The moon rains out her beams, and Heaven is overflowed.

What thou art we know not;

What is most like thee?

From rainbow clouds there flow not

Drops so bright to see

As from thy presence showers a rain of melody.

Like a Poet hidden

In the light of thought,
Singing hymns unbidden

Till the world is wrought

To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded

not:

20 shrill blithe, Harvard MS. cancelled.

21 Keen as are || Thy notes, like, Harvard MS. cancelled.

33 rainbow clouds there || the rainbows, Harvard MS. cancelled.

Like a rose embowered

In its own green leaves,
By warm winds deflowered,
Till the scent it gives

Makes faint with too much sweet those heavy winged thieves.

Sound of vernal showers

On the twinkling grass,
Rain-awakened flowers,

All that ever was

Joyous and clear and fresh, thy music doth surpass.

Teach us, Sprite or Bird,

What sweet thoughts are thine;

45 sweet as love, which | which is love—and, Harvard MS. cancelled.

53 warm | the, Harvard MS. cancelled.

55 faint || rich, Harvard MS. cancelled; those, Harvard MS. || the, Harvard MS. cancelled, these, Shelley, 1820.

I have never heard

Praise of love or wine

That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine.

Chorus Hymeneal,

Or triumphal chant,

Matched with thine, would be all

But an empty vaunt,

A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want.

What objects are the fountains

Of thy happy strain?

What fields or waves or mountains?

What shapes of sky or plain?

What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of pain?

With thy clear keen joyance

Languor cannot be;

Shadow of annoyance

Never came near thee;

Thou lovest but ne'er knew love's sad satiety.

Waking or asleep

Thou of death must deem
Things more true and deep

Than we mortals dream

Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream?

We look before and after,

And pine for what is not;

Our sincerest laughter

72 happy drunken, Harvard MS. cancelled.

With some pain is fraught;

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest

thought.

Yet if we could scorn

Hate and pride and fear;

If we were things born

Not to shed a tear,

I know not how thy joy we ever should come near.

Better than all measures

Of delightful sound,
Better than all treasures

That in books are found,

Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground!

Teach me half the gladness

That thy brain must know,
Such harmonious madness
From my lips would flow

The world should listen then-as I am listening

now.

ODE TO LIBERTY

Yet Freedom, yet, thy banner torn but flying,

Streams like a thunder-storm against the wind.

I

A GLORIOUS people vibrated again

The lightning of the Nations; Liberty,

BYRON.

From heart to heart, from tower to tower, o'er Spain,

104 would, Shelley, 1820 || should, Harvard MS.

de to Liberty. Published with Prometheus Unbound, 1820.

Scattering contagious fire into the sky,

Gleamed. My soul spurned the chains of its dismay, And in the rapid plumes of song

Clothed itself, sublime and strong;

As a young eagle soars the morning clouds among,
Hovering in verse o'er its accustomed prey;
Till from its station in the Heaven of fame
The Spirit's whirlwind rapt it, and the ray
Of the remotest sphere of living flame
Which paves the void was from behind it flung,
As foam from a ship's swiftness, when there came
A voice out of the deep: I will record the same.

II

forth;

The Sun and the serenest Moon sprang
The burning stars of the abyss were hurled
Into the depths of heaven. The dædal earth,
That island in the ocean of the world,
Hung in its cloud of all-sustaining air;
But this divinest universe

Was yet a chaos and a curse,

For thou wert not; but power from worst producing worse,

The spirit of the beasts was kindled there,

And of the birds, and of the watery forms, And there was war among them, and despair

Within them, raging without truce or terms. The bosom of their violated nurse

Groaned, for beasts warred on beasts, and worms

on worms,

And men on men; each heart was as a hell of

storms.

i. 4 unto, Harvard MS.