XXXII. And with the silence of her eloquent smile On the swift breath of morn, the vessel flew XXXIII. Till down that mighty stream, dark, calm, and fleet, As swift as twinkling beams, had under heaven From woods and waves wild sounds and odours driven, The boat fled visibly. Three nights and days, Borne like a cloud through morn and noon and even, We sailed along the winding watery ways Of the vast stream, a long and labyrinthine maze. XXXIV. A scene of joy and wonder to behold That river's shapes and shadows changing ever! Or, when the moonlight poured a holier day, XXXV. Morn, noon, and even, that boat of pearl outran Which flieth forth and cannot make abode. With cyclopean piles, whose turrets proud, The homes of the departed, dimly frowned O'er the bright waves which girt their dark foundations round, .XXXVI. Sometimes between the wide and flowering meadows And dark-green chasms shades beautiful and white XXXVII. And ever as we sailed our minds were full Of love and wisdom, which would overflow In converse wild and sweet and wonderful, And in quick smiles whose light would come and go Of sudden tears, and in the mute caress— For a deep shade was cleft, and we did know That virtue, though obscured on earth, not less Survives all mortal change in lasting loveliness. XXXVIII. Three days and nights we sailed, as thought and feeling On the fourth day, wild as a wind-wrought sea XXXIX. Steady and swift,-where the waves rolled like mountains Tumultuous floods from their ten-thousand fountains, Made the air sweep in whirlwinds from the shore,— Calm as a shade, the boat of that fair child Securely fled that rapid stress before, Amid the topmost spray and sunbows wild Wreathed in the silver mist. In joy and pride we smiled. NOTES BY W. M. ROSSETTI. P. xxii. "A WISE friend once wrote to Shelley," &c. This was Godwin. Letter of 4th March 1812, cited by Mr. Jefferson Hogg. P. xxii. "He had not completed his nine-and-twentieth year when he died." Mrs. Shelley speaks inadvertently here. Shelley, born on 4th August 1792, and dying on 8th July 1822, was all but thirty years of age. P. xxiv. To the Queen of my Heart, This piece may still be looked up by the curious in Captain Medwin's Shelley Papers; a small gleaning of Shelley's writings, with a memoir, published in the Athenæum in 1832, and next year in a volume. It begins "Shall we roam, my love, To the twilight grove' and is certainly very poor stuff. Yet there are some lines which seem to have a twang of Shelley in a faint way; especially "And thy beauty, more bright Than the stars' soft light, Shall seem as a weft from the sky." For my own part, I could imagine it equally possible that these lines were either a very characterless and almost a casual imitation of Shelley, or that the poem was a veritable but worthless product of his juvenility. Certain it is that he then wrote many still more trashy, as our Appendix will show. The authority of Captain Medwin, who knew Shelley from childhood, is not to be altogether disregarded.-Notes and Queries, vol. viii., No. 195 (1853), published a poem of moderate length named The Calm, attributed to Shelley, and originally printed in a South Carolina newspaper in 1839, coming professedly from Mr. Trelawny in the first instance. It is a rambling sort of tirade, in which one refuses, as if by instinct, to believe. There is strong internal evidence of its American authorship; and Mr. Trelawny tells me positively that he knows nothing about it.-In 1875 a poem ascribed to Shelley, named Shadows of the Soul, was placed in my hands: it is a poem of very considerable length-523 stanzas in the Spenserian metre. I read it attentively through, and am fully convinced it is not Shelley's. It was in manuscript; but there was no suggestion that the handwriting was Shelley's own. P. 155. This poem was written by Shelley, according to his own account,' at the age of eighteen (say between August 1810 and August 1811), and by him privately I See his letter, p. 251. printed about the same time-not published, though he had originally thought of publishing it. However, Shelley's statement of the period of composition is incorrect; for letters printed by Mr. Jefferson Hogg show indisputably that the poem was begun towards April 1812, and finished, with its Notes, in 1813, when the poet was between twenty and twenty-one years of age. Queen Mab was piratically published in 1821 by a Strand bookseller, Clarke, against whose misdeed Shelley protested (see Mrs. Shelley's Note on Queen Mab, p. 251). Meanwhile the author had in 1816 issued the volume named Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude, and other Poems. In this volume the concluding poem is entitled the Damon of the World, and consists (substantially) of the 1st section of Queen Mab, and about half the 2nd section, with continual verbal alterations. At the present day (1877) there are three authorities for the text of Queen Mab: 1. Shelley's unpublished edition, reproduced accurately enough by Clarke, and in all sorts of later editions up to (but not including) my own of 1870. 2. Those portions of the Damon of the World which correspond with No. 1, or which modify it to the extent of verbal alteration only. 3. A copy of No. 1 containing a great number of alterations in Shelley's own handwriting-alterations sometimes identical with, and sometimes differing from, those which appear in No. 2. This copy was first mentioned in Mr. Middleton's Life of Shelley (vol. i., p. 256); but for full and correct details regarding it the reader should consult Mr. Forman's edition of Shelley, vol. ii. (1877). I reproduce here Mr. Middleton's statement: "The volume which Shelley revised, and enriched with many additions and corrections, was left at Marlow, where it had been thrown aside, and no doubt forgotten, among the many anxieties he was there subject to. It fell afterwards into the hands of a gentleman attached to the Owenites, and has been ever since carefully concealed from the eyes of the world. As the poem stands in the original, its doctrines exactly accord with their tenets, and it is to a considerable extent the gospel of the Owenites; while those revisions and erasures would have produced it in a very modified form." When in 1869 I was preparing my edition of Shelley, published in 1870, only Nos. 1 and 2, and the few specimens which Mr. Middleton gives from No. 3. were anywhere accessible. The same was the case in 1876, when I was preparing the present edition; and the whole of Queen Mab, as now printed in this volume, had been struck off long before Mr. Forman's text appeared. The consequence is that Queen Mab re-appears in my present re-issue the same to all practical intents, as in my edition of 1870. Had the materials published by Mr. Forman been before me in due time, I should, on the contrary, have been much minded to reject Nos. 1 and 2, and adhere solely to No. 3. As it stands, I can only record here, in my Notes, the variations of superior importance proper to No. 3; of several minor variations I say nothing. My own text of Queen Mab (1870 and 1877) was constructed from Nos. I and 2, with the feeling that an editor who endeavours to produce a critical edition of Shelley has before him a rather embarrassing option. Shelley, when extremely young, printed Queen Mab, and afterwards saw or surmised it to be rubbish (though it is certainly very far from being unmiti The title-page of the privately-printed edition runs as follows: "Queen Mab; a Philosophical Poem. By Percy Bysshe Shelley.-Ecrasez l'Infâme ! (Čorréspondance de Voltaire.) Avia Pieridum peragro loca, nullius ante Primum quod magnis doceo de rebus, ed arctis (Lucret. lib. iv.) Δὸς ποῦ στῶ καὶ κόσμον κινήσω. (Archimedes.) London: Printed by P. B. Shelley, 23 Chapel Street, Grosvenor Square. 1813” gated rubbish). At a less immature age he published the Damon of the World. a modified extract from the poem. The alterations of diction which he there introduced with no sparing hand manifestly represent his own deliberate preference, and ought so far to be respected and adopted in any republication: but then they are alterations introduced into a mere extract of the entire poem, and one could not be quite sure that, if Shelley had been reprinting the complete and not the abridged version, he would have made all the changes given in the latter. Moreover, through extraneous agency, the unabridged and unaltered Queen Mab has been restored to the body of Shelley's works. Unabridged it must remain: shall it also remain unaltered? or rather verbally altered according to the pattern of the Damon of the World? It appeared to me in 1869-70 that, on the whole, the best course to pursue is that which my editions exhibit, and which may be thus summarized :* a. Every alteration given in the Damon of the World is not adopted; but some alterations, which seem to me very decided improvements, are adopted, and are (when of sufficient importance) indicated in the notes, along with some of the remaining and unused alterations : b. The concluding passage of the Damon of the World, being a sort of summarized abstract of what Queen Mab proceeds to set forth at far greater length, cannot be incorporated in that poem. Neither ought it to be entirely passed over. It is therefore given in the Appendix. By this method I endeavoured to reconcile the necessity of giving Queen Mab entire, and not far different from the version now long familiar to readers of Shelley, with the rival necessity of adopting the poet's own revisions; and this without cumbering our edition with the whole of the Damon of the World following the whole of Queen Mab. (In subsequent references, I shall, for brevity's sake, use Q. M. for Queen Mab, D. W. for Damon of the World, and A. C. for Amended Copy of Queen Mab.) P. 155. Shelley printed "To Harriet ****** It is certain that the dedicatee was his own wife, Harriet Shelley. A letter of his proves this-the letter addressed to Mr. Ollier on 11th June 1821, and published in the Shelley Memorials (p. 54). Here he speaks of a foolish dedication to my late wife, the publication of which" [it had been omitted in the pirated edition] "would have annoyed me." This should set at rest all the suggestions which have been made that Shelley really meant to dedicate the poem to his early love, his cousin Harriet Grove. P. 156. "The other, rosy as the morn." (D. W.) "The other glowing like the vital morn." In A. C., "the vital day." P. 156. "Hath then the gloomy Power," to " 'Light, life, and rapture, from her smile." (D. W.) "Hath then the iron-sceptred skeleton '(Q.M.) "Must then that peerless form." |