MUTABILITY

WE are as clouds that veil the midnight

moon;

How restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver, Streaking the darkness radiantly!—yet

soon

Night closes round, and they are lost for ever:

This world is the nurse of all we know,

Or like forgotten lyres, whose dissonant strings

This world is the mother of all we feel, And the coming of death is a fearful blow To a brain unencompassed with nerves of steel;

Give various response to each varying When all that we know, or feel, or see, like an unreal mystery.

Shall pass

blast, To whose frail frame no second motion brings

One mood or modulation like the last.

away:

And the billows of cloud that around thee roll

Shall sleep in the light of a wondrous day,

Where hell and heaven shall leave thee

free

To the universe of destiny.

We rest.—A dream has power to poison sleep;

We rise. One wandering thought No longer will live to hear or to see pollutes the day; We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or In the boundless realm of unending All that is great and all that is strange

weep; Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares

change.

It is the same!—For, be it joy or sorrow,
The path of its departure still is free:
Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his

morrow;

Nought may endure but Mutability.

The secret things of the grave are there, Where all but this frame must surely be,

Though the fine-wrought eye and the

wondrous ear

night

Sheds on a lonely and sea-girt isle,
Ere the dawning of morn's undoubted
light,

Is the flame of life so fickle and wan
That flits round our steps till their
strength is gone.

Who telleth a tale of unspeaking death?

Who lifteth the veil of what is to come?

Who painteth the shadows that are

beneath

The wide-winding caves of the peopled tomb?

Or uniteth the hopes of what shall be With the fears and the love for that which we see?

ON DEATH

THERE IS NO WORK, NOR DEVICE, NOR KNOW-
LEDGE, NOR WISDOM, IN THE GRAVE, WHITHER
THOU GOEST.
Ecclesiastes.

THE pale, the cold, and the moony smile A SUMMER EVENING CHURCH

Which the meteor beam of a starless

YARD,

O man! hold thee on in courage of soul In duskier braids around the languid Through the stormy shades of thy

worldly way,

eyes of day:

Silence and twilight, unbeloved of men,

Creep hand in hand from yon obscurest glen.

They breathe their spells towards the
departing day,
Encompassing the earth, air, stars, and

sea;

Light, sound, and motion own the potent sway,

Responding to the charm with its own

TO COLERIDGE

ΔΑΚΡΥΣΙ ΔΙΟΙΣΩ ΠΟΤΜΟΝ 'ΑΠΟΤΜΟΝ

Oh! THERE are spirits of the air,

And genii of the evening breeze,
And gentle ghosts, with eyes as fair

As star-beams among twilight trees :-
Such lovely ministers to meet
Oft hast thou turned from men thy lonely
feet.

mystery.

The winds are still, or the dry church- With mountain winds, and babbling tower grass

springs,

Knows not their gentle motions as they

And moonlight seas, that are the voice Of these inexplicable things

pass.

Thou didst hold commune, and rejoice When they did answer thee; but they Cast, like a worthless boon, thy love

away.

Thou too, aërial Pile! whose pinnacles
Point from one shrine like pyramids of
fire,
Obeyest in silence their sweet solemn
spells,
Clothing in hues of heaven thy dim and
distant spire,

height

Around whose lessening and invisible Another's wealth:-tame sacrifice
To a fond faith! still dost thou pine?
Gather among the stars the clouds of Still dost thou hope that greeting hands,
Voice, looks, or lips, may answer thy
demands?

night.

Thus solemnised and softened, death is mild

And terrorless as this serenest night: Here could I hope, like some inquiring child

Sporting on graves, that death did hide from human sight

Sweet secrets, or beside its breathless

And thou hast sought in starry eyes Beams that were never meant for thine,

The dead are sleeping in their sepulchres : And, mouldering as they sleep, a thrill- Ah! wherefore didst thou build thine ing sound

hope

Half sense, half thought, among the darkness stirs,

Breathed from their wormy beds all living things around,

And mingling with the still night and Could steal the power to wind thee in

mute sky

their wiles.

Its awful hush is felt inaudibly.

On the false earth's inconstancy? Did thine own mind afford no scope

Of love, or moving thoughts to thee? That natural scenes or human smiles

Yes, all the faithless smiles are fled Whose falsehood left thee brokenhearted;

The glory of the moon is dead;

Night's ghosts and dreams have now
departed;

Thine own soul still is true to thee,
But changed to a foul fiend through
misery.

sleep

That loveliest dreams perpetual watch This fiend, whose ghastly presence ever Beside thee like thy shadow hangs,

did keep.

i

Dream not to chase;-the mad endea- For this I prayed, would on thy sleep

have crept,

vour

recovered from a severe pulmonary attack; the weather was warm and pleasant. He lived near Windsor Forest; and his life was spent under its shades or on the water, meditating subjects for verse. Hitherto,

MRS. SHELLEY

NOTE ON THE EARLY POEMS, BY he had chiefly aimed at extending his political doctrines, and attempted so to do by appeals in prose essays to the people, exhorting them to claim their rights; but he had now begun to feel that the time for action was not ripe in England, and that the pen was the only instrument wherewith to prepare the way for better things.

In the scanty journals kept during those years I find a record of the books that Shelley read during several years. During the years of 1814 and 1815 the list is extensive. It includes, in Greek, Homer, Hesiod, Theocritus, the histories of Thucydides and Herodotus, and Diogenes Laertius. In Latin, Petronius, Suetonius, some of the works of Cicero, a large proportion of those of Seneca and Livy. In English, Milton's Poems, Wordsworth's Excursion, Southey's Madoc and Thalaba, Locke On the Human Understanding, Bacon's Novum Organum. In Italian, Ariosto, Tasso, and Alfieri. In French, the Réveries d'un Solitaire of Rousseau. To these may be added several modern books of travels. He read few novels.

Its frozen dew, and thou didst lie Where the bitter breath of the naked sky

Might visit thee at will.

THE remainder of Shelley's Poems will be arranged in the order in which they were written. Of course, mistakes will occur in placing some of the shorter ones; for, as I have said, many of these were thrown aside, and I never saw them till I had the misery of looking over his writings after the hand that traced them was dust; and some were in the hands of others, and I never saw them till now. The subjects of the poems are often to me an unerring guide; but on other occasions I can only guess, by finding them in the pages of the same manuscript book that contains poems with the date of whose composition I am fully conversant. In the present arrangement all his poetical translations will be placed together at the end.

THE SUNSET

THERE late was One within whose subtle being,

The loss of his early papers prevents my being able to give any of the poetry of his boyhood. Of the few I give as Early Poems, the greater part were published with Alastor; some of them were written previously, some at the same period. The poem beginning "Oh, there are spirits in the air was addressed in idea to Coleridge, whom he never knew; and at whose character he could only guess imperfectly, through his writings, and accounts he heard of him from some who knew him well. He regarded his change of opinions as rather an act of will than As light and wind within some delicate conviction, and believed that in his inner heart he would be haunted by what Shelley considered the better and holier aspirations of his youth. The summer evening that suggested to him the poem written in the churchyard of Lechlade occurred during his voyage up the Thames in 1815. He had been advised by a physician to live as much as possible in the open air; and a fortnight of a bright warm July was spent in tracing the Thames to its source. He never spent a season more tranquilly First than the summer of 1815. He had just

cloud

POEMS WRITTEN IN 1816

That fades amid the blue noon's burning
sky,
Genius and death contended.
may know

None

The sweetness of the joy which made

his breath

Fail, like the trances of the summer air, When, with the Lady of his love, who then

knew the unreserve of mingled being,