By which the holiest dreams of highest spirits
Are stars beneath the dawn...

She shall arise

Victorious as the world arose from Chaos!
And as the Heavens and the Earth arrayed
Their presence in the beauty and the light
Of thy first smile, O Father, as they gather
The spirit of thy love which paves for them
Their path o'er the abyss, till every sphere
Shall be one living Spirit, so shall Greece-

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SATAN.

Be as all things beneath the empyrean,

Mine

Art thou eyeless like old Destiny,

Thou mockery-king, crowned with a wreath of thorns? Whose sceptre is a reed, the broken reed.

Which pierces thee! whose throne a chair of scorn;

For seest thou not beneath this crystal floor
The innumerable worlds of golden light

Which are my empire, and the least of them

which thou would'st redeem from me?

Know'st thou not them my portion?

Or wouldst rekindle the

strife

Which our great Father then did arbitrate

When he assigned to his competing sons

Each his apportioned realm?

Thou Destiny,

Thou who art mailed in the omnipotence

Of Him who sends thee forth, whate'er thy task,
Speed, spare not to accomplish, and be mine
Thy trophies, whether Greece again become
The fountain in the desart whence the earth
Shall drink of freedom, which shall give it strength

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To suffer, or a gulph of hollow death

To swallow all delight, all life, all hope.

Go, thou Vicegerent of my will, no less.

Than of the Father's; but lest thou shouldst faint,
The winged hounds, Famine and Pestilence,
Shall wait on thee, the hundred-forkèd snake
Insatiate Superstition still shall . . .

The earth behind thy steps, and War shall hover
Above, and Fraud shall gape below, and Change
Shall fit before thee on her dragon wings,
Convulsing and consuming, and I add
Three vials of the tears which demons weep
When virtuous spirits through the gate of Death
Pass triumphing over the thorns of life,

Sceptres and crowns, mitres and swords and snares,
Trampling in scorn, like Him and Socrates.

The first is Anarchy; when Power and Pleasure,

Glory and science and security,

On Freedom hang like fruit on the green tree,

Then pour it forth, and men shall gather ashes.
The second Tyranny-

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Thou seest but the Past in the To-come.

Pride is thy error and thy punishment.
Boast not thine empire, dream not that thy worlds
Are more than furnace-sparks or rainbow-drops
Before the Power that wields and kindles them.
True greatness asks not space, true excellence
Lives in the Spirit of all things that live,
Which lends it to the worlds thou callest thine.

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With beams as keen as those which pierced the shadow

Of Christian night rolled back upon the West
When the orient moon of Islam rode in triumph
From Tmolus to the Acroceraunian snow.

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Of God, and from the throne of Destiny
Even to the utmost limit of thy way
May Triumph

Be thou a curse on them whose creed

Divides and multiplies the most high God.

FRAGMENTS CONNECTED WITH THE

PROLOGUE TO HELLAS.1

I.

FAIREST of the Destinies,

Disarray thy dazzling eyes:

Keener far their lightnings are

Than the winged [bolts] thou bearest,

And the smile thou wearest

Wraps thee as a star

Is wrapt in light.

Under the general heading Prologue to Hellas, in the Relics of Shelley, Mr. Garnett gives these three frag

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185

ments, with the remark that they appear to have been originally written for Hellas."

II. .

Could Arethuse to her forsaken urn

From Alpheus and the bitter Doris run,

Or could the morning shafts of purest light

Again into the quivers of the Sun

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Be gathered-could one thought from its wild flight Return into the temple of the brain

Without a change, without a stain,—
Could aught that is, ever again

Be what it once has ceased to be,
Greece might again be free!

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III.

A star has fallen upon the earth

'Mid the benighted nations,

A quenchless atom of immortal light,
A living spark of Night,

A cresset shaken from the constellations.

Swifter than the thunder fell

To the heart of Earth, the well

Where its pulses flow and beat,

And unextinct in that cold source

Guides the sphere which is its prison,

Like an angelic spirit pent

In a form of mortal birth,

Till, as a spirit half arisen

Shatters its charnel, it has rent,

In the rapture of its mirth,

The thin and painted garment of the Earth,

Ruining its chaos-a fierce breath

Consuming all its forms of living death.

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FRAGMENT: "I WOULD NOT BE A KING."1

I WOULD not be a king-enough

Of woe it is to love;

The path to power is steep and rough,

And tempests reign above.

I would not climb the imperial throne;
"Tis built on ice which fortune's sun
Thaws in the height of noon.
Then farewell, king, yet were I one,
Care would not come so soon.
Would he and I were far away
Keeping flocks on Himalay!

FRAGMENT: PEACE FIRST AND LAST.

THE babe is at peace within the womb,

The corpse is at rest within the tomb,
We begin in what we end.

FRAGMENT: WANDERING.2

HE wanders, like a day-appearing dream,
Through the dim wildernesses of the mind;
Through desert woods and tracts, which seem
Like ocean, homeless, boundless, unconfined.

1 This and the next fragment were first given by Mrs. Shelley in the second edition of 1839.

* First given by Mrs. Shelley in the first edition of 1839. I have not

changed the punctuation; but I suspect we should read the sense thus : He wanders (like a day-appearing dream

Through the dim wildernesses of the mind) Through desert woods &c.