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TO WORDSWORTH.

POET of Nature, thou hast wept to know
That things depart which never may return:
Childhood and youth, friendship and love's first
glow,

Have fled like sweet dreams, leaving thee to

mourn.

These common woes I feel. One loss is mine
Which thou too feel'st, yet I alone deplore.
Thou wert as a lone star, whose light did shine
On some frail bark in winter's midnight roar:
Thou hast like to a rock-built refuge stood
Above the blind and battling multitude:
In honoured poverty thy voice did weave
Songs consecrate to truth and liberty,—
Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve,
Thus having been, that thou shouldst cease
to be.

FEELINGS OF A REPUBLICAN

ON THE FALL OF BONAPARTE.

I HATED thee, fallen tyrant! I did groan
To think that a most unambitious slave,
Like thou, shouldst dance and revel on the
grave
Of Liberty.

throne

Thou mightst have built thy

Where it had stood even now: thou didst prefer A frail and bloody pomp which time has swept

In fragments towards oblivion. Massacre, For this I prayed, would on thy sleep have crept,

Treason and Slavery, Rapine, Fear, and Lust, And stifled thee, their minister. I know Too late, since thou and France are in the dust, That virtue owns a more eternal foe

Than force or fraud: old Custom, legal Crime, And bloody Faith the foulest birth of time.1

SONNET.

FROM THE ITALIAN OF DANTE.

Dante Alighieri to Guido Cavalcanti.

GUIDO, I would that Lappo, thou, and I, Led by some strong enchantment, might ascend

Presumably by way of comment on this last line, Shelley printed next to it in the Alastor volume, under the title Superstition, an excerpt from his pri vately printed poem Queen Mab. He simply took the thirty-one lines beginning with—

Thou taintest all thou lookest upon !

and ending with—

And all their causes, to an abstract point, Converging, thou didst bend and called it God! (pages 47 and 48 of this volume) and substituted for the last line the two following

Converging, thou didst give it name, and form,
Intelligence, and unity, and power.—ED.

2 A translation of Cavalcanti's Sonnet to Dante, beginning

Io vegno il giorno a te infinite volte,

will be found among Shelley's translations in a later volume. -ED.

A magic ship, whose charmèd sails should fly With winds at will where'er our thoughts might wend,

And that no change, nor any evil chance Should mar our joyous voyage; but it might be,

That even satiety should still enhance

Between our hearts their strict community: And that the bounteous wizard then would

place

1

Vanna and Bice and my gentle love,

Companions of our wandering, and would grace With passionate talk, wherever we might rove, Our time, and each were as content and free As I believe that thou and I should be.

TRANSLATED FROM THE GREEK OF MOSCHUS.

Τὰν ἅλα τὰν γλαυκὰν ὅταν ὥνεμος ἀτρέμα βάλλῃ, κ.τ.λ.

WHEN winds that move not its calm surface

sweep

The azure sea, I love the land no more; The smiles of the serene and tranquil deep Tempt my unquiet mind.-But when the roar Of ocean's grey abyss resounds, and foam

Gathers upon the sea, and vast waves burst, I turn from the drear aspect to the home

Of earth and its deep woods, where interspersed,

When winds blow loud, pines make sweet melody.

1 Whether by mistranslation or by misprint, the word my is obviously wrong, Bice being herself the love of Dante.-ED.

Whose house is some lone bark, whose toil the sea,

Whose prey the wandering fish, an evil lot Has chosen.-But I my languid limbs will fling

Beneath the plane, where the brook's murmuring

Moves the calm spirit, but disturbs it not.

THE DÆMON OF THE WORLD.'

Quantum scire licet.

PART I.

Nec tantum prodere vati,
Venit ætas omnis in unam

Congeriem, miserumque premunt tot sæcula pectus.

LUCAN, Phars. L. v. I. 176.

How wonderful is Death,
Death and his brother Sleep!

One pale as yonder wan and hornèd moon,
With lips of lurid blue,

The other glowing like the vital morn,
When throned on ocean's wave

It breathes over the world:

Yet both so passing strange and wonderful!

This poem is an elaborate revision of the first, second, eighth and ninth cantos of Queen Mab, and may be regarded as what Shelley in 1815 considered worth preserving in that volume. After making

his revision, which exists in his own copy of Queen Mab now in my collection, he only published with Alastor the first of the two parts. The second was published for the first time in my library edition of his works in 1877.—ED.

10

Hath then the iron-sceptred Skeleton,
Whose reign is in the tainted sepulchres,
To the hell dogs that couch beneath his throne
Cast that fair prey? Must that divinest form,
Which love and admiration cannot view
Without a beating heart, whose azure veins
Steal like dark streams along a field of snow,
Whose outline is as fair as marble clothed
In light of some sublimest mind, decay?
Nor putrefaction's breath

Leave aught of this pure spectacle

But loathsomeness and ruin ?—
Spare aught but a dark theme,

20

On which the lightest heart might moralize?
Or is it but that downy-winged slumbers
Have charmed their nurse coy Silence near her
lids

To watch their own repose?

Will they, when morning's beam

Flows through those wells of light,

Seek far from noise and day some western cave, Where woods and streams with soft and pausing winds

A lulling murmur weave ?

Ianthe doth not sleep

The dreamless sleep of death:
Nor in her moonlight chamber silently
Doth Henry hear her regular pulses throb,
Or mark her delicate cheek

30

With interchange of hues mock the broad

moon,

Outwatching weary night,

Without assured reward.
Her dewy eyes are closed;

On their translucent lids, whose texture fine 40

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