FRAGMENT: THE SERPENT.

WAKE the serpent not-lest he
Should not know the way to go,-
Let him crawl which yet lies sleeping
Through the deep grass of the meadow!
Not a bee shall hear him creeping,
Not a may-fly shall awaken

From its cradling blue-bell shaken,
Not the starlight as he's sliding
Through the grass with silent gliding.

FRAGMENT: FITFUL RAIN.

THE fitful alternations of the rain,
When the chill wind, languid as with pain
Of its own heavy moisture, here and there
Drives through the grey and beamless atmosphere.

FRAGMENT: LOVE'S ATMOSPHERE.

THERE is a warm and gentle atmosphere
About the form of one we love, and thus

As in a tender mist our spirits are

Wrapt in the

of that which is to us

The health of life's own life.

TO WILLIAM SHELLEY.1

THY little footsteps on the sands
Of a remote and lonely shore;
The twinkling of thine infant hands,
Where now the worm will feed no more:

Thy mingled look of love and glee
When we returned to gaze on thee.

1 First given in Mrs. Shelley's first edition of 1839.

TO WILLIAM SHELLEY. 1

(With what truth I may say-
Roma! Roma! Roma!

Non è più come era prima!)

I.

My lost William, thou in whom
Some bright spirit lived, and did
That decaying robe consume
Which its lustre faintly hid,

Here its ashes find a tomb,
But beneath this pyramid

Thou art not-if a thing divine

Like thee can die, thy funeral shrine

Is thy mother's grief and mine.

II.

Where art thou, my gentle child?
Let me think thy spirit feeds,
With its life intense and mild,

The love of living leaves and weeds,
Among these tombs and ruins wild;-

Let me think that through low seeds
Of the sweet flowers and sunny grass,
Into their hues and scents may pass
A portion 3

1 Mrs. Shelley first published this fragment in the Posthumous Poems (1824) with the date " June, 1819,"

affixed.

* Within in Mrs. Shelley's editions of 1824 and 1839; but this mistake was corrected in later editions,- -commencing, certainly, as early as 1847.

3 Concerning the English burial ground wherein this child was buried, Shelley wrote as follows: "This spot

is the repository of a sacred loss, of which the yearnings of a parent's heart are now prophetic; he is rendered immortal by love, as his memory is by death. My beloved child is buried here. I envy death the body far less than the oppressors the minds of those whom they have torn from me. The one can kill the body, the other crushes the affections."

TWO FRAGMENTS TO MARY.1

I.

My dearest Mary, wherefore hast thou gone,
And left me in this dreary world alone!
Thy form is here indeed-a lovely one-
But thou art fled, gone down the dreary road,
That leads to Sorrow's most obscure abode ;
Thou sittest on the hearth of pale despair,

Where

For thine own sake I cannot follow thee.

II.

The world is dreary,

And I am weary

Of wandering on without thee, Mary;

A joy was erewhile

In thy voice and thy smile,

And 'tis gone, when I should be gone too, Mary.

ON THE MEDUSA OF LEONARDO DA VINCI,

IN THE FLORENTINE GALLERY.2

I.

Ir lieth, gazing on the midnight sky,
Upon the cloudy mountain peak supine;
Below, far lands are seen tremblingly;
Its horror and its beauty are divine.

1 These two fragments addressed to herself were first given by Mrs. Shelley in the second edition of 1839, with the date July, 1819" affixed, but without any heading. Mr. Rossetti, who infers (no doubt rightly) that they were written in the season of Mrs. Shelley's deep dejection for the loss

66

of the beloved infant William," suspects that when in the last line of fragment II should be where "i.e. to the tomb." This seems likely, but not, to my mind, a certainty.

2 First given by Mrs. Shelley in the Posthumous Poems, inscribed "Florence, 1819."

Upon its lips and eyelids seems to lie

Loveliness like a shadow, from which shine,1

Fiery and lurid, struggling underneath,
The agonies of anguish and of death.

II.

Yet it is less the horror than the grace

Which turns the gazer's spirit into stone; Whereon the lineaments of that dead face

Are graven, till the characters be grown Into itself, and thought no more can trace; "Tis the melodious hue of beauty thrown. Athwart the darkness and the glare of pain, Which humanize and harmonize the strain.

III.

And from its head as from one body grow,
As
grass out of a watery rock,
Hairs which are vipers, and they curl and flow
And their long tangles in each other lock,
And with unending involutions shew

Their mailed radiance, as it were to mock.
The torture and the death within, and saw
The solid air with many a ragged jaw.

IV.

And from a stone beside, a poisonous eft
Peeps idly into those2 Gorgonian eyes;
Whilst in the air a ghastly bat, bereft

Of sense, has flitted with a mad surprise
Out of the cave this hideous light had cleft,
And he comes hastening like a moth that hies

1 In Mrs. Shelley's editions of 1824 and 1839, shrine; but corrected to shine as early as 1847.

In the Posthumous Poems, those:

in the editions of 1839 these.

After a taper; and the midnight sky
Flares, a light more dread than obscurity.

'Tis the tempestuous loveliness of terror;
For from the serpents gleams a brazen glare
Kindled by that inextricable error,

Which makes a thrilling vapour of the air
Become a
and ever-shifting mirror

Of all the beauty and the terror there-
A woman's countenance, with serpent locks,
Gazing in death on heaven from those wet rocks.

LOVE'S PHILOSOPHY.1

I.

THE fountains mingle with the river,
And the rivers with the ocean;
The winds of heaven mix for ever
With a sweet emotion;

Nothing in the world is single;
All things by a law divine
In one another's being mingle;—
Why not I with thine?

1 Mrs. Shelley classes this poem among those of 1820; and in the Posthumous Poems it is dated "January, 1820." Mr. Rossetti follows this arrangement. The poem was, however, published in The Indicator for of the 22nd December, 1819, with the signature "Z.", and with the following introductory note by Leigh Hunt -"We intended to introduce the following delightful little lyric, by a friend, in very different company from that of the gentlemen just presented to the reader; [the article making up the rest of the number was that on Thieves, Ancient and

Modern "] but as Mercury, who was the god of thieves, was also the inventor of the lyre, and as Love himself, time out of mind, has been called a thief, it is not, in all respects, inappropriately situated. We may fancy Mercury playing, and Love singing: -and the song is indeed worthy of the performers. It is elemental, Platonical; a meeting of divineness with humanity." It is possible that this poem was the one referred to in Shel. ley's letter to Hunt in which he enquires after The Mask of Anarchy, and refers to another poem as enclosed, to be printed in The Examiner, or to