70

75

Fie, child!

Let that unseasonable thought

Not be remembered till it snows in June;

Such fancies are a music out of tune

With the sweet dance your heart must keep to-night.
What would you take all beauty and delight
Back to the Paradise from which you sprung,

And leave to grosser mortals ?

And say, sweet lamb, would you not learn the sweet
And subtle mystery by which spirits meet?
Who knows whether the loving game is played,
When, once of mortal [vesture] disarrayed,

The naked soul goes wandering here and there
Through the wide desarts of Elysian air?
The violet dies not till it "-

80

THE TOWER OF FAMINE.1

AMID the desolation of a city,
Which was the cradle, and is now the grave
Of an extinguished people; so that pity

1 This fragment of terza rima appeared with two other pieces in The Keepsake for 1829 (edited by F. M. Reynolds.) The other two pieces are Summer and Winter and The Aziola; the same volume contains Shelley's prose fragment On Love; and, as there are also original contributions of Mrs. Shelley's, I presume there is no need to doubt that it was from her that these three small pieces were obtained. They bear the general heading Fragments, by Percy Bysshe Shelley; and to the title of The Tower of Famine the following note is appended:

"At Pisa there still exists the prison of Ugolino, which goes by the

name of 'La Torre della Fame': in the adjoining building the galley slaves are confined. It is situated near the Ponte al Mare on the Arno."

Whether Mrs. Shelley found this note in the MS. or wrote it, I cannot say; but Mr. Rossetti calls it "Shelley's note." He adds that Mr. Browning says Shelley has "made a mistake; supposing the building rightly called the Torre Guelfa to be the Tower of Famine. His description applies to the former; his conception to the latter. Of the true Tower of Famine, the vestiges should be sought for in the Piazza de' Cavalieri."

Weeps o'er the shipwrecks of oblivion's wave,
There stands the Tower of Famine. It is built
Upon some prison homes, whose dwellers rave

For bread, and gold, and blood: pain, linked to guilt, Agitates the light flame of their hours,

Until its vital oil is spent or spilt:

There stands the pile, a tower amid the towers
And sacred domes; each marble-ribbèd roof,
The brazen-gated temples, and the bowers

Of solitary wealth; the tempest-proof
Pavilions of the dark Italian air,

Are by its presence dimmed-they stand aloof,

And are withdrawn-so that the world is bare,
As if a spectre wrapt in shapeless terror
Amid a company of ladies fair

Should glide and glow, till it became a mirror
Of all their beauty, and their hair and hue,
The life of their sweet eyes, with all its error,
Should be absorbed, till they to marble grew.

5

10

15

20

THE WANING MOON.2

AND like a dying lady, lean and pale,
Who totters forth, wrapt in a gauzy veil,
Out of her chamber, led by the insane.
And feeble wanderings of her fading brain,

1 In The Keepsake we read With; but For is substituted in the collected editions.

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

The moon arose up in the murky east,1
A white and shapeless mass.

TO THE MOON.?

I.

ART thou pale for weariness

Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless

Among the stars that have a different birth,-
And ever changing, like a joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy?

II.

Thou chosen sister of the spirit,

That gazes on thee till in thee it pities ..

AN ALLEGORY.3

I.

A PORTAL as of shadowy adamant

Stands yawning on the highway of the life
Which we all tread, a cavern huge and gaunt;
Around it rages an unceasing strife

Of shadows, like the restless clouds that haunt
The gap of some cleft mountain, lifted high
Into the whirlwinds of the upper sky.

1 In Mrs. Shelley's later editions on the murky earth the reading of the text is given in the Relics of Shelley from a MS. in Sir Percy Shelley's possession. It is easy to see how the line became corrupt in the Posthumous Poems and the editions of 1839 we read in the murky earth, the word earth only being wrong; and when it was observed that something was

wrong, a second mistake appears to have been made instead of the first being rectified.

2 Stanza I was first given by Mrs. Shelley in the Posthumous Poems. The fragment of a second stanza was given by Mr. Rossetti from the MS.

3 First published by Mrs. Shelley in the Posthumous Poems.

II.

And many pass1 it by with careless tread,
Not knowing that a shadowy. . .

Tracks every traveller even to where the dead
Wait peacefully for their companion new;
But others, by more curious humour led,

Pause to examine,-these are very few,
And they learn little there, except to know
That shadows follow them where'er they go.

TIME LONG PAST.2

I.

LIKE the ghost of a dear friend dead
Is time long past.

A tone which is now forever fled,
A hope which is now forever past,
A love so sweet it could not last,
Was time long past.

II.

There were sweet dreams in the night
Of time long past:

1 In the Posthumous Poems, and editions of 1839, passed; but Mr. Rossetti substitutes pass, which seems a perfectly secure emendation.

2 The preservation of these beautiful lines, we owe to Mrs. Catty (Miss Sophia Stacey) to whom the poem To Sophia (pp. 12-13 of this volume) was addressed. Time Long Past was written by Shelley in a copy of Leigh Hunt's Literary Pocket-book for 1819, which he gave Miss Stacey on the 29th of December 1820. Whether this date is to regulate the date assigned to the compo

sition I doubt, because in that Pocketbook Shelley also wrote Love's Philosophy, which had appeared a year before in The Indicator; but at present it is the only date we have to go by,-the poem having apparently been unknown to Mrs. Shelley or forgotten by her. It first appeared in Mr. Rossetti's edition (1870); and it is to the courtesy of Major General Catty, the son of the lady the poem was given to, that I am indebted for permission to in clude it in this edition.

And, was it sadness or delight,

Each day a shadow onward cast

Which made us wish it yet might last-
That time long past.

III.

There is regret, almost remorse,

For time long past.

'Tis like a child's beloved corse

A father watches, till at last
Beauty is like remembrance cast

From time long past.

SONNET. 1

YE hasten to the dead! What seek ye there,
Ye restless thoughts and busy purposes

Of the idle brain, which the world's livery wear?
O thou quick Heart which pantest to possess

All that anticipation feigneth fair!

Thou vainly curious mind which wouldest guess

Whence thou didst come, and whither thou mayst 2 go,

And that which never yet was known wouldst 3 know—
Oh, whither hasten ye that thus ye press

With such swift feet life's green and pleasant path,
Seeking alike from happiness and woe

A refuge in the cavern of grey death?

O heart, and mind, and thoughts! What thing do you Hope to inherit in the grave below?

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

2 In the Posthumous Poems, may'st;

in the collected editions, mayest.

3 In the Posthumous Poems, would; but wouldst in the editions of 1839.