POEMS WRITTEN IN 1820.

ARETHUSA.1

ARETHUSA arose

I.

From her couch of snows

In the Acroceraunian mountains,

From cloud and from crag,

With many a jag,

Shepherding her bright fountains.

She leapt down the rocks,

With her rainbow locks

Streaming among the streams;—
Her steps paved with green

The downward ravine

Which slopes to the western gleams:

And gliding and springing

She went, ever singing,

In murmurs as soft as sleep;

The Earth seemed to love her,

And Heaven smiled above her,

As she lingered towards the deep.

1 First given by Mrs. Shelley in the Posthumous Poems.

II.

Then Alpheus bold,

On his glacier cold,

With his trident the mountains strook; And opened a chasm

In the rocks;-with the spasm

All Erymanthus shook.

And the black south wind

It concealed behind

The urns of the silent snow,

And earthquake and thunder
Did rend in sunder

The bars of the springs below :
The beard and the hair

Of the River-god1 were

Seen through the torrent's sweep,
As he followed the light

Of the fleet nymph's flight
To the brink of the Dorian deep.

III.

"Oh, save me! Oh, guide me!
And bid the deep hide me,
For he grasps me now by the hair!"
The loud Ocean heard,

To its blue depth stirred,

And divided at her prayer;

And under the water

The Earth's white daughter

Fled like a sunny beam;

Behind her descended

Her billows, unblended

1 In Mrs. Shelley's editions, river God.

With the brackish Dorian stream:

Like a gloomy stain

On the emerald main
Alpheus rushed behind,—
As an eagle pursuing

A dove to its ruin1

Down the streams of the cloudy wind.

IV.

Under the bowers

Where the Ocean Powers
Sit on their pearlèd thrones,
Through the coral woods
Of the weltering floods,
Over heaps of unvalued stones;
Through the dim beams

Which amid the streams
Weave a net-work of coloured light;
And under the caves,

Where the shadowy waves
Are as green as the forest's night :-
Outspeeding the shark,

And the sword-fish dark,
Under the ocean foam,

And up through the rifts

1 The licence taken by Shelley in such rhymes as this seems to demand some explanation. This is one of several cases in which, amidst marks of the most fastidious workmanship, we find ruin set to rhyme with pursuing or some other present participle in ing. I cannot think that Shelley would have permitted himself to indulge in so indefensible a solecism had the words not formed a rhyme to him; and it seems likely that, being of the aristocratic caste, the habit of

dropping the final g was indelibly acquired as a child and youth, and never struck him as a bad habit to be got over. If so, to him, ruin and pursuing were a perfect rhyme; and I need not tell the reader that, to this day, it is an affectation current among persons who are or pretend to be of the aristocratic caste, not only to drop the final g in these cases themselves, but to stigmatize its pronunciation by other people as "pedantic" !

Of the mountain clifts

They past to their Dorian home.

V.

And now from their fountains

In Enna's mountains,

Down one vale where the morning basks,
Like friends once parted

Grown single-hearted,

They ply their watery tasks.
At sunrise they leap

From their cradles steep
In the cave of the shelving hill;
At noon-tide they flow
Through the woods below.
And the meadows of Asphodel;
And at night they sleep
In the rocking deep
Beneath the Ortygian shore;-
Like spirits that lie

In the azure sky

When they love but live no more.

THE QUESTION. 1

I.

I DREAMED that, as I wandered by the way,
Bare winter suddenly was changed to spring,
And gentle odours led my steps astray,
Mixed with a sound of waters murmuring

1 First given by Mrs. Shelley in the Posthumous Poems.

Along a shelving bank of turf, which lay

Under a copse, and hardly dared to fling

Its green arms round the bosom of the stream,
But kissed it and then fled, as thou mightest in dream.

II.

There grew pied wind-flowers and violets,

Daisies, those pearled Arcturi of the earth, The constellated flower that never sets;

Faint oxlips; tender bluebells, at whose birth
The sod scarce heaved; and that tall flower that wets-
Like a child, half in tenderness and mirth-1

Its mother's face with heaven-collected tears,
When the low wind, its playmate's voice, it hears.

III.

And in the warm hedge grew lush eglantine,

Green cow-bind and the moonlight-coloured May, And cherry blossoms, and white cups, whose wine Was the bright dew yet drained not by the day; And wild roses, and ivy serpentine,

With its dark buds and leaves, wandering astray; And flowers azure, black, and streaked with gold, Fairer than any wakened eyes behold.

IV.

And nearer to the river's trembling edge

There grew broad flag-flowers, purple prankt with white, And starry river buds among the sedge,

And floating water-lilies, broad and bright,

Which lit the oak that overhung the hedge

With moonlight beams of their own watery light;

This line, omitted from Mrs. Shelley's editions, was discovered by

VOL. IV.

D

Mr. Garnett, and published in The
Westminster Review for July, 1870.