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Turns, tho' it wound not then with A cruel punishment for one most cruel If such can love, to make that love the fuel

prostrate head

Sinks in the dusk and writhes like me

and dies?

No: wears a living death of agonies!

Of the mind's hell; hate, scorn, remorse, despair:

As the slow shadows of the pointed But me-whose heart a stranger's tear

grass

Mark the eternal periods, his pangs pass
Slow, ever-moving,-making moments

be

As mine seem-each an immortality!

might wear

As water-drops the sandy fountain-stone, Who loved and pitied all things, and could moan

For woes which others hear not, and could see

"That you had never seen me-never The absent with the glance of phantasy,

heard

My voice, and more than all had ne'er endured

The deep pollution of my loathed embrace

That your eyes ne'er had lied love in my face

And with the poor and trampled sit and

weep,

Following the captive to his dungeon deep;

Me-who am as a nerve o'er which do

creep

The else unfelt oppressions of this earth, That, like some maniac monk, I had And was to thee the flame upon thy

torn out

hearth,

The nerves of manhood by their bleeding When all beside was cold-that thou on

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With thee, like some suppressed and Who intend deeds too dreadful for a

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And they will make one blessing which Such features to love's work . . . this

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Shall not be thy defence . . . for since

thy lip

Met mine first, years long past, since Fear me not. . .

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"Alas, love!

against thee I would

With soft fire under mine, I have not A finger in despite. Do I not live That thou mayst have less bitter cause

dwindled

Nor changed in mind or body, or in
aught

But as love changes what it loveth not
After long years and many trials.
"How vain

Are words!

I thought never to speak

again, Not even in secret,-not to my own heart

But from my lips the unwilling accents start,

to grieve?

I give thee tears for scorn and love for hate;

And that thy lot may be less desolate Than his on whom thou tramplest, I refrain

From that sweet sleep which medicines all pain.

Then, when thou speakest of me, never say

'He could forgive not.' Here I cast away And from my pen the words flow as I All human passions, all revenge, all write,

pride;

Dazzling my eyes with scalding tears I think, speak, act no ill; I do but hide my sight Under these words, like embers, every spark

Is dim to see that charactered in vain

On this unfeeling leaf which burns the Of that which has consumed me-quick

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Without the power to wish it thine Wept without shame in his society.

again;

And as slow years pass, a funereal train Each with the ghost of some lost hope or friend

Following it like its shadow, wilt thou bend

No thought on my dead memory?

I think I never was impressed so much; The man who were not, must have lacked a touch

Of human nature . . . then we lingered
not,

Although our argument was quite forgot,
But calling the attendants, went to dine

At Maddalo's; yet neither cheer nor Or read in gondolas by day or night, wine Having the little brazen lamp alight, Could give us spirits, for we talked of Unseen, uninterrupted; books are there, Pictures, and casts from all those statues fair

him

And nothing else, till daylight made stars dim;

And we agreed his was some dreadful ill Wrought on him boldly, yet unspeakable, By a dear friend; some deadly change in love

Of one vowed deeply which he dreamed not of;

For whose sake he, it seemed, had fixed a blot

Of falsehood on his mind which flourished not

But in the light of all-beholding truth, And having stamped this canker on his youth

She had abandoned him- and how

much more

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But I had friends in London too: the chief

Attraction here, was that I sought relief Might be his woe, we guessed not-he From the deep tenderness that maniac had store

wrought

Of friends and fortune once, as we could Within me-'twas perhaps an idle

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The following morning urged by my The stamp of why they parted, how

affairs

I left bright Venice.

After many years And many changes I returned; the

name

Of Venice, and its aspect, was the

same;

But Maddalo was travelling far away
Among the mountains of Armenia.
His dog was dead.

become

they met :

Yet if thine agèd eyes disdain to wet Those wrinkled cheeks with youth's remembered tears,

Ask me no more, but let the silent
years

Be closed and cered over their memory
As yon
mute marble where their
corpses lie."

His child had now I urged and questioned still, she told

me how

A woman; such as it has been my doom | All happened—but the cold world shall
To meet with few, a wonder of this earth
Where there is little of transcendant

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'Why, her heart must have been tough :

How did it end?"

"And was not

this enough?

They met they parted

there no more?"

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"Child, is

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Of that unutterable light has made
The edges of that cloud
Intoa hue, like some harmonious thought,
Wasting itself on that which it had
wrought,

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From the Baths of Lucca, in 1818, Shelley visited Venice; and, circumstances rendering it eligible that we should remain a few weeks in the neighbourhood of that Something within that interval which city, he accepted the offer of Lord Byron,

bore

who lent him the use of a villa he rented

near Este; and he sent for his family which was interspersed by visits to Venice, from Lucca to join him. we proceeded southward.

I Capuccini was a villa built on the site of a Capuchin convent, demolished when the French suppressed religious houses; it was situated on the very overhanging brow of a low hill at the foot of a range of higher ones. The house was cheerful and pleasant; a vine-trellised walk, a pergola, as it is called in Italian, led from the hall-door to a summer-house at the end of the garden, which Shelley made his study, and in which he began the Prometheus; and here also, as he mentions in a letter, he wrote Julian and Maddalo. A slight ravine, with a road in its depth, divided the garden from the hill, on which stood the ruins of the ancient castle of Este, whose dark massive wall gave forth an echo, and from whose ruined crevices owls and bats flitted forth at night, as the crescent moon sunk behind the black and heavy battlements. We looked from the garden over the wide plain of Lombardy, bounded to the west by the far Apennines, while to the east the horizon was lost in misty distance. After the picturesque but limited view of mountain, ravine, and chestnut-wood, at the Baths of Lucca, there was something infinitely gratifying to the eye in the wide range of prospect commanded by our new abode.

PROMETHEUS UNBOUND

A LYRICAL DRAMA

IN FOUR ACTS

AUDISNE HÆC AMPHIARAE, SUB TERRAM
ABDITE?

PREFACE

THE Greek tragic writers, in selecting as their subject any portion of their national history or mythology, employed in their treatment of it a certain arbitrary discretion. They by no means conceived themselves bound to adhere to the common interpretation or to imitate in story as in title their rivals and predecessors. Such a system would have amounted to a resignation of those claims to preference over their competitors which incited the composition. The Agamemnonian story was exhibited on the Athenian theatre with as many variations as dramas.

I have presumed to employ a similar licence. The "Prometheus Unbound" of Eschylus supposed the reconciliation of Jupiter with his victim as the price of the Our first misfortune, of the kind from disclosure of the danger threatened to his which we soon suffered even more severely, empire by the consummation of his marhappened here. Our little girl, an infant riage with Thetis. Thetis, according to in whose small features I fancied that I this view of the subject, was given in martraced great resemblance to her father, riage to Peleus, and Prometheus, by the showed symptoms of suffering from the permission of Jupiter, delivered from his heat of the climate. Teething increased captivity by Hercules. Had I framed my her illness and danger. We were at story on this model, I should have done Este, and when we became alarmed, no more than have attempted to restore hastened to Venice for the best advice. the lost drama of Æschylus; an ambition When we arrived at Fusina, we found which, if my preference to this mode of that we had forgotten our passport, and treating the subject had incited me to the soldiers on duty attempted to prevent cherish, the recollection of the high comour crossing the laguna; but they could parison such an attempt would challenge not resist Shelley's impetuosity at such a might well abate. But, in truth, I was. moment. We had scarcely arrived at averse from a catastrophe so feeble as Venice before life fled from the little that of reconciling the Champion with sufferer, and we returned to Este to weep the Oppressor of mankind. The moral her loss. interest of the fable, which is so powerAfter a few weeks spent in this retreat, fully sustained by the sufferings and

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