Which I have borne, and yet must bear,
Till death, like sleep, might steal on me,
And I might feel in the warm air

My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea

Breathe o'er my dying brain its last monotony."

In the spring of 1819, the Shelleys settled in Rome, where Shelley worked on his "Prometheus Unbound," writing among the ruins of the Baths of Caracalla, he always worked out-of-doors if possible and made translations from Homer and Euripides, from the Italian of Dante, the Spanish of Calderon, and from "Faust." He read the latter poem, he said, "always with sensations which no other composition excites. It deepens the gloom, and augments the rapidity of ideas, and would, therefore, seem to me an unfit study for any person who is a prey to the reproaches of memory, and the delusions of an imagination not to be restrained."

His love for the Iliad was strong. He was ever "astonished at the perpetually increasing magnificence of the last seven books. Homer then truly begins to be himself. The battle of Scamander, the funeral of Patroclus, and the high and solemn close of the whole bloody tale in tenderness and inexpiable sorrow, are wrought in a manner incomparable with anything of the same kind. The Odyssey is sweet, but there is nothing like this."

On June 7, their only child, William, died, and was buried in the Protestant cemetery, which Shelley thought the "most beautiful and solemn " he had ever beheld. "To see the sun shining on its bright grass," he wrote Peacock, fresh, when we first visited it, with the autumnal dews, and hear the whispering of the wind among the leaves of the trees which have overgrown the

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tomb of Cestius, and the soil which is stirring in the sun-warm earth, and to mark the tombs, mostly of women and young people who were buried there, one might, if one were to die, desire the sleep they seem to sleep."

The shock of William Shelley's death was terrible to his parents. The father had watched by his bedside sixty hours without rest. Mary became despondent, and seemed to live with her dead child rather than with her living husband.

it,

"My dearest Mary, wherefore hast thou gone,
And left me in this dreary world alone!
Thy form is here, indeed a lovely one
But thou art fled, gone down the dreary road,
That leads to Sorrow's most obscure abode;
Thou sittest on the hearth of pale despair,
Where,

For thine own sake, I cannot follow thee."

To his William he began a poem, but never finished

Leaving Rome, the city of their sorrow, the Shelleys went to Leghorn, where the poet wrote the drama of "The Cenci," at the suggestion of his wife. In the

autumn they moved to Florence, where, on November 12, their last child, Sir Percy Florence Shelley, was born. Here he wrote the last act of "Prometheus Unbound,' and, in a wood that skirts the Arno outside of Florence, that wonderful poem, the "Ode to the West Wind,” of which William Sharp says: "There is not in our language a lyrical poem more epically grand." Professor Dowden says, in it "there is a union of lyrical breadth with lyrical intensity unsurpassed in English song.”

"Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:

What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

Will take from both a deep autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves, to quicken a new birth;
And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be thou my lips to unawakened earth

The trumpet of a prophecy! O wind,

If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind ?"

Truly says Andrew Lang to Shelley in his "Letters to Dead Authors," "Your voice is as the voice of winds. and tides, and, perhaps, more deathless than all of these, and only perishable with the perishing of the human spirit."

"The Cenci" was offered to Covent Garden Theatre and to Drury Lane, but refused on account of the repulsiveness of the story. The beautiful Beatrice Cenci killed her father, who was a monster of vice, and

she, with her stepmother and her brother, died on the scaffold. Mrs. Shelley regards the fifth act of "The Cenci" as the finest thing her husband ever wrote. "The Prometheus Unbound" fell still-born from the This was disheartening to a poet who had

press. written,

"Chameleons feed on light and air:

Poets' food is love and fame."

"Nothing is more difficult and unwelcome," said Shelley, a year before his death, "than to write without a confidence of finding readers. . . It is impossible to compose, except under the strong excitement of an assurance of finding sympathy in what you write.

I can only print my writings by stinting myself in food."

Prometheus, in Shelley's drama, says Symonds, "is the humane vindicator of love, justice, and liberty, as opposed to Jove, the tyrannical oppressor, and creator of all evil by his selfish rule. Prometheus is the mind of man idealized, the spirit of our race, as Shelley thought it made to be. Jove is the incarnation of all. that thwarts its free development. . . . Prometheus resists Jove to the uttermost; endures all torments, physical and moral, that the tyrant plagues him with, secure in his own strength, and calmly expectant of an hour which shall hurl Jove from heaven, and leave the spirit of good triumphant. That hour arrives: Jove disappears; the burdens of the world and men are suddenly removed; a new age of peace and freedom and illimitable energy begins; the whole universe partakes in emancipation; the spirit of the earth no longer groans in pain, but sings alternate love-songs

with his sister orb, the moon; Prometheus is re-united in indissoluble bonds to his old love, Asia.”

As Mrs. Shelley says, "Through the whole poem there reigns a sort of calm and holy spirit of love; it soothes the tortured, and is hope to the expectant, till the prophecy is fulfilled, and Love, untainted by any evil, becomes the law of the world."

Of this poem, William Rossetti writes: "The immense scale and boundless scope of the conception; the marble majesty and extra-mundane passions of the personages; the sublimity of ethical aspiration; the radiance of ideal and poetic beauty which saturates every phase of the subject, and almost (as it were) wraps it from sight at times, and transforms it out of sense into spirit; the rolling river of great sound and lyrical rapture; form a combination not to be matched elsewhere, and scarcely to encounter competition."

Among the choicest passages in the Prometheus are the "Hymn to Asia,"

"Life of Life! thy lips enkindle,"

and Asia's answer,

"My soul is an enchanted boat."

Professor J. C. Shairp says of these lyrics: "Exquisitely beautiful as they are, they are, however, beautiful as the mirage is beautiful, and as unsubstantial. There is nothing in the reality of things answering to Asia. She is not human, she is not divine. There is nothing moral in her no will, no power to subdue evil: only an exquisite essence, a melting loveliness. There is in her no law, no righteousness; something which may enervate, nothing which can brace the soul."

This year, 1819, were also written the spirited "Songs