with [Whilst the veiled figure has been chanting the strophe, MAMMON, DAKRY, LAOCTONOS, and SWELLFOOT have surrounded IONA TAURINA, who, with her hands folded on her breast and her eyes lifted to Heaven, stands, as saint-like resignation, to wait the issue of the business in perfect confidence of her innocence. PURGANAX, after unsealing the Green Bag, is gravely about to pour the liquor upon her head, when suddenly the whole expression of her figure and countenance changes; she snatches it from his hand with a loud laugh of triumph, and empties it over SWELLFOOT and his whole Court, who are instantly changed into a number L' anima amante si slancia fuori del creato, e si crea nell' infinito un mondo tutto per essa, diverso assai da questo oscuro e pauroso baratro. The noble and unfortunate lady, Emilia V, who inspired Epipsychidion was Teresa Emilia Viviani, eldest daughter of Count Viviani, a nobleman of Pisa. She had been placed by her family in the neighboring Convent of St. Anna, and there Shelley met her at the be HER OWN WORDS. ginning of December, 1820, and interested himself in her fortunes. The episode, which is too long for narration in a note, is best described in Mrs. Marshall's Life of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Its personal incidents are unimportant, since they do not enter into the substance of the poem, which is an idealized history of Shelley's spirit. The lady, to whom the verses are addressed, soon lost the enchantment which Shelley's imagination and sympathy had woven about her, and she ceased to interest him except as an object of compassion. Shelley was fully aware of the mystical nature of the poem, which shows the most spiritual elements of his genius at their point of highest intensity of passion. He wrote to Gisborne: The Epipsychidion is a mystery; as to real flesh and blood, you know that I do not deal in those articles; you might as well go to a gin-shop for a leg of mutton, as expect anything human or earthly from me;' and again, The Epipsychidion I cannot look at; the person whom it celebrates was a cloud instead of a Juno, and poor Ixion starts from the centaur that was the offspring of his own embrace. If you are curious, however, to hear what I am and have been, it will tell you something thereof. It is an idealized history of my life and feelings. I think one is always in love with something or other; the error, and I confess it is not easy for spirits cased in flesh and blood to avoid it, consists in seeking in a mortal image the likeness of what is, perhaps, eternal.'• ... In sending it for publication to Ollier, he says: I send you... and a longer piece, entitled Epipsychidion. The longer poem, I desire, should not be considered as my own; indeed, in a certain sense, it is a production of a portion of me already dead; and in this sense the advertisement is no fiction. It is to be published simply for the esoteric few; and I make its author a secret, to avoid the malignity of those who turn sweet food into poison, transforming all they touch into the corruption of their own natures. My wish with respect to it is that it should be printed immediately in the simplest form, and merely one hundred copies those who are capable of judging and feeling rightly with respect to a composition of so abstruse a nature, certainly do not arrive at that number among those, at least, who would ever be excited to read an obscure and anonymous production; and it would give me no pleasure that the vulgar should read it. If you have any book-selling reason against publishing so small a number as a hundred, merely, distribute copies among those to whom you think the poetry would afford any pleasure, SWEET Spirit! sister of that orphan one, Whose empire is the name thou weepest on, In my heart's temple I suspend to thee These votive wreaths of withered memory. and send me, as soon as you can, a copy by the post.' The poem was composed at Pisa during the first weeks of 1821, and an edition of one hundred copies was published at London the following summer. The title means, as Dr. Stopford Brooke points out, this soul out of my soul.' ADVERTISEMENT THE writer of the following lines died at Florence, as he was preparing for a voyage to one of the wildest of the Sporades, which he had bought and where he had fitted up the ruins of an old building, and where it was his hope to have realized a scheme of life, suited perhaps to that happier and better world of which he is now an inhabitant, but hardly practicable in this. His life was singular; less on account of the romantic vicissitudes which diversified it than the ideal tinge which it received from his own character and feelings. The present Poem, like the Vita Nuova of Dante, is sufficiently intelligible to a certain class of readers without a matter-of-fact history of the circumstances to which it relates; and to a certain other class it must ever remain incomprehensible from a defect of a common organ of perception for the ideas of which it treats. Not but that, gran vergogna sarebbe a colui, che rimasse cosa sotto veste di figura o di colore rettorico: e domandato non sapesse denudare le sue parole da cotal veste, in guisa che avessero verace intendimento. The present poem appears to have been intended by the writer as the dedication to some longer one. The stanza on the opposite page [below] is almost a literal translation from Dante's famous Canzone Voi, ch' intendendo, il terzo ciel movete, etc. The presumptuous application of the concluding lines to his own composition will raise a smile at the expense of my unfortunate friend: be it a smile not of contempt, but pity. My Song, I fear that thou wilt find but few Poor captive bird! who from thy narrow cage Pourest such music that it might assuage The rugged hearts of those who prisoned thee, In the suspended impulse of its lightness, Of planetary music heard in trance. |