No More Learning

'Tis past!
Whatever comes, my heart shall sink no more.
And yet, I know not why, your words strike chill:
How tedious, false, and cold, seem all things. I
Have met with much injustice in this world;
No difference has been made by God or man,
Or any power molding my wretched lot,
'Twixt good or evil, as regarded me.
I am cut off from the only world I know,–
From light, and life, and love, in youth's sweet prime.
You do well telling me to trust in God,-
I hope I do trust in him. In whom else
Can any trust? And yet my heart is cold.
Know you not, mother-sister, know you not?
Bernardo even now is gone to implore
The Pope to grant our pardon.
Child, perhaps
It will be granted. We may all then live
To make these woes a tale for distant years:
Oh, what a thought! It gushes to my heart
Like the warm blood.
Yet both will soon be cold.
Oh, trample out that thought! Worse than despair,
Worse than the bitterness of death, is hope:
It is the only ill which can find place
Upon the giddy, sharp, and narrow hour
Tottering beneath us. Plead with the swift frost
That it should spare the eldest flower of spring;
Plead with awakening earthquake, o'er whose couch
Even now a city stands, strong, fair, and free;
Now stench and blackness yawn, like death. Oh plead
With Famine, or wind-walking Pestilence,
Blind lightning, or the deaf sea, not with man!
Cruel, cold, formal man: righteous in words,
In deeds a Cain. No, mother, we must die:
Since such is the reward of innocent lives;
Such the alleviation of worst wrongs.
And whilst our murderers live, and hard, cold men,


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PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
13275
Bernardo-
Beatrice-
Smiling and slow, walk through a world of tears
To death as to life's sleep, 'twere just the grave
Were some strange joy for us. Come, obscure Death,
And wind me in thine all-embracing arms!
Like a fond mother hide me in thy bosom,
And rock me to the sleep from which none wake.
Live ye, who live, subject to one another
As we were once who now
-
Bernardo rushes in
-―――
}
Oh, horrible,
That tears, that looks, that hope poured forth in prayer,
Even till the heart is vacant and despairs,
Should all be vain! The ministers of death
Are waiting round the doors. I thought I saw
Blood on the face of one. - What if 'twere fancy?
Soon the heart's blood of all I love on earth
Will sprinkle him, and he will wipe it off
As if 'twere only rain. O life! O world!
Cover me! let me be no more! To see
That perfect mirror of pure innocence
Wherein I gazed, and grew happy and good,
Shivered to dust! To see thee, Beatrice,
Who made all lovely thou didst look upon-
Thee, light of life, dead, dark! while I say
To hear I have no sister; and thou, mother,
Whose love was as a bond to all our loves,
Dead! the sweet bond broken!
Enter Camillo and Guards
"sister"
They come!
Kiss those warm lips before their crimson leaves
Are blighted white-cold. Say farewell before
Death chokes that gentle voice! Oh, let me hear
You speak.
Let me
Farewell, my tender brother. Think
Of our sad fate with gentleness, as now;
And let mild, pitying thoughts lighten for thee
Thy sorrow's load. Err not in harsh despair,
But tears and patience. One thing more, my child:
For thine own sake be constant to the love
Thou bearest us; and to the faith that I,
Though wrapt in a strange cloud of crime and shame,
Lived ever holy and unstained. And though


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13276
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
Ill tongues shall wound me, and our common name
Be as a mark stamped on thine innocent brow
For men to point at as they pass, do thou
Forbear, and never think a thought unkind
Of those who perhaps love thee in their graves.
So mayest thou die as I do; fear and pain
Being subdued. Farewell! Farewell! Farewell!
I cannot say, farewell!
Camillo-
O Lady Beatrice!
Beatrice-Give yourself no unnecessary pain,
My dear Lord Cardinal. Here, mother, tie
My girdle for me, and bind up this hair
In any simple knot; ay, that does well.
And yours I see is coming down. How often
Have we done this for one another; now
We shall not do it any more. My lord,
We are quite ready. Well, 'tis very well.
Bernardo
ADONAIS
WEEP for Adonais - he is dead!
Oh, weep for Adonais! though our tears
Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head!
And thou, sad hour, selected from all years
To mourn our loss, rouse thy obscure compeers,
And teach them thine own sorrow! Say: "With me
Died Adonais; till the future dares
Forget the past, his fate and fame shall be
An echo and a light unto eternity! "
Where wert thou, mighty mother, when he lay,
When thy son lay, pierced by the shaft which flies
In darkness? where was lorn Urania
When Adonais died? With veilèd eyes,
'Mid listening echoes, in her paradise
She sate, while one, with soft enamored breath,
Rekindled all the fading melodies
With which, like flowers that mock the corse beneath,
He had adorned and hid the coming bulk of death.
Oh, weep for Adonais - he is dead!
Wake, melancholy mother, wake and weep!


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13277
Yet wherefore? Quench within their burning bed
Thy fiery tears, and let thy loud heart keep,
Like his, a mute and uncomplaining sleep;
For he is gone where all things wise and fair
Descend; - oh, dream not that the amorous deep
Will yet restore him to the vital air:
Death feeds on his mute voice, and laughs at our despair.
Most musical of mourners, weep again!
Lament anew, Urania! - He died
Who was the sire of an immortal strain,
Blind, old, and lonely, when his country's pride,
The priest, the slave, and the liberticide,
Trampled and mocked with many a loathed rite
Of lust and blood; he went, unterrified,
Into the gulf of death: but his clear sprite
Yet reigns o'er earth; the third among the sons of light.
Most musical of mourners, weep anew!
Not all to that bright station dared to climb;
And happier they their happiness who knew,
Whose tapers yet burn through that night of time
In which suns perished; others more sublime,
Struck by the envious wrath of man or God,
Have sunk, extinct in their refulgent prime;
And some yet live, treading the thorny road
Which leads, through toil and hate, to Fame's serene abode.
But now thy youngest, dearest one has perished,
The nursling of thy widowhood, who grew,
Like a pale flower by some sad maiden cherished,
And fed with true love tears, instead of dew:
Most musical of mourners, weep anew!
Thy extreme hope, the loveliest and the last,
The bloom whose petals, nipt before they blew,
Died on the promise of the fruit, is waste;
The broken lily lies- the storm is overpast.
To that high capital where kingly Death
Keeps his pale court in beauty and decay,
He came; and bought, with price of purest breath,
A grave among the eternal. - Come away!
Haste, while the vault of blue Italian day
Is yet his fitting charnel-roof! while still
He lies, as if in dewy sleep he lay;


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13278
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
Awake him not! surely he takes his fill
Of deep and liquid rest, forgetful of all ill.
He will awake no more, oh, never more! -
Within the twilight chamber spreads apace
The shadow of white Death, and at the door
Invisible Corruption waits to trace
His extreme way to her dim dwelling-place;
The eternal Hunger sits, but pity and awe
Soothe her pale rage, nor dares she to deface
So fair a prey, till darkness and the law
Of change shall o'er his sleep the mortal curtain dr
Oh, weep for Adonais! - The quick dreams,
The passion-wingèd ministers of thought,
Who were his flocks, whom near the living streams
Of his young spirit he fed, and whom he taught
The love which was its music, wander not,-
Wander no more, from kindling brain to brain,
But droop there, whence they sprung; and mourn their
lot
-
Round the cold heart, where, after their sweet pain,
They ne'er will gather strength, or find a home again.
And one with trembling hands clasps his cold head,
And fans him with her moonlight wings, and cries:-
"Our love, our hope, our sorrow, is not dead;
See, on the silken fringe of his faint eyes,
Like dew upon a sleeping flower, there lies
A tear some dream has loosened from his brain. "
Lost angel of a ruined paradise!
She knew not 'twas her own; as with no stain
She faded, like a cloud which had outwept its rain.
One from a lucid urn of starry dew
Washed his light limbs as if embalming them;
Another clipt her profuse locks, and threw
The wreath upon him, like an anadem,
Which frozen tears instead of pearls begem;
Another in her willful grief would break
Her bow and wingèd reeds, as if to stem
A greater loss with one which was more weak,
And dull the barbèd fire against his frozen cheek.
Another splendor on his mouth alit,-
That mouth, whence it was wont to draw the breath


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PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
13279
Which gave it strength to pierce the guarded wit,
And pass into the panting heart beneath
With lightning and with music: the damp death
Quenched its caress upon his icy lips;
And as a dying meteor stains a wreath
Of moonlight vapor, which the cold night clips,
It flushed through his pale limbs, and past to its eclipse.
And others came: Desires and Adorations,
Winged Persuasions and veiled Destinies,
Splendors, and Glooms, and glimmering incarnations
Of Hopes and Fears, and twilight Phantasies;
And Sorrow, with her family of sighs;
And Pleasure, blind with tears, led by the gleam
Of her own dying smile instead of eyes,—
Came in slow pomp; the moving pomp might seem
Like pageantry of mist on an autumnal stream.
All he had loved, and molded into thought,
From shape and hue and odor and sweet sound,
Lamented Adonais. Morning sought
Her eastern watch-tower; and her hair unbound,
Wet with the tears which should adorn the ground,
Dimmed the aerial eyes that kindle day:
Afar the melancholy thunder moaned,
Pale Ocean in unquiet slumber lay,
And the wild winds flew round, sobbing in their dismay.
Lost Echo sits amid the voiceless mountains,
And feeds her grief with his remembered lay,
And will no more reply to winds or fountains,
Or amorous birds perched on the young green spray,
Or herdsman's horn, or bell at closing day;
Since she can mimic not his lips, more dear
Than those for whose disdain she pined away
Into a shadow of all sounds: a drear
Murmur, between their songs, is all the woodmen hear.
Grief made the young Spring wild, and she threw down
Her kindling buds, as if she Autumn were,
Or they dead leaves: since her delight is flown,
For whom should she have waked the sullen year?
To Phoebus was not Hyacinth so dear,
Nor to himself Narcissus, as to both


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PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
Thou, Adonais: wan they stand and sere
Amid the faint companions of their youth,
With dew all turned to tears; odor, to sighing ruth.
Thy spirit's sister, the lorn nightingale,
Mourns not her mate with such melodious pain;
Not so the eagle, who like thee could scale
Heaven, and could nourish in the sun's domain
Her mighty youth with morning, doth complain,
Soaring and screaming round her empty nest,
As Albion wails for thee: the curse of Cain
Light on his head who pierced thy innocent breast,
And scared the angel soul that was its earthly guest!
Ah, woe is me! winter is come and gone,
But grief returns with the revolving year.
The airs and streams renew their joyous tone;
The ants, the bees, the swallows reappear;
Fresh leaves and flowers deck the dead season's bier;
The amorous birds now pair in every brake,
And build their mossy homes in field and brere;
And the green lizard, and the golden snake,
Like unimprisoned flames, out of their trance awake.
Through wood and stream and field and hill and ocean
A quickening life from the earth's heart has burst,
As it has ever done, with change and motion,
From the great morning of the world when first
God dawned on chaos: in its stream immersed
The lamps of heaven flash with a softer light;
All baser things pant with life's sacred thirst
Diffuse themselves, and spend in love's delight
The beauty and the joy of their renewèd might.
The leprous corpse touched by this spirit tender
Exhales itself in flowers of gentle breath ·
Like incarnations of the stars, when splendor
Is changed to fragrance, they illumine death.
And mock the merry worm that wakes beneath:
Naught we know, dies. Shall that alone which knows,
Be as a sword consumed before the sheath
By sightless lightning? -th' intense atom glows
A moment, then is quenched in a most cold repose.
Alas! that all we loved of him should be,
But for our grief, as if it had not been,


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13281
And grief itself be mortal! Woe is me!
Whence are we, and why are we? of what scene
The actors or spectators? Great and mean
Meet massed in death, who lends what life must borrow.
As long as skies are blue, and fields are green,
Evening must usher night, night urge the morrow,
Month follow month with woe, and year wake year to sorrow.
He will awake no more, oh, never more!
"Wake thou," cried Misery, "childless mother, rise
Out of thy sleep, and slake, in thy heart's core,
A wound more fierce than his with tears and sighs. "
And all the Dreams that watched Urania's eyes,
And all the Echoes whom their sister's song
Had held in holy silence, cried, "Arise! "
Swift as a thought by the snake Memory stung,
From her ambrosial rest the fading splendor sprung.
She rose like an autumnal night, that springs
Out of the east, and follows wild and drear
The golden day, which, on eternal wings,
Even as a ghost abandoning a bier,
Had left the earth a corpse. Sorrow and fear
So struck, so roused, so rapt Urania;
So saddened round her like an atmosphere
Of stormy mist; so swept her on her way
Even to the mournful place where Adonais lay.
Out of her secret paradise she sped,
Through camps and cities rough with stone, and steel,
And human hearts, which to her airy tread
Yielding not, wounded the invisible
Palms of her tender feet where'er they fell:
And barbed tongues, and thoughts more sharp than they,
Rent the soft form they never could repel,
Whose sacred blood, like the young tears of May,
Paved with eternal flowers that undeserving way.
In the death chamber for a moment Death,
Shamed by the presence of that living might
Blushed to annihilation, and the breath
Revisited those lips, and life's pale light
Flashed through those limbs, so late her dear delight.
"Leave me not wild and drear and comfortless,
As silent lightning leaves the starless night!
XXIII-831


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PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
Leave me not! " cried Urania: her distress
Roused Death; Death rose and smiled, and met her vain
caress.
Stay yet awhile! speak to me once again;
Kiss me, so long but as a kiss may live:
And in my heartless breast and burning brain
That word, that kiss, shall all thoughts else survive,
With food of saddest memory kept alive,
Now thou art dead, as if it were a part
Of thee, my Adonais! I would give
All that I am to be as thou now art!
But I am chained to Time, and cannot thence depart!
"O gentle child, beautiful as thou wert,
Why didst thou leave the trodden paths of men
Too soon, and with weak hands though mighty heart
Dare the unpastured dragon in his den?
Defenseless as thou wert, oh where was then
Wisdom the mirrored shield, or scorn the spear?
Or hadst thou waited the full cycle, when
Thy spirit should have filled its crescent sphere,
The monsters of life's waste had fled from thee like deer.
"The herded wolves, bold only to pursue;
The obscene ravens, clamorous o'er the dead;
The vultures to the conqueror's banner true
Who feed where Desolation first has fed,
And whose wings rain contagion; - how they fled,
When like Apollo, from his golden bow,
The Pythian of the age one arrow sped
And smiled! -The spoilers tempt no second blow,
They fawn on the proud feet that spurn them lying low.
"The sun comes forth, and many reptiles spawn;
He sets, and each ephemeral insect then
Is gathered into death without a dawn,
And the immortal stars awake again;-
So is it in the world of living men:
A godlike mind soars forth, in its delight
Making earth bare and veiling heaven, and when
It sinks, the swarms that dimmed or shared its light
Leave to its kindred lamps the spirit's awful night. "
-
Thus ceased she: and the mountain shepherds came,
Their garlands sere, their magic mantles rent;


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13283
The pilgrim of eternity, whose fame.
Over his living head like heaven is bent,
An early but enduring monument,
Came, veiling all the lightnings of his song
In sorrow; from her wilds Ierne sent
The sweetest lyrist of her saddest wrong,
And love taught grief to fall like music from his tongue.
Midst others of less note, came one frail form,—
A phantom among men; companionless
As the last cloud of an expiring storm
Whose thunder is its knell: he, as I guess,
Had gazed on nature's naked loveliness,
Actæon-like, and now he fled astray
With feeble steps o'er the world's wilderness,
And his own thoughts, along that rugged way,
Pursued, like raging hounds, their father and their prey.
__
A pardlike spirit beautiful and swift;
A Love in desolation masked; -
a power
Girt round with weakness: it can scarce uplift
The weight of the superincumbent hour;—
It is a dying lamp, a falling shower,
A breaking billow even whilst we speak
Is it not broken? On the withering flower
The killing sun smiles brightly; on a cheek
The life can burn in blood, even while the heart may break.
His head was bound with pansies overblown,
And faded violets, white, and pied, and blue;
And a light spear topped with a cypress cone,
Round whose rude shaft dark ivy tresses grew,
Yet dripping with the forest's noonday dew,
Vibrated, as the ever-beating heart
Shook the weak hand that grasped it: of that crew
He came the last, neglected and apart;
A herd-abandoned deer struck by the hunter's dart.
All stood aloof, and at his partial moan
Smiled through their tears; well knew that gentle band
Who in another's fate now wept his own:
As in the accents of an unknown land,
He sung new sorrow, sad Urania scanned
The stranger's mien, and murmured, "Who art thou? »
He answered not, but with a sudden hand


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13284
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
Made bare his branded and ensanguined brow,
Which was like Cain's or Christ's-oh, that it should be so!
What softer voice is hushed over the dead?
Athwart what brow is that dark mantle thrown?
What form leans sadly o'er the white death-bed,
In mockery of monumental stone,
The heavy heart heaving without a moan?
If it be he who, gentlest of the wise,
Taught, soothed, loved, honored the departed one,
Let me not vex, with inharmonious sighs,
The silence of that heart's accepted sacrifice.
Our Adonais has drunk poison - oh!
What deaf and viperous murderer could crown
Life's early cup with such a draught of woe?
The nameless worm would now itself disown:
It felt, yet could escape the magic tone
Whose prelude held all envy, hate, and wrong,
But what was howling in one breast alone,
Silent with expectation of the song,
Whose master's hand is cold, whose silver lyre unstrung.
Live thou, whose infamy is not thy fame!
Live! fear no heavier chastisement from me,
Thou noteless blot on a remembered name!
But be thyself, and know thyself to be!
And ever at thy season be thou free
To spill the venom when thy fangs o'erflow:
Remorse and self-contempt shall cling to thee;
Hot shame shall burn upon thy secret brow,
And like a beaten hound tremble thou shalt-as now.
Nor let us weep that our delight is fled
Far from these carrion kites that scream below:
He wakes or sleeps with the enduring dead;
Thou canst not soar where he is sitting now. —
Dust to the dust! but the pure spirit shall flow
Back to the burning fountain whence it came,
A portion of the Eternal, which must glow
Through time and change, unquenchably the same,
Whilst thy cold embers choke the sordid hearth of shame.
Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep;
He hath awakened from the dream of life:


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'Tis we, who, lost in stormy visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife,
And in mad trance, strike with our spirit's knife
Invulnerable nothings. - We decay
Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief
Convulse us and consume us day by day,
And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.
He has outsoared the shadow of our night;
Envy and calumny and hate and pain,
And that unrest which men miscal delight,
Can touch him not and torture not again:
From the contagion of the world's slow stain
He is secure, and now can never mourn
A heart grown cold, a head grown gray in vain;
Nor, when the spirit's self has ceased to burn,
With sparkless ashes load an unlamented urn.
He lives, he wakes-'tis Death is dead, not he;
Mourn not for Adonais. -Thou young Dawn,
Turn all thy dew to splendor, for from thee
The spirit thou lamentest is not gone;
Ye caverns and ye forests, cease to moan!
Cease, ye faint flowers and fountains; and thou air,
Which like a mourning veil thy scarf hadst thrown
O'er the abandoned earth, now leave it bare
Even to the joyous stars which smile on its despair!
He is made one with nature; there is heard
His voice in all her music, from the moan
Of thunder to the song of night's sweet bird:
He is a presence to be felt and known
In darkness and in light, from herb and stone,
Spreading itself where'er that Power may move
Which has withdrawn his being to its own;
Which wields the world with never-wearied love,
Sustains it from beneath, and kindles it above.
He is a portion of the loveliness
Which once he made more lovely: he doth bear
His part, while the one Spirit's plastic stress
Sweeps through the dull dense world, compelling there
All new successions to the forms they wear;
Torturing th' unwilling dross that checks its flight
To its own likeness, as each mass may bear;


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13286
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
And bursting in its beauty and its might
From trees and beasts and men, into the heaven's light.
The splendors of the firmament of time
May be eclipsed, but are extinguished not;
Like stars to their appointed height they climb,
And death is a low mist which cannot blot
The brightness it may veil. When lofty thought
Lifts a young heart above its mortal lair,
And love and life contend in it, for what
Shall be its earthly doom, the dead live there
And move like winds of light on dark and stormy air.
The inheritors of unfulfilled renown
Rose from their thrones, built beyond mortal thought,
Far in the Unapparent. Chatterton
Rose pale, his solemn agony had not
Yet faded from him; Sidney, as he fought
And as he fell, and as he lived and loved,
Sublimely mild, a spirit without spot,
Arose; and Lucan, by his death approved:
Oblivion as they rose shrank like a thing reproved.
And many more, whose names on earth are dark
But whose transmitted effluence cannot die,
So long as fire outlives the parent spark,
Rose, robed in dazzling immortality.
"Thou art become as one of us," they cry:
"It was for thee yon kingless sphere has long
Swung blind in unascended majesty,
Silent alone amid an heaven of song.
Assume thy wingèd throne, thou Vesper of our throng! "
Who mourns for Adonais? Oh, come forth,
Fond wretch! and know thyself and him aright.
Clasp with thy panting soul the pendulous earth;
As from a centre, dart thy spirit's light
Beyond all worlds, until its spacious might
Satiate the void circumference: then shrink
Even to a point within our day and night;
And keep thy heart light lest it make thee sink
When hope has kindled hope, and lured thee to the brink.
Or go to Rome, which is the sepulchre-
Oh! not of him, but of our joy: 'tis naught


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13287
That ages, empires, and religions there
Lie buried in the ravage they have wrought;
For such as he can lend,- they borrow not
Glory from those who made the world their prey:
And he is gathered to the kings of thought
Who waged contention with their time's decay,
And of the past are all that cannot pass away.
-
- at once the paradise,
Go thou to Rome,-
The grave, the city, and the wilderness;
And where its wrecks like shattered mountains rise,
And flowering weeds and fragrant copses dress
The bones of desolation's nakedness,
Pass till the spirit of the spot shall lead
Thy footsteps to a slope of green access
Where, like an infant's smile, over the dead
A light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread,
And gray walls molder round, on which dull time
Feeds, like slow fire upon a hoary brand:
And one keen pyramid with wedge sublime,
Pavilioning the dust of him who planned
This refuge for his memory, doth stand
Like flame transformed to marble; and beneath,
A field is spread, on which a newer band
Have pitched in heaven's smile their camp of death,
Welcoming him we lose with scarce extinguished breath.
Here pause: these graves are all too young as yet
To have outgrown the sorrow which consigned
Its charge to each; and if the seal is set,
Here, on one fountain of a mourning mind,
Break it not thou! too surely shalt thou find
Thine own well full, if thou returnest home,
Of tears and gall. From the world's bitter wind
Seek shelter in the shadow of the tomb:
What Adonais is, why fear we to become?
The One remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven's light forever shines, earth's shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-colored glass,
Stains the white radiance of eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments. - Die,
If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek!
Follow where all is fled! -Rome's azure sky,


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13288
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words, are weak
The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak.
Why linger, why turn back, why shrink, my heart?
Thy hopes are gone before; from all things here
They have departed: thou shouldst now depart!
A light is past from the revolving year,
And man, and woman; and what still is dear
Attracts to crush, repels to make thee wither.
The soft sky smiles, the low wind whispers near;
'Tis Adonais calls! oh, hasten thither,
No more let life divide what death can join together.
That light whose smile kindles the universe,
That beauty in which all things work and move,
That benediction which the eclipsing curse
Of birth can quench not, that sustaining love
Which, through the web of being blindly wove
By man and beast and earth and air and sea,
Burns bright or dim as each are mirrors of
The fire for which all thirst,- now beams on me,
Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality.
The breath whose might I have invoked in song.
Descends on me; my spirit's bark is driven
Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng
Whose sails were never to the tempest given;
The massy earth and spherèd skies are riven!
I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar;
Whilst burning through the inmost veil of Heaven,
The soul of Adonais, like a star,
Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.
HYMN TO INTELLECTUAL BEAUTY
THE
HE awful shadow of some unseen power
Floats though unseen amongst us,- visiting
This various world with as inconstant wing
As summer winds that creep from flower to flower;
Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower,
It visits with inconstant glance
Each human heart and countenance;
Like hues and harmonies of evening,-


## p. 13289 (#91) ###########################################

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
13289
Like clouds in starlight widely spread,-
Like memory of music fled,-
Like aught that for its grace may be
Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery.
――
Spirit of Beauty, that dost consecrate
With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon
Of human thought or form,- where art thou gone?
Why dost thou pass away and leave our state,
This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate?
Ask why the sunlight not for ever
Weaves rainbows o'er yon mountain river,
Why aught should fail and fade that once is shown,
Why fear and dream and death and birth
Cast on the daylight of this earth
Such gloom,- why man has such a scope
For love and hate, despondency and hope?
No voice from some sublimer world hath ever
To sage or poet these responses given;
Therefore the names of demon, ghost, and heaven,
Remain the records of their vain endeavor,-
Frail spells, whose uttered charm might not avail to sever,
From all we hear and all we see,
Doubt, chance, and mutability.
Thy light alone-like mist o'er mountains driven,
Or music by the night wind sent
Through strings of some still instrument,
Or moonlight on a midnight stream—
Gives grace and truth to life's unquiet dream.
Love, hope, and self-esteem, like clouds depart
And come, for some uncertain moments lent.
Man were immortal and omnipotent
Didst thou, unknown and awful as thou art,
Keep with thy glorious train firm state within his heart.
Thou messenger of sympathies
That wax and wane in lovers' eyes-
Thou that to human thought art nourishment,
Like darkness to a dying flame!
Depart not as thy shadow came,
Depart not-lest the grave should be,
Like life and fear, a dark reality.


## p. 13290 (#92) ###########################################

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
13290
While yet a boy I sought for ghosts, and sped
Through many a listening chamber, cave, and ruin,
And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing
Hopes of high talk with the departed dead.
I called on poisonous names with which our youth is fed;
I was not heard - I saw them not-
When, musing deeply on the lot
Of life, at the sweet time when winds are wooing
All vital things that wake to bring
News of birds and blossoming,
Sudden thy shadow fell on me
I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy!
-
I vowed that I would dedicate my powers
To thee and thine: have I not kept the vow?
With beating heart and streaming eyes, even now
I call the phantoms of a thousand hours
Each from his voiceless grave: they have in visioned bowers
Of studious zeal or love's delight
Outwatched with me the envious night;
They know that never joy illumed my brow
Unlinked with hope that thou wouldst free
This world from its dark slavery;
That thou, O awful Loveliness,
Wouldst give whate'er these words cannot express
The day becomes more solemn and serene
When noon is past; here is a harmony
In autumn, and a lustre in its sky,
Which through the summer is not heard or seen,
As if it could not be, as if it had not been!
Thus let thy power, which like the truth
Of nature on my passive youth
Descended, to my onward life supply
Its calm, to one who worships thee,
And every form containing thee,
Whom, Spirit fair, thy spells did bind
To fear himself and love all human-kind.


## p. 13291 (#93) ###########################################

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
13291
OZYMANDIAS
MET a traveler from an antique land
I
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,-
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair! "
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare '
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
THE INDIAN SERENADE
ARISE from dreams of thee
In the first sweet sleep of night,
When the winds are breathing low,
And the stars are shining bright;
I arise from dreams of thee,
And a spirit in my feet
Hath led me- who knows how! -
To thy chamber window, Sweet!
The wandering airs they faint
On the dark, the silent stream
And the Champak odors fail
Like sweet thoughts in a dream;
The nightingale's complaint,
It dies upon her heart-
As I must on thine,
O beloved as thou art!
Oh, lift me from the grass!
I die! I faint! I fail!
Let thy love in kisses rain
-
On my lips and eyelids pale.
My cheek is cold and white, alas!
My heart beats loud and fast;
Oh, press it to thine own again,
Where it will break at last!


## p. 13292 (#94) ###########################################

13292
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
O
ODE TO THE WEST WIND
I
WILD West Wind, thou breath of autumn's being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,
Yellow and black and pale and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes; O thou,
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed
The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the spring shall blow
Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odors plain and hill:
Wild spirit, which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and preserver - hear, O hear!
II
Thou on whose stream, 'mid the steep sky's commotion,
Loose clouds like earth's decaying leaves are shed,
Shook from the tangled boughs of heaven and ocean,
Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread
On the blue surface of thine airy surge,
Like the bright hair uplifted from the head
Of some fierce Mænad, even from the dim verge
Of the horizon to the zenith's height
The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge
Of the dying year, to which this closing night
Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre,
Vaulted with all thy congregated might
Of vapors, from whose solid atmosphere
Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst- O hear!
III
Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,
Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams,


## p. 13293 (#95) ###########################################

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
13293
Beside a pumice isle in Baiæ's bay,
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave's intenser day,
All overgrown with azure moss and flowers
So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! thou
For whose path the Atlantic's level powers
Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below
The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear
The sapless foliage of the ocean, know
Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear,
And tremble and despoil themselves-O hear!
IV
If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;
A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share
The impulse of thy strength, only less free
Than thou, O uncontrollable! If even
I were as in my boyhood, and could be
The comrade of thy wanderings over heaven,
As then, when to outstrip thy skyey speed
Scarce seemed a vision,-I would ne'er have striven
As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.
O lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed
One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.
V
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,


## p. 13294 (#96) ###########################################

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
13294
Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened earth
The trumpet of a prophecy! O wind,
If winter comes, can spring be far behind?
THE SENSITIVE PLANT
PART FIRST
SENSITIVE PLANT in a garden grew,
And the young winds fed it with silver dew,
And it opened its fan-like leaves to the light,
And closed them beneath the kisses of night.
A
And the spring arose on the garden fair,
Like the spirit of love felt everywhere;
And each flower and herb on earth's dark breast
Rose from the dreams of its wintry rest.
But none ever trembled and panted with bliss
In the garden, the field, or the wilderness,
Like a doe in the noontide with love's sweet want,
As the companionless Sensitive Plant.
The snowdrop, and then the violet,
Arose from the ground with warm rain wet,
And their breath was mixed with fresh odor, sent
From the turf, like the voice and the instrument.
Then the pied wind-flowers and the tulip tall,
And narcissi, the fairest among them all,
Who gaze on their eyes in the stream's recess,
Till they die of their own dear loveliness;
And the Naiad-like lily of the vale,
Whom youth makes so fair and passion so pale,
That the light of its tremulous bells is seen
Through their pavilions of tender green;
And the hyacinth, purple and white and blue,
Which flung from its bells a sweet peal anew
Of music so delicate, soft, and intense,
It was felt like an odor within the sense;


## p. 13295 (#97) ###########################################

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
And the rose like a nymph to the bath addrest,
Which unveiled the depth of her glowing breast,
Till, fold after fold, to the fainting air
The soul of her beauty and love lay bare;
And the wand-like lily, which lifted up,
As a Mænad, its moonlight-colored cup,
Till the fiery star, which is its eye,
Gazed through clear dew on the tender sky;
And the jessamine faint, and the sweet tuberose,
The sweetest flower for scent that blows;
And all rare blossoms from every clime,—
Grew in that garden in perfect prime.
And on the stream whose inconstant bosom
Was prankt under boughs of embowering blossom,
With golden and green light, slanting through
Their heaven of many a tangled hue,
Broad water-lilies lay tremulously,
And starry river-buds glimmered by,
And around them the soft stream did glide and dance
With a motion of sweet sound and radiance.
And the sinuous paths of lawn and of moss,
Which led through the garden along and across,
Some open at once to the sun and the breeze,
Some lost among bowers of blossoming trees,
Were all paved with daisies and delicate bells,
As fair as the fabulous asphodels;
And flowrets which drooping as day drooped too
Fell into pavilions, white, purple, and blue,
To roof the glow-worm from the evening dew.
And from this undefiled Paradise
The flowers (as an infant's awakening eyes
Smile on its mother, whose singing sweet
Can first lull, and at last must awaken it),
When heaven's blithe winds had unfolded them,
As mine-lamps enkindle a hidden gem,
Shone smiling to heaven, and every one
Shared joy in the light of the gentle sun;
13295
For each one was interpenetrated
With the light and the odor its neighbor shed;


## p. 13296 (#98) ###########################################

13296
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
Like young lovers whom youth and love make dear,
Wrapped and filled by their mutual atmosphere.
But the Sensitive Plant, which could give small fruit
Of the love which it felt from the leaf to the root,
Received more than all; it loved more than ever,
Where none wanted but it, could belong to the giver:
For the Sensitive Plant has no bright flower;
Radiance and odor are not its dower:
It loves even like Love, its deep heart is full;
It desires what it has not, the beautiful!
The light winds which from unsustaining wings
Shed the music of many murmurings;
The beams which dart from many a star
Of the flowers whose hues they bear afar;
The plumèd insects swift and free,
Like golden boats on a sunny sea,
Laden with light and odor, which pass
Over the gleam of the living grass;
The unseen clouds of the dew, which lie
Like fire in the flowers till the sun rides high,
Then wander like spirits among the spheres,
Each cloud faint with the fragrance it bears;
The quivering vapors of dim noontide,
Which like a sea o'er the warm earth glide,
In which every sound and odor and beam
Move, as reeds in a single stream,-
―
Each and all like ministering angels were
For the Sensitive Plant sweet joy to bear,
Whilst the lagging hours of the day went by
Like windless clouds o'er a tender sky.
And when evening descended from heaven above,
And the earth was all rest, and the air was all love,
And delight, though less bright, was far more deep,
And the day's veil fell from the world of sleep,
And the beasts and the birds and the insects were drowned
In an ocean of dreams without a sound,-
Whose waves never mark, though they ever impress
The light sand which paves it, consciousness,-
-
---


## p. 13297 (#99) ###########################################

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
13297
(Only overhead the sweet nightingale
Ever sang more sweet as the day might fail,
And snatches of its Elysian chant
Were mixed with the dreams of the Sensitive Plant,)
The Sensitive Plant was the earliest
Upgathered into the bosom of rest;
A sweet child weary of its delight,
The feeblest and yet the favorite,
Cradled within the embrace of night.
XXIII-832
THE CLOUD
BRING fresh showers for the thirsting flowers,
From the seas and the streams;
I
I bear light shade for the leaves when laid
In their noonday dreams.
From my wings are shaken the dews that waken
The sweet buds every one,
When rocked to rest on their mother's breast,
As she dances about the sun.
I wield the flail of the lashing hail,
And whiten the green plains under,
And then again I dissolve it in rain,
And laugh as I pass in thunder.
I sift the snow on the mountains below,
And their great pines groan aghast;
And all the night 'tis my pillow white,
While I sleep in the arms of the blast.
Sublime on the towers of my skyey bowers,
Lightning my pilot sits;
In a cavern under is fettered the thunder,
It struggles and howls at fits.
Over earth and ocean, with gentle motion,
This pilot is guiding me,
Lured by the love of the genii that move
In the depths of the purple sea;
Over the rills and the crags and the hills,
Over the lakes and the plains,
Wherever he dream, under mountain or stream,
The spirit he loves remains:
And I all the while bask in heaven's blue smile,
Whilst he is dissolving in rains.


## p. 13298 (#100) ##########################################

13298
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
The sanguine sunrise, with his meteor eyes,
And his burning plumes outspread,
Leaps on the back of my sailing rack,
When the morning star shines dead;
As on the jag of a mountain crag,
Which an earthquake rocks and swings,
An eagle alit one moment may sit
In the light of its golden wings.
And when sunset may breathe, from the lit sea beneath,
Its ardors of rest and of love,
And the crimson pall of eve may fall
From the depth of heaven above,
With wings folded I rest on mine airy nest,
As still as a brooding dove.
That orbed maiden with white fire laden,
Whom mortals call the moon,
Glides glimmering o'er my fleece-like floor,
By the midnight breezes strewn :
And wherever the beat of her unseen feet,
Which only the angels hear,
May have broken the woof of my tent's thin roof,
The stars peep behind her and peer;
And I laugh to see them whirl and flee,
Like a swarm of golden bees,
When I widen the rent in my wind-built tent,
Till the calm rivers, lakes, and seas,
Like strips of the sky fallen through me on high,
Are each paved with the moon and these.
I bind the sun's throne with a burning zone,
And the moon's with a girdle of pearl;
The volcanoes are dim, and the stars reel and swim,
When the whirlwinds my banner unfurl.
From cape to cape, with a bridge-like shape,
Over a torrent sea,
Sunbeam-proof, I hang like a roof,
The mountains its columns be.
The triumphal arch through which I march
With hurricane, fire, and snow,
When the powers of the air are chained to my chair,
Is the million-colored bow;
The sphere-fire above its soft colors wove,
While the moist earth was laughing below.


## p. 13299 (#101) ##########################################

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
13299
I am the daughter of earth and water,
And the nursling of the sky;
I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores;
I change, but I cannot die,
For after the rain, when with never a stain,
The pavilion of heaven is bare,
And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams,
Build up the blue dome of air,
I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,
And out of the caverns of rain,
Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,
I arise and unbuild it again.
TO A SKYLARK
AIL to thee, blithe spirit!
Bird thou never wert,
That from heaven, or near it,
Pourest thy full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.
H
Higher still and higher
From the earth thou springest
Like a cloud of fire;
The blue deep thou wingest,
And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.
In the golden lightning
Of the sunken sun,
O'er which clouds are bright'ning,
Thou dost float and run;
Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.
The pale purple even
Melts around thy flight;
Like a star of heaven,
In the broad daylight
Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight,
Keen as are the arrows
Of that silver sphere,
Whose intense lamp narrows
In the white dawn clear,
Until we hardly see, we feel, that it is there.


## p. 13300 (#102) ##########################################

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
13300
All the earth and air
With thy voice is loud,
As, when night is bare,
From one lonely cloud
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;
Like a high-born maiden
In a palace-tower,
Soothing her love-laden
Soul in secret hour
With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower;
Like a glow-worm golden
In a dell of dew,
Scattering unbeholden
Its aerial hue
Among the flowers and grass, which screen it from the view;
Like a rose embowered
In its own green leaves,
By warm winds deflowered,
Till the scent it gives
Makes faint with too much sweet these heavy-wingèd 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:
I have never heard
Praise of love or wine
That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine.


## p. 13301 (#103) ##########################################

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
13301
Chorus hymeneal,
Or triumphal chaunt,
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
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.


## p. 13302 (#104) ##########################################

13302
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
A
ARETHUSA
RETHUSA arose
From her couch of snows
In the Acroceraunian mountains:
From cloud and from crag,
With many a jag,
Shepherding her bright fountains.
She leapt down the rocks,
With her rainbow locks
Streaming among the streams;·
Her steps paved with green
The downward ravine
Which slopes to the western gleams;
And gliding and springing
She went, ever singing,
In murmurs as, soft as sleep:
The earth seemed to love her,
And heaven smiled above her,
As she lingered towards the deep.
Then Alpheus bold,
On his glacier cold,
With his trident the mountains strook,
And opened a chasm.
In the rocks; - with the spasm
All Erymanthus shook.
And the black south wind
It concealed behind
The urns of the silent snow,
And earthquake and thunder
Did rend in sunder
The bars of the springs below.
The beard and the hair
Of the River-god were
Seen through the torrent's sweep,
As he followed the light
Of the fleet nymph's flight
To the brink of the Dorian deep.
"Oh, save me! Oh, guide me!
And bid the deep hide me,
For he grasps me now by the hair! "


## p. 13303 (#105) ##########################################

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
13303
The loud Ocean heard,
To its blue depth stirred,
And divided at her prayer:
And under the water
The Earth's white daughter
Fled like a sunny beam;
Behind her descended
Her billows, unblended
With the brackish Dorian stream;
Like a gloomy stain
On the emerald main
Alpheus rushed behind,-
As an eagle pursuing
A dove to its ruin
Down the streams of the cloudy wind.
――
Under the bowers
Where the Ocean Powers
Sit on their pearlèd thrones,
Through the coral woods
Of the weltering floods,
Over heaps of unvalued stones;
Through the dim beams
Which amid the streams
Weave a network of colored light;
And under the caves,
Where the shadowy waves
Are as green as the forest's night;
Outspeeding the shark,
And the sword-fish dark,
Under the ocean foam,
And up through the rifts
Of the mountain clifts,
They past to their Dorian home.
-
And now from their fountains
In Enna's mountains,
Down one vale where the morning basks,
Like friends once parted
Grown single-hearted,
They ply their watery tasks.
At sunrise they leap
From their cradles steep
In the cave of the shelving hill;


## p. 13304 (#106) ##########################################

13304
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
At noontide they flow
Through the woods below
And the meadows of Asphodel;
And at night they sleep
In the rocking deep
Beneath the Ortygian shore;·
Like spirits that lie
In the azure sky
When they love but live no more.
HYMN OF PAN
ROM the forests and highlands
We come, we come;
From the river-girt islands,
Where loud waves are dumb
F
Listening to my sweet pipings.
The wind in the reeds and the rushes,
The bees on the bells of thyme,
The birds on the myrtle bushes,
The cicale above in the lime,
And the lizards below in the grass,
Were as silent as ever old Tmolus was
Listening to my sweet pipings.
Liquid Peneus was flowing,
And all dark Tempe lay
In Pelion's shadow, outgrowing
The light of the dying day,
Speeded by my sweet pipings.
The Sileni, and Sylvans, and Fauns,
And the Nymphs of the woods and waves,
To the edge of the moist river-lawns,
And the brink of the dewy caves,
And all that did then attend and follow,
Were silent with love, as you now, Apollo,
With envy of my sweet pipings.
I sang of the dancing stars,
I sang of the dædal earth,
And of heaven,- and the giant wars,
And love, and death, and birth,
And then I changed my pipings,-
――


## p. 13305 (#107) ##########################################

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
13305
Singing how down the vale of Menalus
I pursued a maiden and clasped a reed:
Gods and men, we are all deluded thus!
It breaks in our bosom and then we bleed:
All wept, as I think both ye now would,
If envy or age had not frozen your blood,
At the sorrow of my sweet pipings.
TO NIGHT
WIFTLY walk over the western wave,
SWIFTLY Spirit of Night!
Out of the misty eastern cave,
Where all the long and lone daylight
Thou wovest dreams of joy and fear,
Which make thee terrible and dear-
Swift be thy flight!
Wrap thy form in a mantle gray,
Star-inwrought!
Blind with thine hair the eyes of Day;
Kiss her until she be wearied out,
Then wander o'er city and sea and land,
Touching all with thine opiate wand-
Come, long sought!
When I arose and saw the dawn,
I sighed for thee;
When light rode high, and the dew was gone,
And noon lay heavy on flower and tree,
And the weary Day turned to his rest,
Lingering like an unloved guest,
I sighed for thee.
Thy brother Death came, and cried,
Wouldst thou me?
Thy sweet child Sleep, the filmy-eyed,
Murmured like a noontide bee,
Shall I nestle near thy side?
Wouldst thou me? . And I replied,
No, not thee!
-
Death will come when thou art dead,
Soon, too soon;


## p. 13306 (#108) ##########################################

13306
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
Sleep will come when thou art fled:
Of neither would I ask the boon
I ask of thee, beloved Night-
Swift be thine approaching flight,
Come soon, soon!
ΤΟ
NE word is too often profaned
For me to profane it,
One feeling too falsely disdained
For thee to disdain it.
ON
One hope is too like despair
For prudence to smother,
And pity from thee more dear
Than that from another.
I can give not what men call love,
But wilt thou accept not
The worship the heart lifts above
And the heavens reject not,—
The desire of the moth for the star,
Of the night for the morrow,
The devotion to something afar
From the sphere of our sorrow?


## p. 13307 (#109) ##########################################

13307
WILLIAM SHENSTONE
(1714-1763)
URNING over the pages of a certain eighteenth-century an-
nual, the reader comes upon a brown and yellow engraving
of a landscape garden: of walks in undulating curves, mini-
ature lakes, little white cascades, Greek temples, pines and cypresses
Aquatic birds peer from out the reeds, and
Beneath the picture is written:-
cut in grotesque shapes.
doves flutter in the trees.
"Oh, may that genius which secures my rest,
Preserve this villa for a friend that's near.
Ne'er make my vintage glad the sordid breast,
Ne'er tinge the lip that dares be insincere. »

The villa referred to, were it visible, would,
according to the owner's biographer, prove
to be "mean; for he did not improve it.
When he came home from his walks, he
might find the floors flooded by a shower
through the broken roof, but could spare no
money for its reparation. »
Would that the artist of the engraving
of Leasowes, famous in song and story, had
introduced that biographer and his subject
into the picture,- Shenstone, "larger than the middle size, somewhat
clumsy in his form, decked in crimson waistcoat and white breeches,
his gray hair streaming on his shoulders," leading the wheezy, sneez-
ing Johnson in front of some simpering Italian divinity set in a damp
grotto, and bidding him admire her! But Shenstone, like most minor
poets of whom Johnson wrote, was unfortunate in having Johnson
for a critic. There was no possible sympathy between the two. John-
son hated the country, hated affectation, hated a poseur. Shenstone
was the child of his time, whose literary progenitors were poets of
fashionable society: the child of the time when the changes were
rung on Damons, Melissas, Philomels, and Cynthias; when Phoebus
was invoked, and Delia's eyebrows inspired a sonnet. Coming close
on the heels of a generation of poetasters, Shenstone could think of
no better way of realizing Pope's ideal in the 'Ode to Solitude' than
to retire to his country seat, and seek the admiration of the world as
SHENSTONE


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13308
WILLIAM SHENSTONE
an Arcadian hermit. He owes his distinction to his choice of sub-
jects and his peculiarity of life, as much as to his verses.
No poet
of the same pretension is so well known by his residence. Without
Leasowes, the Elegies' might have lain on the dustiest of book-
shelves, and The Schoolmistress' have scarcely sustained enough
vitality to survive. But through Leasowes, Shenstone lives. In his
day, landscape gardening was a novelty; and in adorning his little
estate he gratified his taste, his innocent vanity, and his indolence.
The feet of his stanzas are as ingeniously varied as the walks.
through his domain. The flights of his Muse were bounded by the
limits of his estate; but they were not less inventive and fantastic
than the little surprises and turns of wood and waterfall, nor less
musical than the songs of his birds. The deaths of his friends were
commemorated by Grecian urns under weeping willows, and then by
elegies inspired by the urns.
The revolution which has taken place in English poetry has flat-
tened Shenstone's verses; and to realize the reaction from the ex-
treme of artificial pathos to straightforward, manly expression, one
has but to read his once popular 'Jemmy Dawson,' and 'The Dying
Kid,' and then Hood's Eugene Aram,' and Wordsworth's 'White
Doe of Rylstone' which, but for the feeble ballads of the Leasowes
poet, might never have been written.
Johnson's criticism of the Pastoral Ballad' is not less interesting
as betraying his notion of the province of poetry than as a criticism
of Shenstone. "I cannot but regret that it is pastoral: an intelligent
reader, acquainted with the scenes of real life, sickens at the mention
of the crook, the pipe, the sheep, and the kids, which it is not neces-
sary to bring forward to notice; for the poet's art is selection, and he
ought to show the beauties without the grossness of country life. "
But the volume Johnson scorned, beguiled many of Shenstone's
cultivated contemporaries by its mellifluous seesaw, and its jingling
resonance comes back to the reader of to-day.
―――――――
"I have found out a gift for my fair:
I have found where the wood-pigeons breed. "
The elegiac form and triple rhythm please the fancy in the still
remembered
"Yet time may diminish the pain. "
Shenstone made no mean rank for himself, in the time when
people were reading Pope's Homer, Addison's Cato,' and Dodsley's
'Economy of Human Life,' - the 'Proverbial Philosophy' of his day.
'The Schoolmistress' is a sketch drawn from life, and in versification
and style closely imitated Spenser. Goldsmith and Gray both knew


## p. 13309 (#111) ##########################################

WILLIAM SHENSTONE
13309
it; and profited by its beauties and its faults when they wrote 'The
Deserted Village' and 'The Elegy in a Country Church-yard. '
Shenstone's 'Essays' are quiet moralizings about Leasowes; though
he could be playfully humorous now and then, as when he said:-
"I have an alcove [his villa], six elegies, a seat, two eulogies (one on
myself), four songs, and a serpentine river, to show you when you
come. "
He had a queer vanity to be thought a scholar; which made him
keep his name on the Oxford books (Pembroke was his college) for
ten years, though he never studied enough to take a degree. Gray
ridiculed his love of the great, and his affected pose as a recluse; but
one can fancy the proud, shy creature peeping through some high
latticed window when the guests from Hagley, Lord Lyttelton's estate,
arrived, maddened, as one of Shenstone's commentators remarks, if
they took the wrong direction, and frantic lest the exclamations he
heard were in derision, not pleasure.
-
He was born at Leasowes in November 1714, and died there of a
"putrid fever," — as Dr. Johnson describes it, not without some satis-
faction as a fit ending for so ill-regulated a life,- February 11th, 1763.
The great man's opinion of our poet is however fairly just, and not
unkindly.
"His good qualities are earnestness and simplicity. Had his mind
been better stored with knowledge, whether he would have been a
great man or not, I know not: he certainly would have been agree-
able. "
He published 'Miscellanies' (1737), 'The Judgment of Hercules'
(1740), The Schoolmistress' (1742); and Elegies; Songs, and Pas-
toral Ballads' (1743), edited by his friend Dodsley. His 'Letters and
Essays' appeared in 1750.
PASTORAL BALLAD
SINC
INCE Phyllis vouchsafed me a look,
I never once dreamt of my vine:
May I lose both my pipe and my crook,
If I knew of a kid that was mine!
I prized every hour that went by,
Beyond all that had pleased me before;
But now they are past, and I sigh;
And I grieve that I prize them no more.
But why do I languish in vain;
Why wander thus pensively here?


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