECURITY.

WHEN Soft winds and sunny skies
With the green earth harmonize,
And the young and dewy dawn,
Bold as an unhunted fawn,
Up the windless heaven is gone,-
Laugh-for ambushed in the day,

Clouds and whirlwinds watch their prey.

1 This and the next four fragments

were first given by Mrs. Shelley in the first edition of 1839.

2 So in the MS., at Boscombe, but

monthless in Mrs. Shelley's editions. I suspect Shelley would have cancelled the word and in this line.

COUPLETS. 1

AND that I walk thus proudly crowned withal
Is that 't is my distinction; if I fall,

I shall not weep out of the vital day,
To-morrow dust, nor wear a dull decay.

FRAGMENT.

THE rude wind is singing
The dirge of the music dead,
The cold worms are clinging
Where kisses were lately fed.

FRAGMENT: FALSE LAURELS AND TRUE.

"WHAT art thou, Presumptuous, who profanest
The wreath to mighty poets only due,
Even whilst like a forgotten moon thou wanest ?
Touch not those leaves which for the eternal few
Who wander o'er the paradise of fame,

In sacred dedication ever grew:

One of the crowd thou art without a name."
"Ah, friend, 'tis the false laurel that I wear;
Bright though it seem, it is not the same

As that which bound Milton's immortal hair;

1 These two couplets were given in the first edition of 1839 as consecutive with the last fragment. This was

clearly a mistake; and in the second edition the fragment appeared without the two couplets.

Its dew is poison and the hopes that quicken

Under its chilling shade, though seeming fair, Are flowers which die almost before they sicken."1

TWO FRAGMENTS OF INVOCATION.?

I.

GREAT Spirit whom the sea of boundless thought
Nurtures within its unimagined caves,

In which thou sittest sole, as in my mind,
Giving a voice to its mysterious waves.

II.

O thou immortal deity

Whose throne is in the depth of human thought,
I do adjure thy power and thee

By all that man may be, by all that he is not,
By all that he has been and yet must be!

1 In Mrs. Shelley's editions the divison into two speeches is not indicated by inverted commas.

2 Probably to Liberty. Fragment I was given by Mr. Rossetti from a

transcript taken by Mr. Garnett from one of the Boscombe MSS.; and Fragment II was given by Mrs. Shelley in the second edition of 1839.

POEMS WRITTEN IN 1822.

[This final group of Shelley's mature original poetry seems almost to arrange itself, the leading pieces being pretty fully dated. To this last half-year of his life belong, it should be remembered, beside the following poems, the Fragments of an Unfinished Drama, The Triumph of Life, and, to some extent, Charles the First,-though to what extent it is difficult to conjecture, the historical drama having been a good time in hand.—H. B. F.]