After a taper; and the midnight sky V. "Tis the tempestuous loveliness of terror; Which makes a thrilling vapour of the air Of all the beauty and the terror there A woman's countenance, with serpent locks, LOVE'S PHILOSOPHY.1 I. THE fountains mingle with the river, Nothing in the world is single ; 1 Mrs. Shelley classes this poem among those of 1820; and in the Posthumous Poems it is dated "January, 1820." Mr. Rossetti follows this arrangement. The poem was, however, published in The Indicator for of the 22nd December, 1819, with the signature "Z.", and with the following introductory note by Leigh Hunt" We intended to introduce the following delightful little lyric, by a friend, in very different company from that of the gentlemen just presented to the reader; [the article making up the rest of the number was that on "Thieves, Ancient and Modern"] but as Mercury, who was the god of thieves, was also the inventor of the lyre, and as Love himself, time out of mind, has been called a thief, it is not, in all respects, inappropriately situated. We may fancy Mercury playing, and Love singing: -and the song is indeed worthy of the performers. It is elemental, Platonical; a meeting of divineness with humanity." It is possible that this poem was the one referred to in Shelley's letter to Hunt in which he enquires after The Mask of Anarchy, and refers to another poem as enclosed, to be printed in The Examiner, or to II. See the mountains kiss high heaven, "share the fate, whatever that fate may be, of the Mask." This letter was printed in Hunt's Lord Byron and some of His Contemporaries, dated 'December, 1819"; but Mrs. Shelley gives the date (Essays, &c., 1840, Vol. II) as November. She says in a footnote that the enclosed poem was Peter Bell the Third; but such cannot be the case, as that poem was certainly sent to Hunt in another letter, dated 2nd November, 1819, printed in Relics of Shelley (p. 103). It being clear that the poem referred to in the other November letter was not Peter Bell, it is at least possible that it was Love's Philosophy. The only important variation from the received text presented by the Indicator version is in the second stanza, where lines 3 and 4 are as follows: No leaf or flower would be forgiven, If it disdained to kiss it's brother; this reading is certainly Shelley's, but was doubtless rejected by him on revision. The received version has the authority of an extant MS. of later date, that namely, in the copy of Leigh Hunt's Literary Pocket-book for 1819, which Shelley presented to Miss Sophia Stacey on the 29th of December, 1820, with this and two other poems written in in MS. The change made in this case is of the subtlest mastery,- --a wonderful improvement where none seemed needed; and yet one can see not only that the metre was out of order before, but also that the word kiss did occur just once too often. While adopting as a mat ter of course this emendation, I have in minutiæ followed the Indicator text implicitly. It commends itself to me as perfectly printed from a perfect MS. of Shelley's. It may be worth while to add that Mr. J. H. Dixon pointed out in Notes and Queries (in January, 1868) that the poem is traceable to a French song in eight lines,Les vents baisent les nuages. [As The Sensitive Plant, A Vision of the Sea, The Cloud, To a Skylark, and the Ode to Liberty have been given in Vol. II, with Prometheus Unbound, as Shelley gave them, I presume Arethusa should open this section. In Mrs. Shelley's collected editions those five poems all precede it. It is dated "Pisa, 1820"; and though Shelley was at Pisa late in 1820 as well as early, I infer, from this poem being placed by Mrs. Shelley before the Letter to Maria Gisborne (given in Vol. III of this edition), that Arethusa was written before the visit to Leghorn, where the Letter was written. There are not many complete dates to guide us in the arrangement of these poems; but the Ode to Naples furnishes another, being referred to in a diary of Mrs. Shelley's under the date 25th August, 1820, though the date given in the Posthumous Poems is September, 1820; and Orpheus may safely be placed after that, being traceable to the influence of Sgricci, the Improvvisatore, whom the Shelleys heard in the winter of 1820. Mrs. Shelley's long letter giving an account of Sgricci (see Vol. II, P. 432) is dated the 29th of December 1820.-H. B. F.] |