CHORUS:

O Slavery! thou frost of the world's prime,

Killing its flowers and leaving its thorns bare!

Thy touch has stamped these limbs with crime,

These brows thy branding garland bear,

But the free heart, the impassive soul _680

Scorn thy control!

SEMICHORUS 1:

Let there be light! said Liberty,

And like sunrise from the sea,

Athens arose!--Around her born,

Shone like mountains in the morn _685

Glorious states;--and are they now

Ashes, wrecks, oblivion?

SEMICHORUS 2:

Go,

Where Thermae and Asopus swallowed

Persia, as the sand does foam:

Deluge upon deluge followed, _690

Discord, Macedon, and Rome:

And lastly thou!

SEMICHORUS 1:

Temples and towers,

Citadels and marts, and they

Who live and die there, have been ours,

And may be thine, and must decay; _695

But Greece and her foundations are

Built below the tide of war,

Based on the crystalline sea

Of thought and its eternity;

Her citizens, imperial spirits, _700

Rule the present from the past,

On all this world of men inherits

Their seal is set.

SEMICHORUS 2:

Hear ye the blast,

Whose Orphic thunder thrilling calls

From ruin her Titanian walls? _705

Whose spirit shakes the sapless bones

Of Slavery? Argos, Corinth, Crete

Hear, and from their mountain thrones

The daemons and the nymphs repeat

The harmony.

SEMICHORUS 1:

I hear! I hear! _710

SEMICHORUS 2:

The world's eyeless charioteer,

Destiny, is hurrying by!

What faith is crushed, what empire bleeds

Beneath her earthquake-footed steeds?

What eagle-winged victory sits _715

At her right hand? what shadow flits

Before? what splendour rolls behind?

Ruin and renovation cry

'Who but We?'

SEMICHORUS 1:

I hear! I hear!

The hiss as of a rushing wind, _720

The roar as of an ocean foaming,

The thunder as of earthquake coming.

I hear! I hear!

The crash as of an empire falling,

The shrieks as of a people calling _725

'Mercy! mercy!'--How they thrill!

Then a shout of 'kill! kill! kill!'

And then a small still voice, thus--

SEMICHORUS 2:

For

Revenge and Wrong bring forth their kind,

The foul cubs like their parents are, _730

Their den is in the guilty mind,

And Conscience feeds them with despair.

NOTE:

_728 For edition 1822, Wms. transcript;

Fear cj. Fleay, Forman, Dowden. See Editor's Note.

SEMICHORUS 1:

In sacred Athens, near the fane

Of Wisdom, Pity's altar stood:

Serve not the unknown God in vain. _735

But pay that broken shrine again,

Love for hate and tears for blood.

[ENTER MAHMUD AND AHASUERUS.]

MAHMUD:

Thou art a man, thou sayest, even as we.

AHASUERUS:

No more!

MAHMUD:

But raised above thy fellow-men

By thought, as I by power.

AHASUERUS:

Thou sayest so. _740

MAHMUD:

Thou art an adept in the difficult lore

Of Greek and Frank philosophy; thou numberest

The flowers, and thou measurest the stars;

Thou severest element from element;

Thy spirit is present in the Past, and sees _745

The birth of this old world through all its cycles

Of desolation and of loveliness,

And when man was not, and how man became

The monarch and the slave of this low sphere,

And all its narrow circles--it is much-- _750

I honour thee, and would be what thou art

Were I not what I am; but the unborn hour,

Cradled in fear and hope, conflicting storms,

Who shall unveil? Nor thou, nor I, nor any

Mighty or wise. I apprehended not _755

What thou hast taught me, but I now perceive

That thou art no interpreter of dreams;

Thou dost not own that art, device, or God,

Can make the Future present--let it come!

Moreover thou disdainest us and ours; _760

Thou art as God, whom thou contemplatest.

AHASUERUS:

Disdain thee?--not the worm beneath thy feet!

The Fathomless has care for meaner things

Than thou canst dream, and has made pride for those

Who would be what they may not, or would seem _765

That which they are not. Sultan! talk no more

Of thee and me, the Future and the Past;

But look on that which cannot change--the One,

The unborn and the undying. Earth and ocean,

Space, and the isles of life or light that gem _770

The sapphire floods of interstellar air,

This firmament pavilioned upon chaos,

With all its cressets of immortal fire,

Whose outwall, bastioned impregnably

Against the escape of boldest thoughts, repels them _775

As Calpe the Atlantic clouds--this Whole

Of suns, and worlds, and men, and beasts, and flowers,

With all the silent or tempestuous workings

By which they have been, are, or cease to be,

Is but a vision;--all that it inherits _780

Are motes of a sick eye, bubbles and dreams;

Thought is its cradle and its grave, nor less

The Future and the Past are idle shadows

Of thought's eternal flight--they have no being:

Nought is but that which feels itself to be. _785

NOTE:

_762 thy edition 1822; my editions 1839.

MAHMUD:

What meanest thou? Thy words stream like a tempest

Of dazzling mist within my brain--they shake

The earth on which I stand, and hang like night

On Heaven above me. What can they avail?

They cast on all things surest, brightest, best, _790

Doubt, insecurity, astonishment.

AHASUERUS:

Mistake me not! All is contained in each.

Dodona's forest to an acorn's cup

Is that which has been, or will be, to that

Which is--the absent to the present. Thought _795

Alone, and its quick elements, Will, Passion,

Reason, Imagination, cannot die;

They are, what that which they regard appears,

The stuff whence mutability can weave

All that it hath dominion o'er, worlds, worms, _800

Empires, and superstitions. What has thought

To do with time, or place, or circumstance?

Wouldst thou behold the Future?--ask and have!

Knock and it shall be opened--look, and lo!

The coming age is shadowed on the Past _805

As on a glass.

MAHMUD:

Wild, wilder thoughts convulse

My spirit--Did not Mahomet the Second

Win Stamboul?

AHASUERUS:

Thou wouldst ask that giant spirit

The written fortunes of thy house and faith.

Thou wouldst cite one out of the grave to tell _810

How what was born in blood must die.

MAHMUD:

Thy words

Have power on me! I see--

AHASUERUS:

What hearest thou?

MAHMUD:

A far whisper--

Terrible silence.

AHASUERUS:

What succeeds?

MAHMUD:

The sound

As of the assault of an imperial city, _815

The hiss of inextinguishable fire,

The roar of giant cannon; the earthquaking

Fall of vast bastions and precipitous towers,

The shock of crags shot from strange enginery,

The clash of wheels, and clang of armed hoofs, _820

And crash of brazen mail as of the wreck

Of adamantine mountains--the mad blast

Of trumpets, and the neigh of raging steeds,

The shrieks of women whose thrill jars the blood,

And one sweet laugh, most horrible to hear, _825

As of a joyous infant waked and playing

With its dead mother's breast, and now more loud

The mingled battle-cry,--ha! hear I not

'En touto nike!' 'Allah-illa-Allah!'?

AHASUERUS:

The sulphurous mist is raised--thou seest--

MAHMUD:

A chasm, _830

As of two mountains in the wall of Stamboul;

And in that ghastly breach the Islamites,

Like giants on the ruins of a world,

Stand in the light of sunrise. In the dust

Glimmers a kingless diadem, and one _835

Of regal port has cast himself beneath

The stream of war. Another proudly clad

In golden arms spurs a Tartarian barb

Into the gap, and with his iron mace

Directs the torrent of that tide of men, _840

And seems--he is--Mahomet!

AHASUERUS:

What thou seest

Is but the ghost of thy forgotten dream.

A dream itself, yet less, perhaps, than that

Thou call'st reality. Thou mayst behold

How cities, on which Empire sleeps enthroned, _845

Bow their towered crests to mutability.

Poised by the flood, e'en on the height thou holdest,

Thou mayst now learn how the full tide of power

Ebbs to its depths.--Inheritor of glory,

Conceived in darkness, born in blood, and nourished _850

With tears and toil, thou seest the mortal throes

Of that whose birth was but the same. The Past

Now stands before thee like an Incarnation

Of the To-come; yet wouldst thou commune with

That portion of thyself which was ere thou _855

Didst start for this brief race whose crown is death,

Dissolve with that strong faith and fervent passion

Which called it from the uncreated deep,

Yon cloud of war, with its tempestuous phantoms

Of raging death; and draw with mighty will _860

The imperial shade hither.

[EXIT AHASUERUS.]

[THE PHANTOM OF MAHOMET THE SECOND APPEARS.]

MAHMUD:

Approach!

PHANTOM:

I come

Thence whither thou must go! The grave is fitter

To take the living than give up the dead;

Yet has thy faith prevailed, and I am here.

The heavy fragments of the power which fell _865

When I arose, like shapeless crags and clouds,

Hang round my throne on the abyss, and voices

Of strange lament soothe my supreme repose,

Wailing for glory never to return.--

A later Empire nods in its decay: _870

The autumn of a greener faith is come,

And wolfish change, like winter, howls to strip

The foliage in which Fame, the eagle, built

Her aerie, while Dominion whelped below.

The storm is in its branches, and the frost _875

Is on its leaves, and the blank deep expects

Oblivion on oblivion, spoil on spoil,

Ruin on ruin:--Thou art slow, my son;

The Anarchs of the world of darkness keep

A throne for thee, round which thine empire lies _880

Boundless and mute; and for thy subjects thou,

Like us, shalt rule the ghosts of murdered life,

The phantoms of the powers who rule thee now--

Mutinous passions, and conflicting fears,

And hopes that sate themselves on dust, and die!-- _885

Stripped of their mortal strength, as thou of thine.

Islam must fall, but we will reign together

Over its ruins in the world of death:--

And if the trunk be dry, yet shall the seed

Unfold itself even in the shape of that _890

Which gathers birth in its decay. Woe! woe!

To the weak people tangled in the grasp

Of its last spasms.

MAHMUD:

Spirit, woe to all!

Woe to the wronged and the avenger! Woe

To the destroyer, woe to the destroyed! _895

Woe to the dupe, and woe to the deceiver!

Woe to the oppressed, and woe to the oppressor!

Woe both to those that suffer and inflict;

Those who are born and those who die! but say,

Imperial shadow of the thing I am, _900

When, how, by whom, Destruction must accomplish

Her consummation!

PHANTOM:

Ask the cold pale Hour,

Rich in reversion of impending death,

When HE shall fall upon whose ripe gray hairs

Sit Care, and Sorrow, and Infirmity-- _905

The weight which Crime, whose wings are plumed with years,

Leaves in his flight from ravaged heart to heart

Over the heads of men, under which burthen

They bow themselves unto the grave: fond wretch!

He leans upon his crutch, and talks of years _910

To come, and how in hours of youth renewed

He will renew lost joys, and--

VOICE WITHOUT:

Victory! Victory!

[THE PHANTOM VANISHES.]

MAHMUD:

What sound of the importunate earth has broken

My mighty trance?

VOICE WITHOUT:

Victory! Victory!

MAHMUD:

Weak lightning before darkness! poor faint smile _915

Of dying Islam! Voice which art the response

Of hollow weakness! Do I wake and live?

Were there such things, or may the unquiet brain,

Vexed by the wise mad talk of the old Jew,

Have shaped itself these shadows of its fear? _920

It matters not!--for nought we see or dream,

Possess, or lose, or grasp at, can be worth

More than it gives or teaches. Come what may,

The Future must become the Past, and I

As they were to whom once this present hour, _925

This gloomy crag of time to which I cling,

Seemed an Elysian isle of peace and joy

Never to be attained.--I must rebuke

This drunkenness of triumph ere it die,

And dying, bring despair. Victory! poor slaves! _930

[EXIT MAHMUD.]

VOICE WITHOUT:

Shout in the jubilee of death! The Greeks

Are as a brood of lions in the net

Round which the kingly hunters of the earth

Stand smiling. Anarchs, ye whose daily food

Are curses, groans, and gold, the fruit of death, _935

From Thule to the girdle of the world,

Come, feast! the board groans with the flesh of men;

The cup is foaming with a nation's blood,

Famine and Thirst await! eat, drink, and die!

SEMICHORUS 1:

Victorious Wrong, with vulture scream, _940

Salutes the rising sun, pursues the flying day!

I saw her, ghastly as a tyrant's dream,

Perch on the trembling pyramid of night,

Beneath which earth and all her realms pavilioned lay

In visions of the dawning undelight. _945

Who shall impede her flight?

Who rob her of her prey?

VOICE WITHOUT:

Victory! Victory! Russia's famished eagles

Dare not to prey beneath the crescent's light.

Impale the remnant of the Greeks! despoil! _950

Violate! make their flesh cheaper than dust!

SEMICHORUS 2:

Thou voice which art

The herald of the ill in splendour hid!

Thou echo of the hollow heart

Of monarchy, bear me to thine abode _955

When desolation flashes o'er a world destroyed:

Oh, bear me to those isles of jagged cloud

Which float like mountains on the earthquake, mid

The momentary oceans of the lightning,

Or to some toppling promontory proud _960

Of solid tempest whose black pyramid,

Riven, overhangs the founts intensely bright'ning

Of those dawn-tinted deluges of fire

Before their waves expire,

When heaven and earth are light, and only light _965

In the thunder-night!

NOTE:

_958 earthquake edition 1822; earthquakes editions 1839.

VOICE WITHOUT:

Victory! Victory! Austria, Russia, England,

And that tame serpent, that poor shadow, France,

Cry peace, and that means death when monarchs speak.

Ho, there! bring torches, sharpen those red stakes, _970

These chains are light, fitter for slaves and poisoners

Than Greeks. Kill! plunder! burn! let none remain.

SEMICHORUS 1:

Alas! for Liberty!

If numbers, wealth, or unfulfilling years,

Or fate, can quell the free! _975

Alas! for Virtue, when

Torments, or contumely, or the sneers

Of erring judging men

Can break the heart where it abides.

Alas! if Love, whose smile makes this obscure world splendid, _980

Can change with its false times and tides,

Like hope and terror,--

Alas for Love!

And Truth, who wanderest lone and unbefriended,

If thou canst veil thy lie-consuming mirror _985

Before the dazzled eyes of Error,

Alas for thee! Image of the Above.

SEMICHORUS 2:

Repulse, with plumes from conquest torn,

Led the ten thousand from the limits of the morn

Through many an hostile Anarchy! _990

At length they wept aloud, and cried, 'The Sea! the Sea!'

Through exile, persecution, and despair,

Rome was, and young Atlantis shall become

The wonder, or the terror, or the tomb

Of all whose step wakes Power lulled in her savage lair: _995

But Greece was as a hermit-child,

Whose fairest thoughts and limbs were built

To woman's growth, by dreams so mild,

She knew not pain or guilt;

And now, O Victory, blush! and Empire, tremble _1000

When ye desert the free--

If Greece must be

A wreck, yet shall its fragments reassemble,

And build themselves again impregnably

In a diviner clime, _1005

To Amphionic music on some Cape sublime,

Which frowns above the idle foam of Time.

SEMICHORUS 1:

Let the tyrants rule the desert they have made;

Let the free possess the Paradise they claim;

Be the fortune of our fierce oppressors weighed _1010

With our ruin, our resistance, and our name!

SEMICHORUS 2:

Our dead shall be the seed of their decay,

Our survivors be the shadow of their pride,

Our adversity a dream to pass away--

Their dishonour a remembrance to abide! _1015

VOICE WITHOUT:

Victory! Victory! The bought Briton sends

The keys of ocean to the Islamite.--

Now shall the blazon of the cross be veiled,

And British skill directing Othman might,

Thunder-strike rebel victory. Oh, keep holy _1020

This jubilee of unrevenged blood!

Kill! crush! despoil! Let not a Greek escape!

SEMICHORUS 1:

Darkness has dawned in the East

On the noon of time:

The death-birds descend to their feast _1025

From the hungry clime.

Let Freedom and Peace flee far

To a sunnier strand,

And follow Love's folding-star

To the Evening land! _1030

SEMICHORUS 2:

The young moon has fed

Her exhausted horn

With the sunset's fire:

The weak day is dead,

But the night is not born; _1035

And, like loveliness panting with wild desire

While it trembles with fear and delight,

Hesperus flies from awakening night,

And pants in its beauty and speed with light

Fast-flashing, soft, and bright. _1040

Thou beacon of love! thou lamp of the free!

Guide us far, far away,

To climes where now veiled by the ardour of day

Thou art hidden

From waves on which weary Noon _1045

Faints in her summer swoon,

Between kingless continents sinless as Eden,

Around mountains and islands inviolably

Pranked on the sapphire sea.

SEMICHORUS 1:

Through the sunset of hope, _1050

Like the shapes of a dream.

What Paradise islands of glory gleam!

Beneath Heaven's cope,

Their shadows more clear float by--

The sound of their oceans, the light of their sky, _1055

The music and fragrance their solitudes breathe

Burst, like morning on dream, or like Heaven on death,

Through the walls of our prison;

And Greece, which was dead, is arisen!

NOTE:

_1057 dream edition 1822; dreams editions 1839.

CHORUS:

The world's great age begins anew, _1060

The golden years return,

The earth doth like a snake renew

Her winter weeds outworn:

Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam,

Like wrecks of a dissolving dream. _1065

A brighter Hellas rears its mountains

From waves serener far;

A new Peneus rolls his fountains

Against the morning star.

Where fairer Tempes bloom, there sleep _1070

Young Cyclads on a sunnier deep.

A loftier Argo cleaves the main,

Fraught with a later prize;

Another Orpheus sings again,

And loves, and weeps, and dies. _1075

A new Ulysses leaves once more

Calypso for his native shore.

Oh, write no more the tale of Troy,

If earth Death's scroll must be!

Nor mix with Laian rage the joy _1080

Which dawns upon the free:

Although a subtler Sphinx renew

Riddles of death Thebes never knew.

Another Athens shall arise,

And to remoter time _1085

Bequeath, like sunset to the skies,

The splendour of its prime;

And leave, if nought so bright may live,

All earth can take or Heaven can give.

Saturn and Love their long repose _1090

Shall burst, more bright and good

Than all who fell, than One who rose,

Than many unsubdued:

Not gold, not blood, their altar dowers,

But votive tears and symbol flowers. _1095

Oh, cease! must hate and death return?

Cease! must men kill and die?

Cease! drain not to its dregs the urn

Of bitter prophecy.

The world is weary of the past, _1100

Oh, might it die or rest at last!

NOTES:

_1068 his edition 1822; its editions 1839.

_1072 Argo]Argos edition 1822.

_1091-_1093 See Editor's note.

_1091 bright editions 1839; wise edition 1829 (ed. Galignani).

_1093 unsubdued editions 1839; unwithstood edition 1829 (ed. Galignani).

NOTES.

(1) THE QUENCHLESS ASHES OF MILAN [L. 60].

Milan was the centre of the resistance of the Lombard league against

the Austrian tyrant. Frederic Barbarossa burnt the city to the ground,

but liberty lived in its ashes, and it rose like an exhalation from

its ruin. See Sismondi's "Histoire des Republiques Italiennes", a book

which has done much towards awakening the Italians to an imitation of

their great ancestors.

(2) THE CHORUS [L. 197].

The popular notions of Christianity are represented in this chorus as

true in their relation to the worship they superseded, and that which

in all probability they will supersede, without considering their

merits in a relation more universal. The first stanza contrasts the

immortality of the living and thinking beings which inhabit the

planets, and to use a common and inadequate phrase, "clothe themselves

in matter", with the transience of the noblest manifestations of the

external world.

The concluding verses indicate a progressive state of more or loss

exalted existence, according to the degree of perfection which every

distinct intelligence may have attained. Let it not be supposed that I

mean to dogmatise upon a subject, concerning which all men are equally

ignorant, or that I think the Gordian knot of the origin of evil can

be disentangled by that or any similar assertions. The received

hypothesis of a Being resembling men in the moral attributes of His

nature, having called us out of non-existence, and after inflicting on

us the misery of the commission of error, should superadd that of the

punishment and the privations consequent upon it, still would remain

inexplicable and incredible. That there is a true solution of the

riddle, and that in our present state that solution is unattainable by

us, are propositions which may be regarded as equally certain:

meanwhile, as it is the province of the poet to attach himself to

those ideas which exalt and ennoble humanity, let him be permitted to

have conjectured the condition of that futurity towards which we are

all impelled by an inextinguishable thirst for immortality. Until

better arguments can be produced than sophisms which disgrace the

cause, this desire itself must remain the strongest and the only

presumption that eternity is the inheritance of every thinking being.

(3) NO HOARY PRIESTS AFTER THAT PATRIARCH [L. 245].

The Greek Patriarch, after haying been compelled to fulminate an

anathema against the insurgents, was put to death by the Turks.

Fortunately the Greeks have been taught that they cannot buy security

by degradation, and the Turks, though equally cruel, are less cunning

than the smooth-faced tyrants of Europe. As to the anathema, his

Holiness might as well have thrown his mitre at Mount Athos for any

effect that it produced. The chiefs of the Greeks are almost all men

of comprehension and enlightened views on religion and politics.

(4) THE FREEDMAN OF A WESTERN POET-CHIEF [L. 563].

A Greek who had been Lord Byron's servant commands the insurgents in

Attica. This Greek, Lord Byron informs me, though a poet and an

enthusiastic patriot, gave him rather the idea of a timid and

unenterprising person. It appears that circumstances make men what

they are, and that we all contain the germ of a degree of degradation

or of greatness whose connection with our character is determined by

events.

(5) THE GREEKS EXPECT A SAVIOUR FROM THE WEST [L. 598].

It is reported that this Messiah had arrived at a seaport near

Lacedaemon in an American brig. The association of names and ideas is

irresistibly ludicrous, but the prevalence of such a rumour strongly

marks the state of popular enthusiasm in Greece.

(6) THE SOUND AS OF THE ASSAULT OF AN IMPERIAL CITY [LL. 814-15].

For the vision of Mahmud of the taking of Constantinople in 1453, see

Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", volume 12 page 223.

The manner of the invocation of the spirit of Mahomet the Second will

be censured as over subtle. I could easily have made the Jew a regular

conjuror, and the Phantom an ordinary ghost. I have preferred to

represent the Jew as disclaiming all pretension, or even belief, in

supernatural agency, and as tempting Mahmud to that state of mind in

which ideas may be supposed to assume the force of sensations through

the confusion of thought with the objects of thought, and the excess

of passion animating the creations of imagination.

It is a sort of natural magic, susceptible of being exercised in a

degree by any one who should have made himself master of the secret

associations of another's thoughts.

(7) THE CHORUS [L. 1060].

The final chorus is indistinct and obscure, as the event of the living

drama whose arrival it foretells. Prophecies of wars, and rumours of

wars, etc., may safely be made by poet or prophet in any age, but to

anticipate however darkly a period of regeneration and happiness is a

more hazardous exercise of the faculty which bards possess or feign.

It will remind the reader 'magno NEC proximus intervallo' of Isaiah

and Virgil, whose ardent spirits overleaping the actual reign of evil

which we endure and bewail, already saw the possible and perhaps

approaching state of society in which the 'lion shall lie down with

the lamb,' and 'omnis feret omnia tellus.' Let these great names be my

authority and my excuse.

(8) SATURN AND LOVE THEIR LONG REPOSE SHALL BURST [L. 1090].

Saturn and Love were among the deities of a real or imaginary state of

innocence and happiness. ALL those WHO FELL, or the Gods of Greece,

Asia, and Egypt; the ONE WHO ROSE, or Jesus Christ, at whose

appearance the idols of the Pagan World wore amerced of their worship;

and the MANY UNSUBDUED, or the monstrous objects of the idolatry of

China, India, the Antarctic islands, and the native tribes of America,

certainly have reigned over the understandings of men in conjunction

or in succession, during periods in which all we know of evil has been

in a state of portentous, and, until the revival of learning and the

arts, perpetually increasing, activity. The Grecian gods seem indeed

to have been personally more innocent, although it cannot be said,

that as far as temperance and chastity are concerned, they gave so

edifying an example as their successor. The sublime human character of

Jesus Christ was deformed by an imputed identification with a Power,

who tempted, betrayed, and punished the innocent beings who were

called into existence by His sole will; and for the period of a

thousand years, the spirit of this most just, wise, and benevolent of

men has been propitiated with myriads of hecatombs of those who

approached the nearest to His innocence and wisdom, sacrificed under

every aggravation of atrocity and variety of torture. The horrors of

the Mexican, the Peruvian, and the Indian superstitions are well

known.

NOTE ON HELLAS, BY MRS. SHELLEY.

The South of Europe was in a state of great political excitement at

the beginning of the year 1821. The Spanish Revolution had been a

signal to Italy; secrete societies were formed; and, when Naples rose

to declare the Constitution, the call was responded to from Brundusium

to the foot of the Alps. To crush these attempts to obtain liberty,

early in 1821 the Austrians poured their armies into the Peninsula: at

first their coming rather seemed to add energy and resolution to a

people long enslaved. The Piedmontese asserted their freedom; Genoa

threw off the yoke of the King of Sardinia; and, as if in playful

imitation, the people of the little state of Massa and Carrara gave

the conge to their sovereign, and set up a republic.

Tuscany alone was perfectly tranquil. It was said that the Austrian

minister presented a list of sixty Carbonari to the Grand Duke, urging

their imprisonment; and the Grand Duke replied, 'I do not know whether

these sixty men are Carbonari, but I know, if I imprison them, I shall

directly have sixty thousand start up.' But, though the Tuscans had no

desire to disturb the paternal government beneath whose shelter they

slumbered, they regarded the progress of the various Italian

revolutions with intense interest, and hatred for the Austrian was

warm in every bosom. But they had slender hopes; they knew that the

Neapolitans would offer no fit resistance to the regular German

troops, and that the overthrow of the constitution in Naples would act

as a decisive blow against all struggles for liberty in Italy.

We have seen the rise and progress of reform. But the Holy Alliance

was alive and active in those days, and few could dream of the

peaceful triumph of liberty. It seemed then that the armed assertion

of freedom in the South of Europe was the only hope of the liberals,

as, if it prevailed, the nations of the north would imitate the

example. Happily the reverse has proved the fact. The countries

accustomed to the exercise of the privileges of freemen, to a limited

extent, have extended, and are extending, these limits. Freedom and

knowledge have now a chance of proceeding hand in hand; and, if it

continue thus, we may hope for the durability of both. Then, as I have

said--in 1821--Shelley, as well as every other lover of liberty,

looked upon the struggles in Spain and Italy as decisive of the

destinies of the world, probably for centuries to come. The interest

he took in the progress of affairs was intense. When Genoa declared

itself free, his hopes were at their highest. Day after day he read

the bulletins of the Austrian army, and sought eagerly to gather

tokens of its defeat. He heard of the revolt of Genoa with emotions of

transport. His whole heart and soul were in the triumph of the cause.

We were living at Pisa at that time; and several well-informed

Italians, at the head of whom we may place the celebrated Vacca, were

accustomed to seek for sympathy in their hopes from Shelley: they did

not find such for the despair they too generally experienced, founded

on contempt for their southern countrymen.

While the fate of the progress of the Austrian armies then invading

Naples was yet in suspense, the news of another revolution filled him

with exultation. We had formed the acquaintance at Pisa of several

Constantinopolitan Greeks, of the family of Prince Caradja, formerly

Hospodar of Wallachia; who, hearing that the bowstring, the accustomed

finale of his viceroyalty, was on the road to him, escaped with his

treasures, and took up his abode in Tuscany. Among these was the

gentleman to whom the drama of "Hellas" is dedicated. Prince

Mavrocordato was warmed by those aspirations for the independence of

his country which filled the hearts of many of his countrymen. He

often intimated the possibility of an insurrection in Greece; but we

had no idea of its being so near at hand, when, on the 1st of April

1821, he called on Shelley, bringing the proclamation of his cousin,

Prince Ypsilanti, and, radiant with exultation and delight, declared

that henceforth Greece would be free.

Shelley had hymned the dawn of liberty in Spain and Naples, in two

odes dictated by the warmest enthusiasm; he felt himself naturally

impelled to decorate with poetry the uprise of the descendants of that

people whose works he regarded with deep admiration, and to adopt the

vaticinatory character in prophesying their success. "Hellas" was

written in a moment of enthusiasm. It is curious to remark how well he

overcomes the difficulty of forming a drama out of such scant

materials. His prophecies, indeed, came true in their general, not

their particular, purport. He did not foresee the death of Lord

Londonderry, which was to be the epoch of a change in English

politics, particularly as regarded foreign affairs; nor that the navy

of his country would fight for instead of against the Greeks, and by

the battle of Navarino secure their enfranchisement from the Turks.

Almost against reason, as it appeared to him, he resolved to believe

that Greece would prove triumphant; and in this spirit, auguring

ultimate good, yet grieving over the vicissitudes to be endured in the

interval, he composed his drama.

"Hellas" was among the last of his compositions, and is among the most

beautiful. The choruses are singularly imaginative, and melodious in

their versification. There are some stanzas that beautifully exemplify

Shelley's peculiar style; as, for instance, the assertion of the

intellectual empire which must be for ever the inheritance of the

country of Homer, Sophocles, and Plato:--

'But Greece and her foundations are

Built below the tide of war,

Based on the crystalline sea

Of thought and its eternity.'

And again, that philosophical truth felicitously imaged forth--

'Revenge and Wrong bring forth their kind,

The foul cubs like their parents are,

Their den is in the guilty mind,

And Conscience feeds them with despair.'

The conclusion of the last chorus is among the most beautiful of his

lyrics. The imagery is distinct and majestic; the prophecy, such as

poets love to dwell upon, the Regeneration of Mankind--and that

regeneration reflecting back splendour on the foregone time, from

which it inherits so much of intellectual wealth, and memory of past

virtuous deeds, as must render the possession of happiness and peace

of tenfold value.

***

FRAGMENTS OF AN UNFINISHED DRAMA.

[Published in part (lines 1-69, 100-120) by Mrs. Shelley, "Posthumous

Poems", 1824; and again, with the notes, in "Poetical Works", 1839.

Lines 127-238 were printed by Dr. Garnett under the title of "The

Magic Plant" in his "Relics of Shelley", 1862. The whole was edited in

its present form from the Boscombe manuscript by Mr. W.M. Rossetti in

1870 ("Complete Poetical Works of P. B. S.", Moxon, 2 volumes.).

'Written at Pisa during the late winter or early spring of 1822'

(Garnett).]

The following fragments are part of a Drama undertaken for the

amusement of the individuals who composed our intimate society, but

left unfinished. I have preserved a sketch of the story as far as it

had been shadowed in the poet's mind.

An Enchantress, living in one of the islands of the Indian

Archipelago, saves the life of a Pirate, a man of savage but noble

nature. She becomes enamoured of him; and he, inconstant to his mortal

love, for a while returns her passion; but at length, recalling the

memory of her whom he left, and who laments his loss, he escapes from

the Enchanted Island, and returns to his lady. His mode of life makes

him again go to sea, and the Enchantress seizes the opportunity to

bring him, by a spirit-brewed tempest, back to her Island. --[MRS.

SHELLEY'S NOTE, 1839.]

SCENE.--BEFORE THE CAVERN OF THE INDIAN ENCHANTRESS.

THE ENCHANTRESS COMES FORTH.

ENCHANTRESS:

He came like a dream in the dawn of life,

He fled like a shadow before its noon;

He is gone, and my peace is turned to strife,

And I wander and wane like the weary moon.

O, sweet Echo, wake, _5

And for my sake

Make answer the while my heart shall break!

But my heart has a music which Echo's lips,

Though tender and true, yet can answer not,

And the shadow that moves in the soul's eclipse _10

Can return not the kiss by his now forgot;

Sweet lips! he who hath

On my desolate path

Cast the darkness of absence, worse than death!

NOTE:

_8 my omitted 1824.

[THE ENCHANTRESS MAKES HER SPELL: SHE IS ANSWERED BY A SPIRIT.]

SPIRIT:

Within the silent centre of the earth _15

My mansion is; where I have lived insphered

From the beginning, and around my sleep

Have woven all the wondrous imagery

Of this dim spot, which mortals call the world;

Infinite depths of unknown elements _20

Massed into one impenetrable mask;

Sheets of immeasurable fire, and veins

Of gold and stone, and adamantine iron.

And as a veil in which I walk through Heaven

I have wrought mountains, seas, and waves, and clouds, _25

And lastly light, whose interfusion dawns

In the dark space of interstellar air.

NOTES:

_15-_27 Within...air. 1839; omitted 1824.

See these lines in "Posthumous Poems", 1824, page 209: "Song of a Spirit".

_16 have 1839; omitted 1824, page 209.

_25 seas, and waves 1824, page 209; seas, waves 1839.

[A good Spirit, who watches over the Pirate's fate, leads, in a

mysterious manner, the lady of his love to the Enchanted Isle. She is

accompanied by a Youth, who loves the lady, but whose passion she

returns only with a sisterly affection. The ensuing scene takes place

between them on their arrival at the Isle. [MRS. SHELLEY'S NOTE,

1839.]]

ANOTHER SCENE.

INDIAN YOUTH AND LADY.

INDIAN:

And, if my grief should still be dearer to me

Than all the pleasures in the world beside,

Why would you lighten it?--

NOTE:

_29 pleasures]pleasure 1824.

LADY:

I offer only _30

That which I seek, some human sympathy

In this mysterious island.

INDIAN:

Oh! my friend,

My sister, my beloved!--What do I say?

My brain is dizzy, and I scarce know whether

I speak to thee or her.

LADY:

Peace, perturbed heart! _35

I am to thee only as thou to mine,

The passing wind which heals the brow at noon,

And may strike cold into the breast at night,

Yet cannot linger where it soothes the most,

Or long soothe could it linger.

INDIAN:

But you said _40

You also loved?

NOTE:

_32-_41 Assigned to INDIAN, 1824.

LADY:

Loved! Oh, I love. Methinks

This word of love is fit for all the world,

And that for gentle hearts another name

Would speak of gentler thoughts than the world owns.

I have loved.

INDIAN:

And thou lovest not? if so, _45

Young as thou art thou canst afford to weep.

LADY:

Oh! would that I could claim exemption

From all the bitterness of that sweet name.

I loved, I love, and when I love no more

Let joys and grief perish, and leave despair _50

To ring the knell of youth. He stood beside me,

The embodied vision of the brightest dream,

Which like a dawn heralds the day of life;

The shadow of his presence made my world

A Paradise. All familiar things he touched, _55

All common words he spoke, became to me

Like forms and sounds of a diviner world.

He was as is the sun in his fierce youth,

As terrible and lovely as a tempest;

He came, and went, and left me what I am. _60

Alas! Why must I think how oft we two

Have sate together near the river springs,

Under the green pavilion which the willow

Spreads on the floor of the unbroken fountain,

Strewn, by the nurslings that linger there, _65

Over that islet paved with flowers and moss,

While the musk-rose leaves, like flakes of crimson snow,

Showered on us, and the dove mourned in the pine,

Sad prophetess of sorrows not her own?

The crane returned to her unfrozen haunt, _70

And the false cuckoo bade the spray good morn;

And on a wintry bough the widowed bird,

Hid in the deepest night of ivy-leaves,

Renewed the vigils of a sleepless sorrow.

I, left like her, and leaving one like her, _75

Alike abandoned and abandoning

(Oh! unlike her in this!) the gentlest youth,

Whose love had made my sorrows dear to him,

Even as my sorrow made his love to me!

NOTE:

_71 spray Rossetti 1870, Woodberry; Spring Forman, Dowden.

INDIAN:

One curse of Nature stamps in the same mould _80

The features of the wretched; and they are

As like as violet to violet,

When memory, the ghost, their odours keeps

Mid the cold relics of abandoned joy.--

Proceed.

LADY:

He was a simple innocent boy. _85

I loved him well, but not as he desired;

Yet even thus he was content to be:--

A short content, for I was--

INDIAN [ASIDE]:

God of Heaven!

From such an islet, such a river-spring--!

I dare not ask her if there stood upon it _90

A pleasure-dome surmounted by a crescent,

With steps to the blue water.

[ALOUD.]

It may be

That Nature masks in life several copies

Of the same lot, so that the sufferers

May feel another's sorrow as their own, _95

And find in friendship what they lost in love.

That cannot be: yet it is strange that we,

From the same scene, by the same path to this

Realm of abandonment-- But speak! your breath--

Your breath is like soft music, your words are _100

The echoes of a voice which on my heart

Sleeps like a melody of early days.

But as you said--

LADY:

He was so awful, yet

So beautiful in mystery and terror,

Calming me as the loveliness of heaven _105

Soothes the unquiet sea:--and yet not so,

For he seemed stormy, and would often seem

A quenchless sun masked in portentous clouds;

For such his thoughts, and even his actions were;

But he was not of them, nor they of him, _110

But as they hid his splendour from the earth.

Some said he was a man of blood and peril,

And steeped in bitter infamy to the lips.

More need was there I should be innocent,

More need that I should be most true and kind, _115

And much more need that there should be found one

To share remorse and scorn and solitude,

And all the ills that wait on those who do

The tasks of ruin in the world of life.

He fled, and I have followed him.

INDIAN:

Such a one _120

Is he who was the winter of my peace.

But, fairest stranger, when didst thou depart

From the far hills where rise the springs of India?

How didst thou pass the intervening sea?

LADY:

If I be sure I am not dreaming now, _125

I should not doubt to say it was a dream.

Methought a star came down from heaven,

And rested mid the plants of India,

Which I had given a shelter from the frost

Within my chamber. There the meteor lay, _130

Panting forth light among the leaves and flowers,

As if it lived, and was outworn with speed;

Or that it loved, and passion made the pulse

Of its bright life throb like an anxious heart,

Till it diffused itself; and all the chamber _135

And walls seemed melted into emerald fire

That burned not; in the midst of which appeared

A spirit like a child, and laughed aloud

A thrilling peal of such sweet merriment

As made the blood tingle in my warm feet: _140

Then bent over a vase, and murmuring

Low, unintelligible melodies,

Placed something in the mould like melon-seeds,

And slowly faded, and in place of it

A soft hand issued from the veil of fire, _145

Holding a cup like a magnolia flower,

And poured upon the earth within the vase

The element with which it overflowed,

Brighter than morning light, and purer than

The water of the springs of Himalah. _150

NOTE:

_120-_126 Such...dream 1839; omitted 1824.

INDIAN:

You waked not?

LADY:

Not until my dream became

Like a child's legend on the tideless sand.

Which the first foam erases half, and half

Leaves legible. At length I rose, and went,

Visiting my flowers from pot to pot, and thought _155

To set new cuttings in the empty urns,

And when I came to that beside the lattice,

I saw two little dark-green leaves

Lifting the light mould at their birth, and then

I half-remembered my forgotten dream. _160

And day by day, green as a gourd in June,

The plant grew fresh and thick, yet no one knew

What plant it was; its stem and tendrils seemed

Like emerald snakes, mottled and diamonded

With azure mail and streaks of woven silver; _165

And all the sheaths that folded the dark buds

Rose like the crest of cobra-di-capel,

Until the golden eye of the bright flower,

Through the dark lashes of those veined lids,

...disencumbered of their silent sleep, _170

Gazed like a star into the morning light.

Its leaves were delicate, you almost saw

The pulses

With which the purple velvet flower was fed

To overflow, and like a poet's heart _175

Changing bright fancy to sweet sentiment,

Changed half the light to fragrance. It soon fell,

And to a green and dewy embryo-fruit

Left all its treasured beauty. Day by day

I nursed the plant, and on the double flute _180

Played to it on the sunny winter days

Soft melodies, as sweet as April rain

On silent leaves, and sang those words in which

Passion makes Echo taunt the sleeping strings;

And I would send tales of forgotten love _185

Late into the lone night, and sing wild songs

Of maids deserted in the olden time,

And weep like a soft cloud in April's bosom

Upon the sleeping eyelids of the plant,

So that perhaps it dreamed that Spring was come, _190

And crept abroad into the moonlight air,

And loosened all its limbs, as, noon by noon,

The sun averted less his oblique beam.

INDIAN:

And the plant died not in the frost?

LADY:

It grew;

And went out of the lattice which I left _195

Half open for it, trailing its quaint spires

Along the garden and across the lawn,

And down the slope of moss and through the tufts

Of wild-flower roots, and stumps of trees o'ergrown

With simple lichens, and old hoary stones, _200

On to the margin of the glassy pool,

Even to a nook of unblown violets

And lilies-of-the-valley yet unborn,

Under a pine with ivy overgrown.

And theme its fruit lay like a sleeping lizard _205

Under the shadows; but when Spring indeed

Came to unswathe her infants, and the lilies

Peeped from their bright green masks to wonder at

This shape of autumn couched in their recess,

Then it dilated, and it grew until _210

One half lay floating on the fountain wave,

Whose pulse, elapsed in unlike sympathies,

Kept time

Among the snowy water-lily buds.

Its shape was such as summer melody _215

Of the south wind in spicy vales might give

To some light cloud bound from the golden dawn

To fairy isles of evening, and it seemed

In hue and form that it had been a mirror

Of all the hues and forms around it and _220

Upon it pictured by the sunny beams

Which, from the bright vibrations of the pool,

Were thrown upon the rafters and the roof

Of boughs and leaves, and on the pillared stems

Of the dark sylvan temple, and reflections _225

Of every infant flower and star of moss

And veined leaf in the azure odorous air.

And thus it lay in the Elysian calm

Of its own beauty, floating on the line

Which, like a film in purest space, divided _230

The heaven beneath the water from the heaven

Above the clouds; and every day I went

Watching its growth and wondering;

And as the day grew hot, methought I saw

A glassy vapour dancing on the pool, _235

And on it little quaint and filmy shapes.

With dizzy motion, wheel and rise and fall,

Like clouds of gnats with perfect lineaments.

...

O friend, sleep was a veil uplift from Heaven--

As if Heaven dawned upon the world of dream-- _240

When darkness rose on the extinguished day

Out of the eastern wilderness.

INDIAN:

I too

Have found a moment's paradise in sleep

Half compensate a hell of waking sorrow.

***

CHARLES THE FIRST.

["Charles the First" was designed in 1818, begun towards the close of

1819 [Medwin, "Life", 2 page 62], resumed in January, and finally laid

aside by June, 1822. It was published in part in the "Posthumous

Poems", 1824, and printed, in its present form (with the addition of

some 530 lines), by Mr. W.M. Rossetti, 1870. Further particulars are

given in the Editor's Notes at the end of Volume 3.]

DRAMATIS PERSONAE:

KING CHARLES I.

QUEEN HENRIETTA.

LAUD, ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY.

WENTWORTH, EARL OF STRAFFORD.

LORD COTTINGTON.

LORD WESTON.

LORD COVENTRY.

WILLIAMS, BISHOP OF LINCOLN.

SECRETARY LYTTELTON.

JUXON.

ST. JOHN.

ARCHY, THE COURT FOOL.

HAMPDEN.

PYM.

CROMWELL.

CROMWELL'S DAUGHTER.

SIR HARRY VANE THE YOUNGER.

LEIGHTON.

BASTWICK.

PRYNNE.

GENTLEMEN OF THE INNS OF COURT, CITIZENS, PURSUIVANTS,

MARSHALSMEN, LAW STUDENTS, JUDGES, CLERK.

SCENE 1:

THE MASQUE OF THE INNS OF COURT.

A PURSUIVANT:

Place, for the Marshal of the Masque!

FIRST CITIZEN:

What thinkest thou of this quaint masque which turns,

Like morning from the shadow of the night,

The night to day, and London to a place

Of peace and joy?

SECOND CITIZEN:

And Hell to Heaven. _5

Eight years are gone,

And they seem hours, since in this populous street

I trod on grass made green by summer's rain,

For the red plague kept state within that palace

Where now that vanity reigns. In nine years more _10

The roots will be refreshed with civil blood;

And thank the mercy of insulted Heaven

That sin and wrongs wound, as an orphan's cry,

The patience of the great Avenger's ear.

NOTE:

_10 now that vanity reigns 1870; now reigns vanity 1824.

A YOUTH:

Yet, father, 'tis a happy sight to see, _15

Beautiful, innocent, and unforbidden

By God or man;--'tis like the bright procession

Of skiey visions in a solemn dream

From which men wake as from a Paradise,

And draw new strength to tread the thorns of life. _20

If God be good, wherefore should this be evil?

And if this be not evil, dost thou not draw

Unseasonable poison from the flowers

Which bloom so rarely in this barren world?

Oh, kill these bitter thoughts which make the present _25

Dark as the future!--

...

When Avarice and Tyranny, vigilant Fear,

And open-eyed Conspiracy lie sleeping

As on Hell's threshold; and all gentle thoughts

Waken to worship Him who giveth joys _30

With His own gift.

SECOND CITIZEN:

How young art thou in this old age of time!

How green in this gray world? Canst thou discern

The signs of seasons, yet perceive no hint

Of change in that stage-scene in which thou art _35

Not a spectator but an actor? or

Art thou a puppet moved by [enginery]?

The day that dawns in fire will die in storms,

Even though the noon be calm. My travel's done,--

Before the whirlwind wakes I shall have found _40

My inn of lasting rest; but thou must still

Be journeying on in this inclement air.

Wrap thy old cloak about thy back;

Nor leave the broad and plain and beaten road,

Although no flowers smile on the trodden dust, _45

For the violet paths of pleasure. This Charles the First

Rose like the equinoctial sun,...

By vapours, through whose threatening ominous veil

Darting his altered influence he has gained

This height of noon--from which he must decline _50

Amid the darkness of conflicting storms,

To dank extinction and to latest night...

There goes

The apostate Strafford; he whose titles

whispered aphorisms _55

From Machiavel and Bacon: and, if Judas

Had been as brazen and as bold as he--

NOTES:

_33-_37 Canst...enginery 1870;

Canst thou not think

Of change in that low scene, in which thou art

Not a spectator but an actor?... 1824.

_43-_57 Wrap...bold as he 1870; omitted 1824.

FIRST CITIZEN:

That

Is the Archbishop.

SECOND CITIZEN:

Rather say the Pope:

London will be soon his Rome: he walks

As if he trod upon the heads of men: _60

He looks elate, drunken with blood and gold;--

Beside him moves the Babylonian woman

Invisibly, and with her as with his shadow,

Mitred adulterer! he is joined in sin,

Which turns Heaven's milk of mercy to revenge. _65

THIRD CITIZEN [LIFTING UP HIS EYES]:

Good Lord! rain it down upon him!...

Amid her ladies walks the papist queen,

As if her nice feet scorned our English earth.

The Canaanitish Jezebel! I would be

A dog if I might tear her with my teeth! _70

There's old Sir Henry Vane, the Earl of Pembroke,

Lord Essex, and Lord Keeper Coventry,

And others who make base their English breed

By vile participation of their honours

With papists, atheists, tyrants, and apostates. _75

When lawyers masque 'tis time for honest men

To strip the vizor from their purposes.

A seasonable time for masquers this!

When Englishmen and Protestants should sit

dust on their dishonoured heads _80

To avert the wrath of Him whose scourge is felt

For the great sins which have drawn down from Heaven

and foreign overthrow.

The remnant of the martyred saints in Rochefort

Have been abandoned by their faithless allies _85

To that idolatrous and adulterous torturer

Lewis of France,--the Palatinate is lost--

[ENTER LEIGHTON (WHO HAS BEEN BRANDED IN THE FACE) AND BASTWICK.]

Canst thou be--art thou?

NOTE:

_73 make 1824; made 1839.

LEIGHTON:

I WAS Leighton: what

I AM thou seest. And yet turn thine eyes,

And with thy memory look on thy friend's mind, _90

Which is unchanged, and where is written deep

The sentence of my judge.

THIRD CITIZEN:

Are these the marks with which

Laud thinks to improve the image of his Maker

Stamped on the face of man? Curses upon him,

The impious tyrant!

SECOND CITIZEN:

It is said besides _95

That lewd and papist drunkards may profane

The Sabbath with their

And has permitted that most heathenish custom

Of dancing round a pole dressed up with wreaths

On May-day. _100

A man who thus twice crucifies his God

May well ... his brother.--In my mind, friend,

The root of all this ill is prelacy.

I would cut up the root.

THIRD CITIZEN:

And by what means?

SECOND CITIZEN:

Smiting each Bishop under the fifth rib. _105

THIRD CITIZEN:

You seem to know the vulnerable place

Of these same crocodiles.

SECOND CITIZEN:

I learnt it in

Egyptian bondage, sir. Your worm of Nile

Betrays not with its flattering tears like they;

For, when they cannot kill, they whine and weep. _110

Nor is it half so greedy of men's bodies

As they of soul and all; nor does it wallow

In slime as they in simony and lies

And close lusts of the flesh.

NOTE:

_78-_114 A seasonable...of the flesh 1870; omitted 1824.

_108 bondage cj. Forman; bondages 1870.

A MARSHALSMAN:

Give place, give place!

You torch-bearers, advance to the great gate, _115

And then attend the Marshal of the Masque

Into the Royal presence.

A LAW STUDENT:

What thinkest thou

Of this quaint show of ours, my aged friend?

Even now we see the redness of the torches

Inflame the night to the eastward, and the clarions _120

[Gasp?] to us on the wind's wave. It comes!

And their sounds, floating hither round the pageant,

Rouse up the astonished air.

NOTE:

_119-_123 Even now...air 1870; omitted 1824.

FIRST CITIZEN:

I will not think but that our country's wounds

May yet be healed. The king is just and gracious, _125

Though wicked counsels now pervert his will:

These once cast off--

SECOND CITIZEN:

As adders cast their skins

And keep their venom, so kings often change;

Councils and counsellors hang on one another,

Hiding the loathsome _130

Like the base patchwork of a leper's rags.

THE YOUTH:

Oh, still those dissonant thoughts!--List how the music

Grows on the enchanted air! And see, the torches

Restlessly flashing, and the crowd divided

Like waves before an admiral's prow!

NOTE:

_132 how the 1870; loud 1824.

A MARSHALSMAN:

Give place _135

To the Marshal of the Masque!

A PURSUIVANT:

Room for the King!

NOTE:

_136 A Pursuivant: Room for the King! 1870; omitted 1824.

THE YOUTH:

How glorious! See those thronging chariots

Rolling, like painted clouds before the wind,

Behind their solemn steeds: how some are shaped

Like curved sea-shells dyed by the azure depths _140

Of Indian seas; some like the new-born moon;

And some like cars in which the Romans climbed

(Canopied by Victory's eagle-wings outspread)

The Capitolian--See how gloriously

The mettled horses in the torchlight stir _145

Their gallant riders, while they check their pride,

Like shapes of some diviner element

Than English air, and beings nobler than

The envious and admiring multitude.

NOTE:

_138-40 Rolling...depths 1870;

Rolling like painted clouds before the wind

Some are

Like curved shells, dyed by the azure depths 1824.

SECOND CITIZEN:

Ay, there they are-- _150

Nobles, and sons of nobles, patentees,

Monopolists, and stewards of this poor farm,

On whose lean sheep sit the prophetic crows,

Here is the pomp that strips the houseless orphan,

Here is the pride that breaks the desolate heart. _155

These are the lilies glorious as Solomon,

Who toil not, neither do they spin,--unless

It be the webs they catch poor rogues withal.

Here is the surfeit which to them who earn

The niggard wages of the earth, scarce leaves _160

The tithe that will support them till they crawl

Back to her cold hard bosom. Here is health

Followed by grim disease, glory by shame,

Waste by lame famine, wealth by squalid want,

And England's sin by England's punishment. _165

And, as the effect pursues the cause foregone,

Lo, giving substance to my words, behold

At once the sign and the thing signified--

A troop of cripples, beggars, and lean outcasts,

Horsed upon stumbling jades, carted with dung, _170

Dragged for a day from cellars and low cabins

And rotten hiding-holes, to point the moral

Of this presentment, and bring up the rear

Of painted pomp with misery!

NOTES:

_162 her 1870; its 1824.

_170 jades 1870; shapes 1824.

_173 presentment 1870; presentiment 1824.

THE YOUTH:

'Tis but

The anti-masque, and serves as discords do _175

In sweetest music. Who would love May flowers

If they succeeded not to Winter's flaw;

Or day unchanged by night; or joy itself

Without the touch of sorrow?

SECOND CITIZEN:

I and thou-

A MARSHALSMAN:

Place, give place! _180

NOTE:

_179, _180 I...place! 1870; omitted 1824.

SCENE 2:

A CHAMBER IN WHITEHALL.

ENTER THE KING, QUEEN, LAUD, LORD STRAFTORD,

LORD COTTINGTON, AND OTHER LORDS; ARCHY;

ALSO ST. JOHN, WITH SOME GENTLEMEN OF THE INNS OF COURT.

KING:

Thanks, gentlemen. I heartily accept

This token of your service: your gay masque

Was performed gallantly. And it shows well

When subjects twine such flowers of [observance?]

With the sharp thorns that deck the English crown. _5

A gentle heart enjoys what it confers,

Even as it suffers that which it inflicts,

Though Justice guides the stroke.

Accept my hearty thanks.

NOTE:

_3-9 And...thanks 1870; omitted 1824.

QUEEN:

And gentlemen,

Call your poor Queen your debtor. Your quaint pageant _10

Rose on me like the figures of past years,

Treading their still path back to infancy,

More beautiful and mild as they draw nearer

The quiet cradle. I could have almost wept

To think I was in Paris, where these shows _15

Are well devised--such as I was ere yet

My young heart shared a portion of the burthen,

The careful weight, of this great monarchy.

There, gentlemen, between the sovereign's pleasure

And that which it regards, no clamour lifts _20

Its proud interposition.

In Paris ribald censurers dare not move

Their poisonous tongues against these sinless sports;

And HIS smile

Warms those who bask in it, as ours would do _25

If ... Take my heart's thanks: add them, gentlemen,

To those good words which, were he King of France,

My royal lord would turn to golden deeds.

ST. JOHN:

Madam, the love of Englishmen can make

The lightest favour of their lawful king _30

Outweigh a despot's.--We humbly take our leaves,

Enriched by smiles which France can never buy.

[EXEUNT ST. JOHN AND THE GENTLEMEN OF THE INNS OF COURT.]

KING:

My Lord Archbishop,

Mark you what spirit sits in St. John's eyes?

Methinks it is too saucy for this presence. _35

ARCHY:

Yes, pray your Grace look: for, like an unsophisticated [eye] sees

everything upside down, you who are wise will discern the shadow of an

idiot in lawn sleeves and a rochet setting springes to catch woodcocks

in haymaking time. Poor Archy, whose owl-eyes are tempered to the

error of his age, and because he is a fool, and by special ordinance

of God forbidden ever to see himself as he is, sees now in that deep

eye a blindfold devil sitting on the ball, and weighing words out

between king and subjects. One scale is full of promises, and the

other full of protestations: and then another devil creeps behind the

first out of the dark windings [of a] pregnant lawyer's brain, and

takes the bandage from the other's eyes, and throws a sword into the

left-hand scale, for all the world like my Lord Essex's there. _48

STRAFFORD:

A rod in pickle for the Fool's back!

ARCHY:

Ay, and some are now smiling whose tears will make the brine; for the

Fool sees--

STRAFFORD:

Insolent! You shall have your coat turned and be whipped out of the

palace for this. _53

ARCHY:

When all the fools are whipped, and all the Protestant writers, while

the knaves are whipping the fools ever since a thief was set to catch

a thief. If all turncoats were whipped out of palaces, poor Archy

would be disgraced in good company. Let the knaves whip the fools, and

all the fools laugh at it. [Let the] wise and godly slit each other's

noses and ears (having no need of any sense of discernment in their

craft); and the knaves, to marshal them, join in a procession to

Bedlam, to entreat the madmen to omit their sublime Platonic

contemplations, and manage the state of England. Let all the honest

men who lie [pinched?] up at the prisons or the pillories, in custody

of the pursuivants of the High-Commission Court, marshal them. _65

NOTE:

_64 pinched marked as doubtful by Rossetti.

1870; Forman, Dowden; penned Woodberry.

[ENTER SECRETARY LYTTELTON, WITH PAPERS.]

KING [LOOKING OVER THE PAPERS]:

These stiff Scots

His Grace of Canterbury must take order

To force under the Church's yoke.--You, Wentworth,

Shall be myself in Ireland, and shall add

Your wisdom, gentleness, and energy, _70

To what in me were wanting.--My Lord Weston,

Look that those merchants draw not without loss

Their bullion from the Tower; and, on the payment

Of shipmoney, take fullest compensation

For violation of our royal forests, _75

Whose limits, from neglect, have been o'ergrown

With cottages and cornfields. The uttermost

Farthing exact from those who claim exemption

From knighthood: that which once was a reward

Shall thus be made a punishment, that subjects _80

May know how majesty can wear at will

The rugged mood.--My Lord of Coventry,

Lay my command upon the Courts below

That bail be not accepted for the prisoners

Under the warrant of the Star Chamber. _85

The people shall not find the stubbornness

Of Parliament a cheap or easy method

Of dealing with their rightful sovereign:

And doubt not this, my Lord of Coventry,

We will find time and place for fit rebuke.-- _90

My Lord of Canterbury.

NOTE:

_22-90 In Paris...rebuke 1870; omitted 1824.

ARCHY:

The fool is here.

LAUD:

I crave permission of your Majesty

To order that this insolent fellow be

Chastised: he mocks the sacred character,

Scoffs at the state, and--

NOTE:

_95 state 1870; stake 1824.

KING:

What, my Archy? _95

He mocks and mimics all he sees and hears,

Yet with a quaint and graceful licence--Prithee

For this once do not as Prynne would, were he

Primate of England. With your Grace's leave,

He lives in his own world; and, like a parrot _100

Hung in his gilded prison from the window

Of a queen's bower over the public way,

Blasphemes with a bird's mind:--his words, like arrows

Which know no aim beyond the archer's wit,

Strike sometimes what eludes philosophy.-- _105

[TO ARCHY.]

Go, sirrah, and repent of your offence

Ten minutes in the rain; be it your penance

To bring news how the world goes there.

[EXIT ARCHY.]

Poor Archy!

He weaves about himself a world of mirth

Out of the wreck of ours. _110

NOTES:

_99 With your Grace's leave 1870; omitted 1824.

_106-_110 Go...ours spoken by THE QUEEN, 1824.

LAUD:

I take with patience, as my Master did,

All scoffs permitted from above.

KING:

My lord,

Pray overlook these papers. Archy's words

Had wings, but these have talons.

QUEEN:

And the lion

That wears them must be tamed. My dearest lord, _115

I see the new-born courage in your eye

Armed to strike dead the Spirit of the Time,

Which spurs to rage the many-headed beast.

Do thou persist: for, faint but in resolve,

And it were better thou hadst still remained _120

The slave of thine own slaves, who tear like curs

The fugitive, and flee from the pursuer;

And Opportunity, that empty wolf,

Flies at his throat who falls. Subdue thy actions

Even to the disposition of thy purpose, _125

And be that tempered as the Ebro's steel;

And banish weak-eyed Mercy to the weak,

Whence she will greet thee with a gift of peace

And not betray thee with a traitor's kiss,

As when she keeps the company of rebels, _130

Who think that she is Fear. This do, lest we

Should fall as from a glorious pinnacle

In a bright dream, and wake as from a dream

Out of our worshipped state.

NOTES:

_116 your 1824; thine 1870.

_118 Which...beast 1870; omitted 1824.

KING:

Beloved friend,

God is my witness that this weight of power, _135

Which He sets me my earthly task to wield

Under His law, is my delight and pride

Only because thou lovest that and me.

For a king bears the office of a God

To all the under world; and to his God _140

Alone he must deliver up his trust,

Unshorn of its permitted attributes.

[It seems] now as the baser elements

Had mutinied against the golden sun

That kindles them to harmony, and quells _145

Their self-destroying rapine. The wild million

Strike at the eye that guides them; like as humours

Of the distempered body that conspire

Against the spirit of life throned in the heart,--

And thus become the prey of one another, _150

And last of death--

STRAFFORD:

That which would be ambition in a subject

Is duty in a sovereign; for on him,

As on a keystone, hangs the arch of life,

Whose safety is its strength. Degree and form, _155

And all that makes the age of reasoning man

More memorable than a beast's, depend on this--

That Right should fence itself inviolably

With Power; in which respect the state of England

From usurpation by the insolent commons _160

Cries for reform.

Get treason, and spare treasure. Fee with coin

The loudest murmurers; feed with jealousies

Opposing factions,--be thyself of none;

And borrow gold of many, for those who lend _165

Will serve thee till thou payest them; and thus

Keep the fierce spirit of the hour at bay,

Till time, and its coming generations

Of nights and days unborn, bring some one chance,

...

Or war or pestilence or Nature's self,-- _170

By some distemperature or terrible sign,

Be as an arbiter betwixt themselves.

Nor let your Majesty

Doubt here the peril of the unseen event.

How did your brother Kings, coheritors _175

In your high interest in the subject earth,

Rise past such troubles to that height of power

Where now they sit, and awfully serene

Smile on the trembling world? Such popular storms

Philip the Second of Spain, this Lewis of France, _180

And late the German head of many bodies,

And every petty lord of Italy,

Quelled or by arts or arms. Is England poorer

Or feebler? or art thou who wield'st her power

Tamer than they? or shall this island be-- _185

[Girdled] by its inviolable waters--

To the world present and the world to come

Sole pattern of extinguished monarchy?

Not if thou dost as I would have thee do.

KING:

Your words shall be my deeds: _190

You speak the image of my thought. My friend

(If Kings can have a friend, I call thee so),

Beyond the large commission which [belongs]

Under the great seal of the realm, take this:

And, for some obvious reasons, let there be _195

No seal on it, except my kingly word

And honour as I am a gentleman.

Be--as thou art within my heart and mind--

Another self, here and in Ireland:

Do what thou judgest well, take amplest licence, _200

And stick not even at questionable means.

Hear me, Wentworth. My word is as a wall

Between thee and this world thine enemy--

That hates thee, for thou lovest me.

STRAFFORD:

I own

No friend but thee, no enemies but thine: _205

Thy lightest thought is my eternal law.

How weak, how short, is life to pay--

KING:

Peace, peace.

Thou ow'st me nothing yet.

[TO LAUD.]

My lord, what say

Those papers?

LAUD:

Your Majesty has ever interposed, _210

In lenity towards your native soil,

Between the heavy vengeance of the Church

And Scotland. Mark the consequence of warming

This brood of northern vipers in your bosom.

The rabble, instructed no doubt _215

By London, Lindsay, Hume, and false Argyll

(For the waves never menace heaven until

Scourged by the wind's invisible tyranny),

Have in the very temple of the Lord

Done outrage to His chosen ministers. _220

They scorn the liturgy of the Holy Church,

Refuse to obey her canons, and deny

The apostolic power with which the Spirit

Has filled its elect vessels, even from him

Who held the keys with power to loose and bind, _225

To him who now pleads in this royal presence.--

Let ample powers and new instructions be

Sent to the High Commissioners in Scotland.

To death, imprisonment, and confiscation,

Add torture, add the ruin of the kindred _230

Of the offender, add the brand of infamy,

Add mutilation: and if this suffice not,

Unleash the sword and fire, that in their thirst

They may lick up that scum of schismatics.

I laugh at those weak rebels who, desiring _235

What we possess, still prate of Christian peace,

As if those dreadful arbitrating messengers

Which play the part of God 'twixt right and wrong,

Should be let loose against the innocent sleep

Of templed cities and the smiling fields, _240

For some poor argument of policy

Which touches our own profit or our pride

(Where it indeed were Christian charity

To turn the cheek even to the smiter's hand):

And, when our great Redeemer, when our God, _245

When He who gave, accepted, and retained

Himself in propitiation of our sins,

Is scorned in His immediate ministry,

With hazard of the inestimable loss

Of all the truth and discipline which is _250

Salvation to the extremest generation

Of men innumerable, they talk of peace!

Such peace as Canaan found, let Scotland now:

For, by that Christ who came to bring a sword,

Not peace, upon the earth, and gave command _255

To His disciples at the Passover

That each should sell his robe and buy a sword,-

Once strip that minister of naked wrath,

And it shall never sleep in peace again

Till Scotland bend or break.

NOTES:

_134-_232 Beloved...mutilation 1870; omitted 1824.

_237 arbitrating messengers 1870; messengers of wrath 1824.

_239 the 1870; omitted 1524.

_243-_244 Parentheses inserted 1870.

_246, _247 When He...sins 1870; omitted 1824.

_248 ministry 1870; ministers 1824.

_249-52 With...innumerable 1870; omitted 1824.

KING:

My Lord Archbishop, _260

Do what thou wilt and what thou canst in this.

Thy earthly even as thy heavenly King

Gives thee large power in his unquiet realm.

But we want money, and my mind misgives me

That for so great an enterprise, as yet, _265

We are unfurnished.

STRAFFORD:

Yet it may not long

Rest on our wills.

COTTINGTON:

The expenses

Of gathering shipmoney, and of distraining

For every petty rate (for we encounter

A desperate opposition inch by inch _270

In every warehouse and on every farm),

Have swallowed up the gross sum of the imposts;

So that, though felt as a most grievous scourge

Upon the land, they stand us in small stead

As touches the receipt.

STRAFFORD:

'Tis a conclusion _275

Most arithmetical: and thence you infer

Perhaps the assembling of a parliament.

Now, if a man should call his dearest enemies

T0 sit in licensed judgement on his life,

His Majesty might wisely take that course. _280

[ASIDE TO COTTINGTON.]

It is enough to expect from these lean imposts

That they perform the office of a scourge,

Without more profit.

[ALOUD.]

Fines and confiscations,

And a forced loan from the refractory city,

Will fill our coffers: and the golden love _285

Of loyal gentlemen and noble friends

For the worshipped father of our common country,

With contributions from the catholics,

Will make Rebellion pale in our excess.

Be these the expedients until time and wisdom _290

Shall frame a settled state of government.

LAUD:

And weak expedients they! Have we not drained

All, till the ... which seemed

A mine exhaustless?

STRAFFORD:

And the love which IS,

If loyal hearts could turn their blood to gold. _295

LAUD:

Both now grow barren: and I speak it not

As loving parliaments, which, as they have been

In the right hand of bold bad mighty kings

The scourges of the bleeding Church, I hate.

Methinks they scarcely can deserve our fear. _300

STRAFFORD:

Oh! my dear liege, take back the wealth thou gavest:

With that, take all I held, but as in trust

For thee, of mine inheritance: leave me but

This unprovided body for thy service,

And a mind dedicated to no care _305

Except thy safety:--but assemble not

A parliament. Hundreds will bring, like me,

Their fortunes, as they would their blood, before--

KING:

No! thou who judgest them art but one. Alas!

We should be too much out of love with Heaven, _310

Did this vile world show many such as thee,

Thou perfect, just, and honourable man!

Never shall it be said that Charles of England

Stripped those he loved for fear of those he scorns;

Nor will he so much misbecome his throne _315

As to impoverish those who most adorn

And best defend it. That you urge, dear Strafford,

Inclines me rather--

QUEEN:

To a parliament?

Is this thy firmness? and thou wilt preside

Over a knot of ... censurers, _320

To the unswearing of thy best resolves,

And choose the worst, when the worst comes too soon?

Plight not the worst before the worst must come.

Oh, wilt thou smile whilst our ribald foes,

Dressed in their own usurped authority, _325

Sharpen their tongues on Henrietta's fame?

It is enough! Thou lovest me no more!

[WEEPS.]

KING:

Oh, Henrietta!

[THEY TALK APART.]

COTTINGTON [TO LAUD]:

Money we have none:

And all the expedients of my Lord of Strafford

Will scarcely meet the arrears.

LAUD:

Without delay _330

An army must be sent into the north;

Followed by a Commission of the Church,

With amplest power to quench in fire and blood,

And tears and terror, and the pity of hell,

The intenser wrath of Heresy. God will give _335

Victory; and victory over Scotland give

The lion England tamed into our hands.

That will lend power, and power bring gold.

COTTINGTON:

Meanwhile

We must begin first where your Grace leaves off.

Gold must give power, or--

LAUD:

I am not averse _340

From the assembling of a parliament.

Strong actions and smooth words might teach them soon

The lesson to obey. And are they not

A bubble fashioned by the monarch's mouth,

The birth of one light breath? If they serve no purpose, _345

A word dissolves them.

STRAFFORD:

The engine of parliaments

Might be deferred until I can bring over

The Irish regiments: they will serve to assure

The issue of the war against the Scots.

And, this game won--which if lost, all is lost-- _350

Gather these chosen leaders of the rebels,

And call them, if you will, a parliament.

KING:

Oh, be our feet still tardy to shed blood.

Guilty though it may be! I would still spare

The stubborn country of my birth, and ward _355

From countenances which I loved in youth

The wrathful Church's lacerating hand.

[TO LAUD.]

Have you o'erlooked the other articles?

[ENTER ARCHY.]

LAUD:

Hazlerig, Hampden, Pym, young Harry Vane,

Cromwell, and other rebels of less note, _360

Intend to sail with the next favouring wind

For the Plantations.

ARCHY:

Where they think to found

A commonwealth like Gonzalo's in the play,

Gynaecocoenic and pantisocratic.

NOTE:

_363 Gonzalo's 1870; Gonzaga Boscombe manuscript.

KING:

What's that, sirrah?

ARCHY:

New devil's politics. _365

Hell is the pattern of all commonwealths:

Lucifer was the first republican.

Will you hear Merlin's prophecy, how three [posts?]

'In one brainless skull, when the whitethorn is full,

Shall sail round the world, and come back again: _370

Shall sail round the world in a brainless skull,

And come back again when the moon is at full:'--

When, in spite of the Church,

They will hear homilies of whatever length

Or form they please. _375

[COTTINGTON?]:

So please your Majesty to sign this order

For their detention.

ARCHY:

If your Majesty were tormented night and day by fever, gout,

rheumatism, and stone, and asthma, etc., and you found these diseases

had secretly entered into a conspiracy to abandon you, should you

think it necessary to lay an embargo on the port by which they meant

to dispeople your unquiet kingdom of man? _383

KING:

If fear were made for kings, the Fool mocks wisely;

But in this case--[WRITING]. Here, my lord, take the warrant,

And see it duly executed forthwith.--

That imp of malice and mockery shall be punished. _387

[EXEUNT ALL BUT KING, QUEEN, AND ARCHY.]

ARCHY:

Ay, I am the physician of whom Plato prophesied, who was to be accused

by the confectioner before a jury of children, who found him guilty

without waiting for the summing-up, and hanged him without benefit of

clergy. Thus Baby Charles, and the Twelfth-night Queen of Hearts, and

the overgrown schoolboy Cottington, and that little urchin Laud--who

would reduce a verdict of 'guilty, death,' by famine, if it were

impregnable by composition--all impannelled against poor Archy for

presenting them bitter physic the last day of the holidays. _397

QUEEN:

Is the rain over, sirrah?

KING:

When it rains

And the sun shines, 'twill rain again to-morrow:

And therefore never smile till you've done crying. _400

ARCHY:

But 'tis all over now: like the April anger of woman, the gentle sky

has wept itself serene.

QUEEN:

What news abroad? how looks the world this morning?

ARCHY:

Gloriously as a grave covered with virgin flowers. There's a rainbow

in the sky. Let your Majesty look at it, for

'A rainbow in the morning _407

Is the shepherd's warning;'

and the flocks of which you are the pastor are scattered among the

mountain-tops, where every drop of water is a flake of snow, and the

breath of May pierces like a January blast. _411

KING:

The sheep have mistaken the wolf for their shepherd, my poor boy; and

the shepherd, the wolves for their watchdogs.

QUEEN:

But the rainbow was a good sign, Archy: it says that the waters of the

deluge are gone, and can return no more.

ARCHY:

Ay, the salt-water one: but that of tears and blood must yet come

down, and that of fire follow, if there be any truth in lies.--The

rainbow hung over the city with all its shops,...and churches, from

north to south, like a bridge of congregated lightning pieced by the

masonry of heaven--like a balance in which the angel that distributes

the coming hour was weighing that heavy one whose poise is now felt in

the lightest hearts, before it bows the proudest heads under the

meanest feet. _424

QUEEN:

Who taught you this trash, sirrah?

ARCHY:

A torn leaf out of an old book trampled in the dirt.--But for the

rainbow. It moved as the sun moved, and...until the top of the

Tower...of a cloud through its left-hand tip, and Lambeth Palace look

as dark as a rock before the other. Methought I saw a crown figured

upon one tip, and a mitre on the other. So, as I had heard treasures

were found where the rainbow quenches its points upon the earth, I set

off, and at the Tower-- But I shall not tell your Majesty what I found

close to the closet-window on which the rainbow had glimmered.

KING:

Speak: I will make my Fool my conscience. _435

ARCHY:

Then conscience is a fool.--I saw there a cat caught in a rat-trap. I

heard the rats squeak behind the wainscots: it seemed to me that the

very mice were consulting on the manner of her death.

QUEEN:

Archy is shrewd and bitter.

ARCHY:

Like the season, _440

So blow the winds.--But at the other end of the rainbow, where the

gray rain was tempered along the grass and leaves by a tender

interfusion of violet and gold in the meadows beyond Lambeth, what

think you that I found instead of a mitre?

KING:

Vane's wits perhaps. _445

ARCHY:

Something as vain. I saw a gross vapour hovering in a stinking ditch

over the carcass of a dead ass, some rotten rags, and broken

dishes--the wrecks of what once administered to the stuffing-out and

the ornament of a worm of worms. His Grace of Canterbury expects to

enter the New Jerusalem some Palm Sunday in triumph on the ghost of

this ass. _451

QUEEN:

Enough, enough! Go desire Lady Jane

She place my lute, together with the music

Mari received last week from Italy,

In my boudoir, and--

[EXIT ARCHY.]

KING:

I'll go in.

NOTE:

_254-_455 For by...I'll go in 1870; omitted 1824.

QUEEN:

MY beloved lord, _455

Have you not noted that the Fool of late

Has lost his careless mirth, and that his words

Sound like the echoes of our saddest fears?

What can it mean? I should be loth to think

Some factious slave had tutored him.

KING:

Oh, no! _460

He is but Occasion's pupil. Partly 'tis

That our minds piece the vacant intervals

Of his wild words with their own fashioning,--

As in the imagery of summer clouds,

Or coals of the winter fire, idlers find _465

The perfect shadows of their teeming thoughts:

And partly, that the terrors of the time

Are sown by wandering Rumour in all spirits;

And in the lightest and the least, may best

Be seen the current of the coming wind. _470

NOTES:

_460, _461 Oh...pupil 1870; omitted 1824.

_461 Partly 'tis 1870; It partly is 1824.

_465 of 1870; in 1824.

QUEEN:

Your brain is overwrought with these deep thoughts.

Come, I will sing to you; let us go try

These airs from Italy; and, as we pass

The gallery, we'll decide where that Correggio

Shall hang--the Virgin Mother _475

With her child, born the King of heaven and earth,

Whose reign is men's salvation. And you shall see

A cradled miniature of yourself asleep,

Stamped on the heart by never-erring love;

Liker than any Vandyke ever made, _480

A pattern to the unborn age of thee,

Over whose sweet beauty I have wept for joy

A thousand times, and now should weep for sorrow,

Did I not think that after we were dead

Our fortunes would spring high in him, and that _485

The cares we waste upon our heavy crown

Would make it light and glorious as a wreath

Of Heaven's beams for his dear innocent brow.

NOTE:

_473-_477 and, as...salvation 1870; omitted 1824.

KING:

Dear Henrietta!

SCENE 3:

THE STAR CHAMBER.

LAUD, JUXON, STRAFFORD, AND OTHERS, AS JUDGES.

PRYNNE AS A PRISONER, AND THEN BASTWICK.

LAUD:

Bring forth the prisoner Bastwick: let the clerk

Recite his sentence.

CLERK:

'That he pay five thousand

Pounds to the king, lose both his ears, be branded

With red-hot iron on the cheek and forehead,

And be imprisoned within Lancaster Castle _5

During the pleasure of the Court.'

LAUD:

Prisoner,

If you have aught to say wherefore this sentence

Should not be put into effect, now speak.

JUXON:

If you have aught to plead in mitigation,

Speak.

BASTWICK:

Thus, my lords. If, like the prelates, I _10

Were an invader of the royal power

A public scorner of the word of God,

Profane, idolatrous, popish, superstitious,

Impious in heart and in tyrannic act,

Void of wit, honesty, and temperance; _15

If Satan were my lord, as theirs,--our God

Pattern of all I should avoid to do;

Were I an enemy of my God and King

And of good men, as ye are;--I should merit

Your fearful state and gilt prosperity, _20

Which, when ye wake from the last sleep, shall turn

To cowls and robes of everlasting fire.

But, as I am, I bid ye grudge me not

The only earthly favour ye can yield,

Or I think worth acceptance at your hands,-- _25

Scorn, mutilation, and imprisonment.

even as my Master did,

Until Heaven's kingdom shall descend on earth,

Or earth be like a shadow in the light

Of Heaven absorbed--some few tumultuous years _30

Will pass, and leave no wreck of what opposes

His will whose will is power.

NOTE:

_27-_32 even...power printed as a fragment, Garnett, 1862; inserted

here conjecturally, Rossetti, 1870.

LAUD:

Officer, take the prisoner from the bar,

And be his tongue slit for his insolence.

BASTWICK:

While this hand holds a pen--

LAUD:

Be his hands--

JUXON:

Stop! _35

Forbear, my lord! The tongue, which now can speak

No terror, would interpret, being dumb,

Heaven's thunder to our harm;...

And hands, which now write only their own shame,

With bleeding stumps might sign our blood away. _40

LAUD:

Much more such 'mercy' among men would be,

Did all the ministers of Heaven's revenge

Flinch thus from earthly retribution. I

Could suffer what I would inflict.

[EXIT BASTWICK GUARDED.]

Bring up

The Lord Bishop of Lincoln.--

[TO STRATFORD.]

Know you not _45

That, in distraining for ten thousand pounds

Upon his books and furniture at Lincoln,

Were found these scandalous and seditious letters

Sent from one Osbaldistone, who is fled?

I speak it not as touching this poor person; _50

But of the office which should make it holy,

Were it as vile as it was ever spotless.

Mark too, my lord, that this expression strikes

His Majesty, if I misinterpret not.

[ENTER BISHOP WILLIAMS GUARDED.]

STRAFFORD:

'Twere politic and just that Williams taste _55

The bitter fruit of his connection with

The schismatics. But you, my Lord Archbishop,

Who owed your first promotion to his favour,

Who grew beneath his smile--

LAUD:

Would therefore beg

The office of his judge from this High Court,-- _60

That it shall seem, even as it is, that I,

In my assumption of this sacred robe,

Have put aside all worldly preference,

All sense of all distinction of all persons,

All thoughts but of the service of the Church.-- _65

Bishop of Lincoln!

WILLIAMS:

Peace, proud hierarch!

I know my sentence, and I own it just.

Thou wilt repay me less than I deserve,

In stretching to the utmost

...

NOTE:

Scene 3. _1-_69 Bring...utmost 1870; omitted 1824.

SCENE 4:

HAMPDEN, PYM, CROMWELL, HIS DAUGHTER, AND YOUNG SIR HARRY VANE.

HAMPDEN:

England, farewell! thou, who hast been my cradle,

Shalt never be my dungeon or my grave!

I held what I inherited in thee

As pawn for that inheritance of freedom

Which thou hast sold for thy despoiler's smile: _5

How can I call thee England, or my country?--

Does the wind hold?

VANE:

The vanes sit steady

Upon the Abbey towers. The silver lightnings

Of the evening star, spite of the city's smoke,

Tell that the north wind reigns in the upper air. _10

Mark too that flock of fleecy-winged clouds

Sailing athwart St. Margaret's.

NOTE:

_11 flock 1824; fleet 1870.

HAMPDEN:

Hail, fleet herald

Of tempest! that rude pilot who shall guide

Hearts free as his, to realms as pure as thee,

Beyond the shot of tyranny, _15

Beyond the webs of that swoln spider...

Beyond the curses, calumnies, and [lies?]

Of atheist priests! ... And thou

Fair star, whose beam lies on the wide Atlantic,

Athwart its zones of tempest and of calm, _20

Bright as the path to a beloved home

Oh, light us to the isles of the evening land!

Like floating Edens cradled in the glimmer

Of sunset, through the distant mist of years

Touched by departing hope, they gleam! lone regions, _25

Where Power's poor dupes and victims yet have never

Propitiated the savage fear of kings

With purest blood of noblest hearts; whose dew

Is yet unstained with tears of those who wake

To weep each day the wrongs on which it dawns; _30

Whose sacred silent air owns yet no echo

Of formal blasphemies; nor impious rites

Wrest man's free worship, from the God who loves,

To the poor worm who envies us His love!

Receive, thou young ... of Paradise. _35

These exiles from the old and sinful world!

...

This glorious clime, this firmament, whose lights

Dart mitigated influence through their veil

Of pale blue atmosphere; whose tears keep green

The pavement of this moist all-feeding earth; _40

This vaporous horizon, whose dim round

Is bastioned by the circumfluous sea,

Repelling invasion from the sacred towers,

Presses upon me like a dungeon's grate,

A low dark roof, a damp and narrow wall. _45

The boundless universe

Becomes a cell too narrow for the soul

That owns no master; while the loathliest ward

Of this wide prison, England, is a nest

Of cradling peace built on the mountain tops,-- _50

To which the eagle spirits of the free,

Which range through heaven and earth, and scorn the storm

Of time, and gaze upon the light of truth,

Return to brood on thoughts that cannot die

And cannot be repelled. _55

Like eaglets floating in the heaven of time,

They soar above their quarry, and shall stoop

Through palaces and temples thunderproof.

NOTES:

_13 rude 1870; wild 1824.

_16-_18 Beyond...priests 1870; omitted 1824.

_25 Touched 1870; Tinged 1824.

_34 To the poor 1870; Towards the 1824.

_38 their 1870; the 1824.

_46 boundless 1870; mighty 1824.

_48 owns no 1824; owns a 1870. ward 1870; spot 1824.

_50 cradling 1870; cradled 1824.

_54, _55 Return...repelled 1870;

Return to brood over the [ ] thoughts

That cannot die, and may not he repelled 1824.

_56-_58 Like...thunderproof 1870; omitted 1824.

SCENE 5:

ARCHY:

I'll go live under the ivy that overgrows the terrace, and count the

tears shed on its old [roots?] as the [wind?] plays the song of

'A widow bird sate mourning

Upon a wintry bough.' _5

[SINGS]

Heigho! the lark and the owl!

One flies the morning, and one lulls the night:--

Only the nightingale, poor fond soul,

Sings like the fool through darkness and light.

'A widow bird sate mourning for her love _10

Upon a wintry bough;

The frozen wind crept on above,

The freezing stream below.

There was no leaf upon the forest bare.

No flower upon the ground, _15

And little motion in the air

Except the mill-wheel's sound.'

NOTE:

Scene 5. _1-_9 I'll...light 1870; omitted 1824.

***

THE TRIUMPH OF LIFE.

[Composed at Lerici on the Gulf of Spezzia in the spring and early

summer of 1822--the poem on which Shelley was engaged at the time of

his death. Published by Mrs. Shelley in the "Posthumous Poems" of

1824, pages 73-95. Several emendations, the result of Dr. Garnett's

examination of the Boscombe manuscript, were given to the world by

Miss Mathilde Blind, "Westminster Review", July, 1870. The poem was,

of course, included in the "Poetical Works", 1839, both editions. See

Editor's Notes.]

Swift as a spirit hastening to his task

Of glory and of good, the Sun sprang forth

Rejoicing in his splendour, and the mask

Of darkness fell from the awakened Earth--

The smokeless altars of the mountain snows _5

Flamed above crimson clouds, and at the birth

Of light, the Ocean's orison arose,

To which the birds tempered their matin lay.

All flowers in field or forest which unclose

Their trembling eyelids to the kiss of day, _10

Swinging their censers in the element,

With orient incense lit by the new ray

Burned slow and inconsumably, and sent

Their odorous sighs up to the smiling air;

And, in succession due, did continent, _15

Isle, ocean, and all things that in them wear

The form and character of mortal mould,

Rise as the Sun their father rose, to bear

Their portion of the toil, which he of old

Took as his own, and then imposed on them: _20

But I, whom thoughts which must remain untold

Had kept as wakeful as the stars that gem

The cone of night, now they were laid asleep

Stretched my faint limbs beneath the hoary stem

Which an old chestnut flung athwart the steep _25

Of a green Apennine: before me fled

The night; behind me rose the day; the deep

Was at my feet, and Heaven above my head,--

When a strange trance over my fancy grew

Which was not slumber, for the shade it spread _30

Was so transparent, that the scene came through

As clear as when a veil of light is drawn

O'er evening hills they glimmer; and I knew

That I had felt the freshness of that dawn

Bathe in the same cold dew my brow and hair, _35

And sate as thus upon that slope of lawn

Under the self-same bough, and heard as there

The birds, the fountains and the ocean hold

Sweet talk in music through the enamoured air,

And then a vision on my train was rolled. _40

...

As in that trance of wondrous thought I lay,

This was the tenour of my waking dream:--

Methought I sate beside a public way

Thick strewn with summer dust, and a great stream

Of people there was hurrying to and fro, _45

Numerous as gnats upon the evening gleam,

All hastening onward, yet none seemed to know

Whither he went, or whence he came, or why

He made one of the multitude, and so

Was borne amid the crowd, as through the sky _50

One of the million leaves of summer's bier;

Old age and youth, manhood and infancy,

Mixed in one mighty torrent did appear,

Some flying from the thing they feared, and some

Seeking the object of another's fear; _55

And others, as with steps towards the tomb,

Pored on the trodden worms that crawled beneath,

And others mournfully within the gloom

Of their own shadow walked, and called it death;

And some fled from it as it were a ghost, _60

Half fainting in the affliction of vain breath:

But more, with motions which each other crossed,

Pursued or shunned the shadows the clouds threw,

Or birds within the noonday aether lost,

Upon that path where flowers never grew,--

And, weary with vain toil and faint for thirst,

Heard not the fountains, whose melodious dew

Out of their mossy cells forever burst;

Nor felt the breeze which from the forest told

Of grassy paths and wood-lawns interspersed _70

With overarching elms and caverns cold,

And violet banks where sweet dreams brood, but they

Pursued their serious folly as of old.

And as I gazed, methought that in the way

The throng grew wilder, as the woods of June _75

When the south wind shakes the extinguished day,

And a cold glare, intenser than the noon,

But icy cold, obscured with blinding light

The sun, as he the stars. Like the young moon--

When on the sunlit limits of the night _80

Her white shell trembles amid crimson air,

And whilst the sleeping tempest gathers might--

Doth, as the herald of its coming, bear

The ghost of its dead mother, whose dim form

Bends in dark aether from her infant's chair,-- _85

So came a chariot on the silent storm

Of its own rushing splendour, and a Shape

So sate within, as one whom years deform,

Beneath a dusky hood and double cape,

Crouching within the shadow of a tomb; _90

And o'er what seemed the head a cloud-like crape

Was bent, a dun and faint aethereal gloom

Tempering the light. Upon the chariot-beam

A Janus-visaged Shadow did assume

The guidance of that wonder-winged team; _95

The shapes which drew it in thick lightenings

Were lost:--I heard alone on the air's soft stream

The music of their ever-moving wings.

All the four faces of that Charioteer

Had their eyes banded; little profit brings _100

Speed in the van and blindness in the rear,

Nor then avail the beams that quench the sun,--

Or that with banded eyes could pierce the sphere

Of all that is, has been or will be done;

So ill was the car guided--but it passed _105

With solemn speed majestically on.

The crowd gave way, and I arose aghast,

Or seemed to rise, so mighty was the trance,

And saw, like clouds upon the thunder-blast,

The million with fierce song and maniac dance _110

Raging around--such seemed the jubilee

As when to greet some conqueror's advance

Imperial Rome poured forth her living sea

From senate-house, and forum, and theatre,

When ... upon the free _115

Had bound a yoke, which soon they stooped to bear.

Nor wanted here the just similitude

Of a triumphal pageant, for where'er

The chariot rolled, a captive multitude

Was driven;--all those who had grown old in power _120

Or misery,--all who had their age subdued

By action or by suffering, and whose hour

Was drained to its last sand in weal or woe,

So that the trunk survived both fruit and flower;--

All those whose fame or infamy must grow _125

Till the great winter lay the form and name

Of this green earth with them for ever low;--

All but the sacred few who could not tame

Their spirits to the conquerors--but as soon

As they had touched the world with living flame, _130

Fled back like eagles to their native noon,

Or those who put aside the diadem

Of earthly thrones or gems...

Were there, of Athens or Jerusalem.

Were neither mid the mighty captives seen, _135

Nor mid the ribald crowd that followed them,

Nor those who went before fierce and obscene.

The wild dance maddens in the van, and those

Who lead it--fleet as shadows on the green,

Outspeed the chariot, and without repose _140

Mix with each other in tempestuous measure

To savage music, wilder as it grows,

They, tortured by their agonizing pleasure,

Convulsed and on the rapid whirlwinds spun

Of that fierce Spirit, whose unholy leisure _145

Was soothed by mischief since the world begun,

Throw back their heads and loose their streaming hair;

And in their dance round her who dims the sun,

Maidens and youths fling their wild arms in air

As their feet twinkle; they recede, and now _150

Bending within each other's atmosphere,

Kindle invisibly--and as they glow,

Like moths by light attracted and repelled,

Oft to their bright destruction come and go,

Till like two clouds into one vale impelled, _155

That shake the mountains when their lightnings mingle

And die in rain--the fiery band which held

Their natures, snaps--while the shock still may tingle

One falls and then another in the path

Senseless--nor is the desolation single, _160

Yet ere I can say WHERE--the chariot hath

Passed over them--nor other trace I find

But as of foam after the ocean's wrath

Is spent upon the desert shore;--behind,

Old men and women foully disarrayed, _165

Shake their gray hairs in the insulting wind,

And follow in the dance, with limbs decayed,

Seeking to reach the light which leaves them still

Farther behind and deeper in the shade.

But not the less with impotence of will _170

They wheel, though ghastly shadows interpose

Round them and round each other, and fulfil

Their work, and in the dust from whence they rose

Sink, and corruption veils them as they lie,

And past in these performs what ... in those. _175

Struck to the heart by this sad pageantry,

Half to myself I said--'And what is this?

Whose shape is that within the car? And why--'

I would have added--'is all here amiss?--'

But a voice answered--'Life!'--I turned, and knew _180

(O Heaven, have mercy on such wretchedness!)

That what I thought was an old root which grew

To strange distortion out of the hill side,

Was indeed one of those deluded crew,

And that the grass, which methought hung so wide _185

And white, was but his thin discoloured hair,

And that the holes he vainly sought to hide,

Were or had been eyes:--'If thou canst forbear

To join the dance, which I had well forborne,'

Said the grim Feature, of my thought aware, _190

'I will unfold that which to this deep scorn

Led me and my companions, and relate

The progress of the pageant since the morn;

'If thirst of knowledge shall not then abate,

Follow it thou even to the night, but I _195

Am weary.'--Then like one who with the weight

Of his own words is staggered, wearily

He paused; and ere he could resume, I cried:

'First, who art thou?'--'Before thy memory,

'I feared, loved, hated, suffered, did and died, _200

And if the spark with which Heaven lit my spirit

Had been with purer nutriment supplied,

'Corruption would not now thus much inherit

Of what was once Rousseau,--nor this disguise

Stain that which ought to have disdained to wear it; _205

'If I have been extinguished, yet there rise

A thousand beacons from the spark I bore'--

'And who are those chained to the car?'--'The wise,

'The great, the unforgotten,--they who wore

Mitres and helms and crowns, or wreaths of light, _210

Signs of thought's empire over thought--their lore

'Taught them not this, to know themselves; their might

Could not repress the mystery within,

And for the morn of truth they feigned, deep night

'Caught them ere evening.'--'Who is he with chin _215

Upon his breast, and hands crossed on his chain?'--

'The child of a fierce hour; he sought to win

'The world, and lost all that it did contain

Of greatness, in its hope destroyed; and more

Of fame and peace than virtue's self can gain _220

'Without the opportunity which bore

Him on its eagle pinions to the peak

From which a thousand climbers have before

'Fallen, as Napoleon fell.'--I felt my cheek

Alter, to see the shadow pass away, _225

Whose grasp had left the giant world so weak

That every pigmy kicked it as it lay;

And much I grieved to think how power and will

In opposition rule our mortal day,

And why God made irreconcilable _230

Good and the means of good; and for despair

I half disdained mine eyes' desire to fill

With the spent vision of the times that were

And scarce have ceased to be.--'Dost thou behold,'

Said my guide, 'those spoilers spoiled, Voltaire, _235

'Frederick, and Paul, Catherine, and Leopold,

And hoary anarchs, demagogues, and sage--

names which the world thinks always old,

'For in the battle Life and they did wage,

She remained conqueror. I was overcome _240

By my own heart alone, which neither age,

'Nor tears, nor infamy, nor now the tomb

Could temper to its object.'--'Let them pass,'

I cried, 'the world and its mysterious doom

'Is not so much more glorious than it was, _245

That I desire to worship those who drew

New figures on its false and fragile glass

'As the old faded.'--'Figures ever new

Rise on the bubble, paint them as you may;

We have but thrown, as those before us threw, _250

'Our shadows on it as it passed away.

But mark how chained to the triumphal chair

The mighty phantoms of an elder day;

'All that is mortal of great Plato there

Expiates the joy and woe his master knew not; _255

The star that ruled his doom was far too fair.

'And life, where long that flower of Heaven grew not,

Conquered that heart by love, which gold, or pain,

Or age, or sloth, or slavery could subdue not.

'And near him walk the ... twain, _260

The tutor and his pupil, whom Dominion

Followed as tame as vulture in a chain.

'The world was darkened beneath either pinion

Of him whom from the flock of conquerors

Fame singled out for her thunder-bearing minion; _265

'The other long outlived both woes and wars,

Throned in the thoughts of men, and still had kept

The jealous key of Truth's eternal doors,

'If Bacon's eagle spirit had not lept

Like lightning out of darkness--he compelled _270

The Proteus shape of Nature, as it slept

'To wake, and lead him to the caves that held

The treasure of the secrets of its reign.

See the great bards of elder time, who quelled

'The passions which they sung, as by their strain _275

May well be known: their living melody

Tempers its own contagion to the vein

'Of those who are infected with it--I

Have suffered what I wrote, or viler pain!

And so my words have seeds of misery-- _180

'Even as the deeds of others, not as theirs.'

And then he pointed to a company,

'Midst whom I quickly recognized the heirs

Of Caesar's crime, from him to Constantine;

The anarch chiefs, whose force and murderous snares _285

Had founded many a sceptre-bearing line,

And spread the plague of gold and blood abroad:

And Gregory and John, and men divine,

Who rose like shadows between man and God;

Till that eclipse, still hanging over heaven, _290

Was worshipped by the world o'er which they strode,

For the true sun it quenched--'Their power was given

But to destroy,' replied the leader:--'I

Am one of those who have created, even

'If it be but a world of agony.'-- _295

'Whence camest thou? and whither goest thou?

How did thy course begin?' I said, 'and why?

'Mine eyes are sick of this perpetual flow

Of people, and my heart sick of one sad thought--

Speak!'--'Whence I am, I partly seem to know, _300

'And how and by what paths I have been brought

To this dread pass, methinks even thou mayst guess;--

Why this should be, my mind can compass not;

'Whither the conqueror hurries me, still less;--

But follow thou, and from spectator turn _305

Actor or victim in this wretchedness,

'And what thou wouldst be taught I then may learn

From thee. Now listen:--In the April prime,

When all the forest-tips began to burn

'With kindling green, touched by the azure clime _310

Of the young season, I was laid asleep

Under a mountain, which from unknown time

'Had yawned into a cavern, high and deep;

And from it came a gentle rivulet,

Whose water, like clear air, in its calm sweep _315

'Bent the soft grass, and kept for ever wet

The stems of the sweet flowers, and filled the grove

With sounds, which whoso hears must needs forget

'All pleasure and all pain, all hate and love,

Which they had known before that hour of rest; _320

A sleeping mother then would dream not of

'Her only child who died upon the breast

At eventide--a king would mourn no more

The crown of which his brows were dispossessed

'When the sun lingered o'er his ocean floor _325

To gild his rival's new prosperity.

'Thou wouldst forget thus vainly to deplore

'Ills, which if ills can find no cure from thee,

The thought of which no other sleep will quell,

Nor other music blot from memory, _330

'So sweet and deep is the oblivious spell;

And whether life had been before that sleep

The Heaven which I imagine, or a Hell

'Like this harsh world in which I woke to weep,

I know not. I arose, and for a space _335

The scene of woods and waters seemed to keep,

Though it was now broad day, a gentle trace

Of light diviner than the common sun

Sheds on the common earth, and all the place

'Was filled with magic sounds woven into one _340

Oblivious melody, confusing sense

Amid the gliding waves and shadows dun;

'And, as I looked, the bright omnipresence

Of morning through the orient cavern flowed,

And the sun's image radiantly intense _345

'Burned on the waters of the well that glowed

Like gold, and threaded all the forest's maze

With winding paths of emerald fire; there stood

'Amid the sun, as he amid the blaze _350

Of his own glory, on the vibrating

Floor of the fountain, paved with flashing rays,

'A Shape all light, which with one hand did fling

Dew on the earth, as if she were the dawn,

And the invisible rain did ever sing

'A silver music on the mossy lawn; _355

And still before me on the dusky grass,

Iris her many-coloured scarf had drawn:

'In her right hand she bore a crystal glass,

Mantling with bright Nepenthe; the fierce splendour

Fell from her as she moved under the mass _360

'Of the deep cavern, and with palms so tender,

Their tread broke not the mirror of its billow,

Glided along the river, and did bend her

'Head under the dark boughs, till like a willow

Her fair hair swept the bosom of the stream _365

That whispered with delight to be its pillow.

'As one enamoured is upborne in dream

O'er lily-paven lakes, mid silver mist

To wondrous music, so this shape might seem

'Partly to tread the waves with feet which kissed _370

The dancing foam; partly to glide along

The air which roughened the moist amethyst,

'Or the faint morning beams that fell among

The trees, or the soft shadows of the trees;

And her feet, ever to the ceaseless song _375

'Of leaves, and winds, and waves, and birds, and bees,

And falling drops, moved in a measure new

Yet sweet, as on the summer evening breeze,

'Up from the lake a shape of golden dew

Between two rocks, athwart the rising moon, _380

Dances i' the wind, where never eagle flew;

'And still her feet, no less than the sweet tune

To which they moved, seemed as they moved to blot

The thoughts of him who gazed on them; and soon

'All that was, seemed as if it had been not; _385

And all the gazer's mind was strewn beneath

Her feet like embers; and she, thought by thought,

'Trampled its sparks into the dust of death

As day upon the threshold of the east

Treads out the lamps of night, until the breath _390

'Of darkness re-illumine even the least

Of heaven's living eyes--like day she came,

Making the night a dream; and ere she ceased

'To move, as one between desire and shame

Suspended, I said--If, as it doth seem, _395

Thou comest from the realm without a name

'Into this valley of perpetual dream,

Show whence I came, and where I am, and why--

Pass not away upon the passing stream.

'Arise and quench thy thirst, was her reply. _400

And as a shut lily stricken by the wand

Of dewy morning's vital alchemy,

'I rose; and, bending at her sweet command,

Touched with faint lips the cup she raised,

And suddenly my brain became as sand _405

'Where the first wave had more than half erased

The track of deer on desert Labrador;

Whilst the wolf, from which they fled amazed,

'Leaves his stamp visibly upon the shore,

Until the second bursts;--so on my sight _410

Burst a new vision, never seen before,

'And the fair shape waned in the coming light,

As veil by veil the silent splendour drops

From Lucifer, amid the chrysolite

'Of sunrise, ere it tinge the mountain-tops; _415

And as the presence of that fairest planet,

Although unseen, is felt by one who hopes

'That his day's path may end as he began it,

In that star's smile, whose light is like the scent

Of a jonquil when evening breezes fan it, _420

'Or the soft note in which his dear lament

The Brescian shepherd breathes, or the caress

That turned his weary slumber to content;

'So knew I in that light's severe excess

The presence of that Shape which on the stream _425

Moved, as I moved along the wilderness,

'More dimly than a day-appearing dream,

The host of a forgotten form of sleep;

A light of heaven, whose half-extinguished beam

'Through the sick day in which we wake to weep _430

Glimmers, for ever sought, for ever lost;

So did that shape its obscure tenour keep

'Beside my path, as silent as a ghost;

But the new Vision, and the cold bright car,

With solemn speed and stunning music, crossed _435

'The forest, and as if from some dread war

Triumphantly returning, the loud million

Fiercely extolled the fortune of her star.

'A moving arch of victory, the vermilion

And green and azure plumes of Iris had _440

Built high over her wind-winged pavilion,

'And underneath aethereal glory clad

The wilderness, and far before her flew

The tempest of the splendour, which forbade

'Shadow to fall from leaf and stone; the crew _445

Seemed in that light, like atomies to dance

Within a sunbeam;--some upon the new

'Embroidery of flowers, that did enhance

The grassy vesture of the desert, played,

Forgetful of the chariot's swift advance; _450

'Others stood gazing, till within the shade

Of the great mountain its light left them dim;

Others outspeeded it; and others made

'Circles around it, like the clouds that swim

Round the high moon in a bright sea of air; _455

And more did follow, with exulting hymn,

'The chariot and the captives fettered there:--

But all like bubbles on an eddying flood

Fell into the same track at last, and were

'Borne onward.--I among the multitude _460

Was swept--me, sweetest flowers delayed not long;

Me, not the shadow nor the solitude;

'Me, not that falling stream's Lethean song;

Me, not the phantom of that early Form

Which moved upon its motion--but among _465

'The thickest billows of that living storm

I plunged, and bared my bosom to the clime

Of that cold light, whose airs too soon deform.

'Before the chariot had begun to climb

The opposing steep of that mysterious dell, _470

Behold a wonder worthy of the rhyme

'Of him who from the lowest depths of hell,

Through every paradise and through all glory,

Love led serene, and who returned to tell

'The words of hate and awe; the wondrous story _475

How all things are transfigured except Love;

For deaf as is a sea, which wrath makes hoary,

'The world can hear not the sweet notes that move

The sphere whose light is melody to lovers--

A wonder worthy of his rhyme.--The grove _480

'Grew dense with shadows to its inmost covers,

The earth was gray with phantoms, and the air

Was peopled with dim forms, as when there hovers

'A flock of vampire-bats before the glare

Of the tropic sun, bringing, ere evening, _485

Strange night upon some Indian isle;--thus were

'Phantoms diffused around; and some did fling

Shadows of shadows, yet unlike themselves,

Behind them; some like eaglets on the wing

'Were lost in the white day; others like elves _490

Danced in a thousand unimagined shapes

Upon the sunny streams and grassy shelves;

'And others sate chattering like restless apes

On vulgar hands,...

Some made a cradle of the ermined capes _495

'Of kingly mantles; some across the tiar

Of pontiffs sate like vultures; others played

Under the crown which girt with empire

'A baby's or an idiot's brow, and made

Their nests in it. The old anatomies _500

Sate hatching their bare broods under the shade

'Of daemon wings, and laughed from their dead eyes

To reassume the delegated power,

Arrayed in which those worms did monarchize,

'Who made this earth their charnel. Others more _505

Humble, like falcons, sate upon the fist

Of common men, and round their heads did soar;

Or like small gnats and flies, as thick as mist

On evening marshes, thronged about the brow

Of lawyers, statesmen, priest and theorist;-- _510

'And others, like discoloured flakes of snow

On fairest bosoms and the sunniest hair,

Fell, and were melted by the youthful glow

'Which they extinguished; and, like tears, they were

A veil to those from whose faint lids they rained _515

In drops of sorrow. I became aware

'Of whence those forms proceeded which thus stained

The track in which we moved. After brief space,

From every form the beauty slowly waned;

'From every firmest limb and fairest face _520

The strength and freshness fell like dust, and left

The action and the shape without the grace

'Of life. The marble brow of youth was cleft

With care; and in those eyes where once hope shone,

Desire, like a lioness bereft _525

'Of her last cub, glared ere it died; each one

Of that great crowd sent forth incessantly

These shadows, numerous as the dead leaves blown

'In autumn evening from a poplar tree. _530

Each like himself and like each other were

At first; but some distorted seemed to be

'Obscure clouds, moulded by the casual air;

And of this stuff the car's creative ray

Wrought all the busy phantoms that were there,

'As the sun shapes the clouds; thus on the way _535

Mask after mask fell from the countenance

And form of all; and long before the day

'Was old, the joy which waked like heaven's glance

The sleepers in the oblivious valley, died;

And some grew weary of the ghastly dance, _540

'And fell, as I have fallen, by the wayside;--

Those soonest from whose forms most shadows passed,

And least of strength and beauty did abide.

'Then, what is life? I cried.'--

CANCELLED OPENING OF THE TRIUMPH OF LIFE.

[Published by Miss M. Blind, "Westminster Review", July, 1870.]

Out of the eastern shadow of the Earth,

Amid the clouds upon its margin gray

Scattered by Night to swathe in its bright birth

In gold and fleecy snow the infant Day,

The glorious Sun arose: beneath his light, _5

The earth and all...

_10-_17 A widow...sound 1870; omitted here 1824;

printed as 'A Song,' 1824, page 217.

_34, _35 dawn Bathe Mrs. Shelley (later editions); dawn, Bathed 1824, 1839.

_63 shunned Boscombe manuscript; spurned 1824, 1839.

_70 Of...interspersed Boscombe manuscript;

Of grassy paths and wood, lawn-interspersed 1824;

wood-lawn-interspersed 1839.

_84 form]frown 1824.

_93 light...beam]light upon the chariot beam; 1824.

_96 it omitted 1824.

_109 thunder Boscombe manuscript; thunders 1824; thunder's 1839.

_112 greet Boscombe manuscript; meet 1824, 1839.

_129 conqueror or conqueror's cj. A.C. Bradley.

_131-_134 See Editor's Note.

_158 while Boscombe manuscript; omitted 1824, 1839.

_167 And...dance 1839 To seek, to [ ], to strain 1824.

_168 Seeking 1839; Limping 1824.

_188 canst, Mrs. Shelley 1824, 1839, 1847.

_189 forborne!' 1824, 1839, 1847.

_190 Feature, (of my thought aware); Mrs. Shelley 1847.

_188-_190 The punctuation is A.C. Bradley's.

_202 nutriment Boscombe manuscript; sentiment 1824, 1839.

_205 Stain]Stained 1824, 1839.

_235 Said my 1824, 1839; Said then my cj. Forman.

_238 names which the 1839: name the 1824.

_252 how]now cj. Forman.

_260 him 1839; omitted 1824.

_265 singled for cj. Forman.

_280 See Editor's Note.

_281, _282 Even...then Boscombe manuscript; omitted 1824, 1839.

_296 camest Boscombe manuscript; comest 1824, 1839.

_311 season Boscombe manuscript; year's dawn 1824, 1839.

_322 the Boscombe manuscript; her 1824, 1839.

_334 woke cj. A.C. Bradley; wake 1824, 1839. Cf. _296, footnote.

_361 Of...and Boscombe manuscript; Out of the deep cavern with 1824, 1839.

_363 Glided Boscombe manuscript; She glided 1824, 1839.

_377 in Boscombe manuscript; to 1824.

_422 The favourite song, Stanco di pascolar le pecorelle,

is a Brescian national air.--[MRS. SHELLEY'S NOTE.]

_464 early]aery cj. Forman.

_475 awe Boscombe manuscript; care 1824.

_486 isle Boscombe manuscript; vale 1824.

_497 sate like vultures Boscombe manuscript; rode like demons 1824.

_515 those]eyes cj. Rossetti.

_534 Wrought Boscombe manuscript; Wrapt 1824.