Of the rent ice-cliff which the sunbeams by others, yet the effect of the whole was call, Plunging into the vale-it is the blast pour. FRAGMENT: HOME DEAR home, thou scene of earliest hopes and joys, The least of which wronged Memory ever makes fascinating and delightful. Mont Blanc was inspired by a view of that mountain and its surrounding peaks and valleys, as he lingered on the Bridge of Arve on his way through the Valley of Chamouni. Shelley makes the following mention of this poem in his publication of Letters from Switserland: "The poem the History of Six Weeks' Tour, and author of the two letters from Chamouni entitled Mont Blanc is written by the and Vevai. It was composed under the Bitterer than all thine unremembered immediate impression of the deep and tears. FRAGMENT: HELEN AND HENRY A SHOVEL of his ashes took And so they followed hard— NOTE ON POEMS OF 1816, BY MRS. SHELLEY SHELLEY wrote little during this year. The poem entitled The Sunset was written in the Spring of the year, while still residing at Bishopgate. He spent the summer on the shores of the Lake of Geneva. The Hymn to Intellectual Beauty was conceived during his voyage round the lake with Lord Byron. He occupied himself during this voyage by reading the Nouvelle Héloïse for the first time. The reading it on the very spot where the scenes are laid added to the interest; and he was at once surprised and charmed by the passionate eloquence and earnest enthralling interest that pervade this work. There was something in the character of Saint-Preux, in his abnegation of self, and in the worship he paid to Love, that coincided with Shelley's own disposition; and, though differing in many of the views and shocked powerful feelings excited by the objects which it attempts to describe; and, as an undisciplined overflowing of the soul, rests its claim to approbation on an attempt to imitate the untamable wildness and inaccessible solemnity from which those feelings sprang." In He This was an eventful year, and less time was given to study than usual. the list of his reading I find, in Greek, Theocritus, the Prometheus of Æschylus, several of Plutarch's Lives, and the works of Lucian. In Latin, Lucretius, Pliny's Letters, the Annals and Germany of Tacitus. In French, the History of the French Revolution by Lacretelle. read for the first time, this year, Montaigne's Essays, and regarded them ever after as one of the most delightful and instructive books in the world. scanty in English works: Locke's Essay, The list is Political Justice, and Coleridge's Lay Sermon, form nearly the whole. his frequent habit to read aloud to me in It was the evening; in this way we read, this year, the New Testament, Paradise Lost, Spenser's Faery Queen, and Don Quixote. POEMS WRITTEN IN 1817 MARIANNE'S DREAM I A PALE dream came to a Lady fair, And said, A boon, a boon, I pray! I know the secrets of the air, And things are lost in the glare of day, XII Sudden, from out that city sprung A light that made the earth grow red; Two flames that each with quivering tongue Licked its high domes, and overhead XIII And hark! a rush as if the deep Had burst its bonds; she looked behind And saw over the western steep A raging flood descend, and wind Through that wide vale; she felt no fear, But said within herself, 'Tis clear XVII At last her plank an eddy crost, And bore her to the city's wall, XVIII The eddy whirled her round and round Its aëry arch with light like blood; XIX These towers are Nature's own, and she For it was filled with sculptures rarest, To save them has sent forth the sea. XIV And now those raging billows came Where that fair Lady sate, and she And on a little plank, the flow XV The flames were fiercely vomited From every tower and every dome, And dreary light did widely shed Of forms most beautiful and strange, Like nothing human, but the fairest Of winged shapes, whose legions range Throughout the sleep of those that are, Like this same Lady, good and fair. XX And as she looked, still lovelier grew sure Was a strong spirit, and the hue Of his own mind did there endure After the touch, whose power had braided O'er that vast flood's suspended foam, Such grace, was in some sad change Beneath the smoke which hung its night Grew tranquil as a woodland river Winding through hills in solitude; Those marble shapes then seemed to quiver, Of the drowning mountains, in and And their fair limbs to float in motion, As the thistle-beard on a whirlwind out, sails Like weeds unfolding in the ocean. XXII While the flood was filling those hollow And their lips moved; one seemed to Waked the fair Lady from her sleep, The blood and life within those snowy Alas, that the torn heart can bleed, On which, like one in trance upborne, but not forget! II A breathless awe, like the swift change Unseen, but felt in youthful slumbers, Wild, sweet, but uncommunicably strange, Thou breathest now in fast ascending numbers. The cope of heaven seems rent and cloven By the enchantment of thy strain, And on my shoulders wings are woven, To follow its sublime career, Beyond the mighty moons that wane Secure o'er rocks and waves I sweep, Rejoicing like a cloud of morn. Now 'tis the breath of summer night, Which when the starry waters sleep, Round western isles, with incenseblossoms bright, Lingering, suspends my soul in its voluptuous flight. TO CONSTANTIA I THE rose that drinks the fountain dew In the pleasant air of noon, |