III.

That moment from time was singled
As the first of a life of pain,
The cup of its joy was mingled
-Delusion too sweet though vain!
Too sweet to be mine again.

IV.

Sweet lips, could my heart have hidden.
That its life was crushed by you,
Ye would not have then forbidden
The death which a heart so true
Sought in your briny dew.

BRIGHT wanderer, fair coquette of heaven,
To whom alone it has been given
To change and be adored for ever,
Envy not this dim world, for never
But once within its shadow grew
One fair as-

EPITAPH.1

THESE are two friends whose lives were undivided ;
So let their memory be, now they have glided
Under the grave; let not their bones be parted,
For their two hearts in life were single-hearted.

1 Published in the Posthumous Poems, among "Fragments," and retained in that division in the collected editions, wherein the Fragments are placed after the Poems of 1822, with a general caution that they "do not properly belong" to that year, by which I presume we are to understand that they do not all belong to 1822, not that none of them were then written. In the absence of certain know

ledge as to its date, it seems to me that this epitaph should be left where it is, at the end of the mature original work, and preceding the translations, as in Mrs. Shelley's editions.

So in the Posthumous Poems and first edition of 1839; but their in all later editions known to me,-a misprint I should say, brought about by the presence of their later in the same line.

TRANSLATIONS.

[The separation of these translations from the original poetry seems desirable on all grounds; and the only poetic translations by Shelley not included in this division are the two which he issued with Alastor,-one from a sonnet of Dante to Guido Cavalcanti, and the other from Moschus: these will be found in Vol. I, at pp. 57 and 58. Gathered together in one section, his translations exhibit to great advantage his wide range of scholarship and his catholicity of admiration. In lieu of a chronology of production I have adopted here the same chronology used by Mrs. Shelley and Mr. Rossetti,— that shewing the historic succession of the authors from whose works the translations were made. Two names, one ancient and one modern, Horace and Bronzino, I have added with some diffidence to the list of authors whose works have been rendered by Shelley, under circumstances explained in the notes to the poems from those authors.-H. B. F.]

TRANSLATIONS.

HYMN TO MERCURY.1

TRANSLATED FROM THE GREEK OF HOMER.

I.

SING, Muse, the son of Maia and of Jove,
The Herald-child, king of Arcadia

And all its pastoral hills, whom in sweet love
Having been interwoven, modest May
Bore Heaven's dread Supreme-an antique grove
Shadowed the cavern where the lovers lay

In the deep night, unseen by Gods or Men,
And white-armed Juno slumbered sweetly then.

II.

Now, when the joy of Jove had its fulfilling,
And Heaven's tenth moon chronicled her relief,
She gave to light a babe all babes excelling,

1 This translation, first given by Mrs. Shelley in the Posthumous Poems, appears to have been written in July, 1820, immediately before The Witch of Atlas,-a circumstance which sufficiently accounts for identity of metre and strong resemblance of style. The playful forms of speech adopted in these two poems are quite exceptional in Shelley's work. In a letter to Peacock, dated July 12th, 1820, written while the Shelleys were occupying

Of

the house of the Gisbornes at Leghorn, and published in Fraser's Magazine for March, 1860, Shelley says "I am translating in ottava rima the Hymn to Mercury, of Homer. course my stanza precludes a literal translation. My next effort will be that it should be legible-a quality much to be desired in translations.' Fragments of the drafts of this and the other Hymns of Homer exist among the Boscombe MSS.