falls

Of spirits passing through the streets; and heard
The Mountain's slumberous voice at intervals
Thrill through those roofless halls;
The oracular thunder penetrating shook

The listening soul in my suspended blood;

I felt that Earth out of her deep heart spoke-
I felt, but heard not :-through white columns
The isle-sustaining Ocean flood, [glowed
A plane of light between two heavens of azure:
Around me gleamed many a bright sepulchre
Of whose pure beauty, Time, as if his pleasure
Were to spare Death, had never made erasure;
But every living lineament was clear
As in the sculptor's thought; and there
The wreaths of stony myrtle, ivy and pine,
Like winter leaves o'ergrown by moulded snow,
Seemed only not to move and grow

Because the crystal silence of the air

Weighed on their life; even as the Power divine,
Which then lulled all things, brooded upon mine.

EPODE II. a.

Then gentle winds arose, With many a mingled close

Like Cyclopses in Vulcan's sooty abysm, Beating their swords to ploughshares;-in a band The gaolers sent those of the liberal schism Free through the streets of Memphis; much, I wis, To the annoyance of king Amasis.

LXXVI,

And timid lovers who had been so coy,

They hardly knew whether they loved or not, Would rise out of their rest, and take sweet joy, To the fulfilment of their inmost thought; And when next day the maiden and the boy

Met one another, both, like sinners caught, Blushed at the thing which each believed was Only in fancy-till the tenth moon shoue; [done

And where the Baian ocean
Welters with air-like motion,

Within, above, around its bowers of starry green,
Moving the sea-flowers in those purple eaves,
Even as the ever stormless atmosphere
Floats o'er the Elysian realm,

It bore me, like an Angel o'er the waves
Of sunlight, whose swift pinnace of dewy air

The Author has connected many recollections of hir visit to Pompeii and Baie with the enthusiasm excited by the intelligence of the proclamation of a Constitutional Government at Naples. This has given a tinge of picturesque and descriptive imagery to the introductory Epodes, which depicture the scenes and some of the majestic feelings permanently connected with the scene of this animating event.-Author's Note, + Pompeii.

STROPHE B. 2.

Thou youngest giant birth, Which from the groaning earth Leap'st, clothed in armour of impenetrable scale! Last of the Intercessors

Who 'gainst the Crowned Transgressors Pleadest before God's love! Arrayed in Wisdom's mail,

Wave thy lightning lance in mirth;
Nor let thy high heart fail,

Though from their hundred gates the leagued
Oppressors,

With hurried legions move!
Hail, hail, all hail !

ANTISTROPHE a.

What though Cimmerian Anarchs dare blaspheme
Freedom and thee? thy shield is as a mirror
To make their blind slaves see, and with fierce
gleam

To turn his hungry sword upon the wearer;
A new Actaeon's error

Shall theirs have been-devoured by their own
Be thou like the imperial Basilisk, [hounds!
Killing thy foe with unapparent wounds!
Gaze on oppression, till, at that dread risk
Aghast, she pass from the Earth's disk;
Fear not, but gaze-for freemen mightier grow,
And slaves more feeble, gazing on their foe.
If Hope, and Truth, and Justice may avail,
Thou shalt be great.-All hail!

ANTISTROPHE 8. 2.

From Freedom's form divine, From Nature's inmost shrine,

Homer and Virgil.

Strip every impious gaw d, rend Error veil by veil : O'er Ruin desolate,

O'er Falsehood's fallen state,

Sit thou sublime, unawed; be the Destroyer pale! And equal laws be thine,

And winged words let sail,

Freighted with truth even from the throne of God:
That wealth, surviving fate,
Be thine.-All hail!

ANTISTROPHE α. Y.

Didst thou not start to hear Spain's thrilling pæar.
From land to land re-echoed solemnly,
Till silence became music? From the EÆæan*
To the cold Alps, eternal Italy

Starts to hear thine! The Sea
Which paves the desert streets of Venice, laughs
In light and music; widowed Genoa wan,
By moonlight spells ancestral epitaphs,
Murmuring, where is Doria? fair Milan,
Within whose veins long ran
The viper's + palsying venom, lifts her heel
To bruise his head. The signal and the scal
(If Hope, and Truth, and Justice can avail)
Art Thou of all these hopes.-O hail!

EPODE I. B.

Hear ye the march as of the Earth-born Forins
Arrayed against the ever-living Gods?
The crash and darkness of a thousand storms
Bursting their inaccessible abodes

Of crags and thunder clouds?
See ye the banners blazoned to the day,
Inwrought with emblems of barbaric pride?
Dissonant threats kill Silence far away,

The Serene Heaven which wraps our Eden wide
The Anarchs of the North lead forth their legions
With iron light is dyed,
Like Chaos o'er creation, uncreating;
An hundred tribes nourished on strange religions
And lawless slaveries,-down the aerial regions
Of the white Alps, desolating,
Famished wolves that bide no waiting,
Blotting the glowing footsteps of old glory,
Trampling our columned cities into dust,
Their dull and savage lust

[hoary

On Beauty's corse to sickness satiating
They come ! The fields they tread look black and
With fire-from their red feet the streams run
gory!

EPODE II. B.

Great Spirit, deepest Love! Which rulest and dost move

Exa, the Island of Circe.

+ The viper was the armorial device of the Visconti, tyrants of Milan.

All things which live and are, within the Italian Who spreadest heaven around it, [shore; Whose woods, rocks, waves, surround it; Who sittest in thy star, o'er Ocean's western floor, Spirit of beauty! at whose soft command

The sunbeams and the showers distil its foison ! From the Earth's bosom chill;

O bid those beams be each a blinding brand

Of lightning! bid those showers be dews of poison!
Bid the Earth's plenty kill!
Bid thy bright Heaven above

Whilst light and darkness bound it,
Be their tomb who planned

To make it ours and thine!

Or, with thine harmonizing ardours fill
And raise thy sons, as o'er the prone horizon
Thy lamp feeds every twilight wave with fire-
Be man's high hope and unextinct desire
The instrument to work thy will divine!
Then clouds from sunbeams, antelopes from leo-
And frowns and fears from Thee, [pards,
Would not more swiftly flee,

Than Celtic wolves from the Ausonian shepherds.—
Whatever, Spirit, from thy starry shrine
Thou yieldest or withholdest, Oh let be
This City of thy worship, ever free!

DEATH.

DEATH is here, and death is there,
Death is busy everywhere,
All around, within, beneath,
Above is death-and we are death.

Death has set his mark and seal On all we are and all we feel, On all we know and all we fear,

First our pleasures die--and then
Our hopes, and then our fears-and when
These are dead, the debt is due,
Dust claims dust-and we die too.

All things that we love and cherish,
Like ourselves, must fade and perish;
Such is our rude mortal lot-
Love itself would, did they not.

SUMMER AND WINTER.

It was a bright and cheerful afternoon,
Towards the end of the sunny month of June,
When the north wind congregates in crowds
The floating mountains of the silver clouds
From the horizon-and the stainless sky
Opens beyond them like eternity.

All things rejoiced beneath the sun, the weeds,
The river, and the corn-fields, and the reeds;
The willow leaves that glanced in the light breeze,
And the firm foliage of the larger trees.

It was a winter such as when birds die
In the deep forests; and the fishes lie
Stiffened in the translucent ice, which makes
Even the mud and slime of the warm lakes
A wrinkled clod, as hard as brick; and when,
Among their children, comfortable men
Gather about great fires, and yet feel cold:
Alas! then for the homeless beggar old!

THE TOWER OF FAMINE*.

AMID the desolation of a city,

[guilt,

Which was the cradle, and is now the grave,
Of an extinguished people; so that pity
Weeps o'er the shipwrecks of oblivion's wave,
There stands the Tower of Famine. It is built
Upon some prison-homes, whose dwellers rave
For bread, and gold, and blood: pain, linked to
Agitates the light flame of their hours,
Until its vital oil is spent or spilt:
There stands the pile, a tower amid the towers
And sacred domes; each marble-ribbed roof,
The brazen-gated temples, and the bowers
Of solitary wealth! the tempest-proof
Pavilions of the dark Italian air
Are by its presence dimmed--they stand aloof,
And are withdrawn-so that the world is bare,
As if a spectre, wrapt in shapeless terror,
Amid a company of ladies fair

Should glide and glow, till it became a mirror
Of all their beauty, and their hair and hue,
The life of their sweet eyes, with all its error,
Should be absorbed, till they to marble grew.

YE hasten to the dead! What seek ye there,
Ye restless thoughts and busy purposes
Of the idle brain, which the world's livery wear?
O thou quick Heart, which pantest to possess
All that anticipation feigneth fair!

Thou vainly curious Mind which wouldest guess
Whence thou didst come,and whither thou mayest go,
And that which never yet was known wouldst
know-

Oh, whither hasten ye, that thus ye press
With such swift feet life's green and pleasant path,
Seeking alike from happiness and woe

A refuge in the cavern of grey death?

O heart, and mind, and thoughts! What thing do you

Hope to inherit in the grave below?

AN ALLEGORY.

A PORTAL as of shadowy adamant

Stands yawning on the highway of the life Which we all tread, a cavern huge and gaunt ; Around it rages an unceasing strife

Of shadows, like the restless clouds that haunt
The gap of some cleft mountain, lifted high
Into the whirlwinds of the upper sky.

⚫ At Pisa there still exists the prison of Ugolino, which goes by the name of La Torre della Fame:" in the adjoining building the galley-slaves are confined. situated near the Ponte al Mare on the Arno.

It is

LINES TO A REVIEWER.

ALAS! good friend, what profit can you see
In hating such a hateless thing as me?
There is no sport in hate where all the rage
Is on one side. In vain would you assuage
Your frowns upon an unresisting smile,
In which not even contempt lurks, to beguile
Your heart, by some faint sympathy of hate.
Oh conquer what you cannot satiate!
For to your passion I am far more coy
Than ever yet was coldest maid or boy
In winter noon. Of your antipathy
If I am the Narcissus, you are free
To pine into a sound with hating me.

WE spent the latter part of the year 1819 in Florence, where Shelley passed several hours daily in the Gallery, and made various notes on its ancient works of art. His thoughts were a good deal taken up also by the project of a steamboat, undertaken by a friend, an engineer, to ply between Leghorn and Marseilles, for which he supplied a sum of money. This was a sort of plan to delight Shelley, and he was greatly disappointed when it was thrown aside.

There was something in Florence that disagreed excessively with his health, and he suffered far more pain than usual; so much so that we left it sooner than we intended, and removed to Pisa, where we had some friends, and, above all, where we could consult the celebrated Vaccà, as to the cause of Shelley's sufferings. He, like every other medical man, could only guess at that, and gave little hope of immediate relief; he enjoined him to abstain from all physicians and medicine, and to leave his complaint to nature. As he had vainly consulted medical men of the highest repute in England, he was easily persuaded to adopt this advice. Pain and ill-health followed him to the end, but the residence at Pisa agreed with him better than any other, and there in consequence we remained.

In the spring we spent a week or two near Leghorn, borrowing the house of some friends, who were absent on a journey to England. It was on a beautiful summer evening, while wan

dering among the lanes, whose myrtle hedges

were the bowers of the fire-flies, that we heard the carolling of the sky-lark, which inspired one of the most beautiful of his poems. He addressed the letter to Mrs. Gisborne from this house, which was hers; he had made his study of the workshop of her son, who was an engineer. Mrs. Gisborne had been a friend of my father in her younger days. She was a lady of great accomplishments, and

charming from her frank and affectionate nature. She had the most intense love of knowledge, a delicate and trembling sensibility, and preserved freshness of mind, after a life of considerable adversity. As a favourite friend of my father we had sought her with eagerness, and the most open and cordial friendship was established between us.

We spent the summer at the baths of San Giuliano, four miles from Pisa. These baths were of great use to Shelley in soothing his nervous irritability. We made several excursions in the neighbourhood. The country around is fertile ; and diversified and rendered picturesque by ranges of near hills and more distant mountains. The peasantry are a handsome, intelligent race, and there was a gladsome sunny heaven spread over us, that rendered home and every scene we visited cheerful and bright. During some of the hottest days of August, Shelley made a solitary journey on foot to the summit of Monte San Pelegrinoa mountain of some height, on the top of which there is a chapel, the object, during certain days in the year, of many pilgrimages. The excursion delighted him while it lasted, though he exerted himself too much, and the effect was considerable lassitude and weakness on his return. During the expedition he conceived the idea and wrote, in the three days immediately succeeding to his liarly characteristic of his tastes--wildly fanciful, return, the Witch of Atlas. This poem is pecufull of brilliant imagery, and discarding human that his imagination suggested. interest and passion, to revel in the fantastic ideas

The surpassing excellence of The Cenci had made me greatly desire that Shelley should increase his popularity, by adopting subjects that would more suit the popular taste, than a poem conceived in the abstract and dreamy spirit of the Witch of Atlas. It was not only that I wished him to acquire popularity as redounding to his