I.

1 This poem came out in the second number of The Liberal (1822), under the title Song, written for an Indian Air. In the Posthumous Poems, it reappeared as Lines to an Indian Air; and that title is also adopted in Mrs. Shelley's collected editions, wherein the poem is assigned to the year 1821. Mr. Rossetti, however, has traced it back as far as 1819, and thinks it may have been written even as early as 1818. In 1819, at all events, Shelley seems to have given an autograph copy of it to Miss Sophia Stacey, afterwards Mrs. Catty, whose son still has the MS. Mr. Garnett (Relics of Shelley, p. 99.) says "Several fragmentary versions of the piece exist among Shelley's manuscripts, all differing more or less from the printed text and each other"; but a second complete, and apparently late, MS. is described by Mr. Robert Browning, in a most interesting letter to Leigh Hunt, published in Vol. II of Hunt's Correspondence, pp. 264-8. I extract the passage relating to this subject:

"While I write, there is a strange thing that happened last night impossible to get out of my thoughts. It may give you pain to tell you of it, yet if with the pain come triumphant memories and hopes, as I expect there will, you may choose the pain with them. What decides me to tell it is that I heard you years ago allude to the destruction of a volume of Lamia, Isabella, &c., to be restored to you yet

-now you remember; also, I think of your putting my name near Shelley's in the end of your letter, where you say 'since I lost Shelley.' Is it not strange that I should have transcribed for the first time, last night, the Indian

Serenade that, together with some verses of Metastasio, accompanied that book? That I should have been reserved to tell the present possessor of them-to whom they were given by Captain Roberts-what the poem was, and that it had been published! It is preserved religiously; but the characters are all but illegible, and I needed a good magnifying-glass to be quite sure of such of them as remain. The end is that I have rescued three or four variations in the reading of that divine little poem, as one reads it, at least, in the Posthumous Poems. It is headed The Indian Serenade (not Lines to an Indian Air). In the first stanza the seventh line is 'Hath led me'; in the second, the third line is 'And the Champak's odours fail'; and the eighth, O Beloved as thou art!' In the last stanza, the seventh line was, 'Oh, press it to thine own again.' Are not all these better readings? (even to the 'Hath' for 'Has.') There, I give them you as you gave us Milton's hair. If I have mistaken in telling you, you will understand and forgive."

Mr. Rossetti has seen what purports to be a verbatim copy of the same MS.; and that copy shews two further variations, namely From instead of In at the beginning of the second line, and must instead of will in the final line; but I should hesitate to accept the evidence of a professing transcript unauthenticated by the transcriber's name; and From for In looks very like a clerical error. Mr. Rossetti says 'There seems to be no ground for affirming that the MS. recovered from the drowned Shelley "is of higher authority than the one used for

II.

the Posthumous Poems"; but I imagine that a copy of these verses found on Shelley's person after his death would be eminently likely to be the most recent copy he had made,—and hence of higher authority than all others. Although the line

The champak odours fail strikes me as more lovely than

And the champak's odours fail, the sense is certainly improved in the less musical, though still exquisitely musical, line; and, on the whole, I agree with Mr. Browning in thinking the version an improved one. Another living poet has taken the same view: with the exception of champak's for champak, Mr. Allingham adopts the variations in his charming Anthology, Nightingale Valley, and adds in a note-"We have enquired after the Indian Air, but, if there was one (and a friend of Shelley's thought there was), it seems untraceable." On this point I may say that, although, as Mr. Rossetti has shewn, the current story of Shelley having written the words to an air brought from India by Mrs. Williams cannot be correct, the air to which that lady sang it can scarcely be irrecoverable, as I am assured by a near relative of hers that it is an air very widely known in India.

1 In The Liberal, burning : but shining in the Posthumous Poems and Mrs. Shelley's other editions.

2 Hath in The Liberal; Has in Mrs. Shelley's editions from 1824 onwards.

3 Mr. Allingham substitutes pine for fail, with the remark, "The reading pine in the second verse, instead of fail, must, for the present, rest on its own merits. We believe that the fail, in the third verse, caused the same word to be slipt into the second, under the notion of making the iteration more exact; but such merely verbal and mechanical iteration is not in place here, and destroys the rhymic structure of the lyric in a very unShelleyan manner." I cannot assent to this I think the substitution of pine introduces a mechanical element not in the poem before, and ruins a most lovely line. In one of the Boscombe drafts odours of my chaplet is substituted for champak odours.

4 So in The Liberal and the Posthumous Poems; and Mr. Browning gives no account of the word die, interpolated in the collected editions, which I think is much better out.

5 So in the editions of 1839 and onwards; but in The Liberal and the Posthumous Poems the O! found by Mr. Browning in the MS., is omitted.