to the verb 'disclosed'; and this verb 'disclosed' has as its accusative or object the words 'black gulphs and yawning caves.' The words 'its precipice obscuring the ravine,' I take to be parenthetical, and as meaning the height of its rocky sides darkening the ravine. Pointed thus, my meaning may be clearer :

On every side now rose

Rocks, which, in unimaginable forms
Lifted their black and barren pinnacles
In the light of evening, and (its precipice
Obscuring the ravine) disclosed above

('Mid toppling stones) black gulphs, etc.

separate' toppling stones,' as governed by the preposition "mid,' from 'black gulphs,' etc., which is governed by the verb 'disclosed.' 'Above' is an adverb, not a preposition, and means in the upper region."

The objection to Professor Dowden's explanation is the putting of the "black gulphs" and "yawning caves" at the top of the ravine. But either this explanation or Mr. Swinburne's suggestion that the sentence is left unfinished seems to be the best solution of the difficulty.

20 589-596. One human step: the step of the hero. One voice must also be the hero's voice, though, as Mr. Rossetti says (Shelley Society's Note Book, p. 22), "It is rather anomalous to say that his own voice led his form." Mr. Rossetti suggests, as a possible explanation, that, since the voice “inspired the echoes,” it may have been by following the echoes that the hero found the nook.

21 602-5. its mountains: the mountains on the "horizon's verge." The moon was low in the horizon; its light flowed from behind the mountains, and illuminated the mist which filled the atmosphere.

21 610. sightless: invisible; cf. Epipsychidion, 1. 240.

21 611. 21 612.

Skeleton: the "Skeleton" is Death, as we see from 1. 619. its: the career of the storm mentioned in 1. 610.

21 619-624. The meaning of this passage appears to be that if Death will devour all that Ruin has made ready for him, he will be satisfied, and will no more make sudden and violent attacks. Men would, in that case, die by the natural slow processes of age, like flowers.

22 650. divided the horns of the moon are divided by the intervention of a "jagged hill," as is shown by 1. 654.

23 667-671. The hero is compared to a lute, a bright stream, a dream of youth; the lute is "still," the stream is "dark and dry," the dream is "unremembered."

23 672. Medea: the daughter of Aëtes, king of Colchis, and wife of Jason, the winner of the Golden Fleece; she possessed magical powers. In this reference to her "wondrous alchemy," the poet is thinking of Ovid's Metamorphoses, VII, 257–285, where it is related that under the influence of Medea's incantation: Vernat humus, floresque et mollia pabula surgunt (1. 284).

23 676. the chalice: of immortality.

23 677. one living man: the Wandering Jew, to whom immortality was given as a curse. The Wandering Jew was often in Shelley's mind; in boyhood he wrote a poem on the subject; and the Jew figures, also, both in Queen Mab and in Hellas.

23 678. Vessel of deathless wrath: cf. Romans, ix. 22: "What if God, willing to shew his wrath and to make his power known, endured with much long-suffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction." the dream: that there is an elixir of life.

23 681.

24 709-710. speak, etc.: show their lack of power by their feeble attempts to image this woe.

24 712. deep for tears:

To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

(Wordsworth's Ode on Intimations of Immortality.)

A SUMMER-EVENING CHURCH-YARD.

"The summer evening that suggested to him the poem written in the church-yard of Lechlade occurred during his voyage up the Thames, in the autumn of 1815" (Mrs. Shelley's note). For a description of this voyage, see Dowden's Life, Vol. I, pp. 526–530.

25 13.

aërial Pile: the clouds above the setting sun.

LINES ("The cold earth slept below").

Given under the title "November, 1815," in The Literary Pocketbook for 1823. "There can be no great rashness in suggesting that the subject of the poem is the death of Harriet Shelley, who drowned herself on the 9th of November, 1816. In that case, 1815 and raven hair were used as a disguise, Harriet's hair having been a light brown" (Forman's note).

26 17.

raven: Mrs. Shelley's edition reads tangled.

TO WORDSWORTH.

In the earlier stages of the French Revolution Wordsworth. strongly sympathized with the party of progress; subsequently he became intensely conservative. The events of the time and the innate tendencies of Wordsworth's mind sufficiently account for this change; but some radical enthusiasts of the day regarded him as a deserter, and his acceptance of an appointment under the government in 1813 caused an outburst of indignation against him among these more ardent spirits. The change in Wordsworth's attitude to political questions also suggested Browning's Lost Leader.

HYMN TO INTELLECTUAL BEAUTY.

Mrs. Shelley tells us that this poem was conceived during Shelley's voyage with Lord Byron around the Lake of Geneva in the summer of 1816. In the conception of " Intellectual Beauty we have a thought characteristic of Shelley and recurring continually in his works. The idea is borrowed from Plato, and will be best grasped through the reading of Diotima's speech in Plato's Symposium, as translated by Shelley himself (see in Forman's edition of the Prose Works, Vol. III, especially pp. 219-222). In this speech Diotima explains how the love of beautiful objects leads on to the love of the beautiful in soul and thought, and, finally, to the conception of universal beauty, of perfect abstract beauty, "eternal, unproduced, indestructible; neither subject to increase nor decay; not, like other things, partly beautiful and partly deformed; not at one time beautiful and at another time not; not beautiful in relation to one thing and deformed in relation to another; not here beautiful and there deformed; not beautiful in the estimation of one person and deformed in that of another; nor can this supreme beauty be figured to the imagination like a beautiful face, or beautiful hands, or any portion of the body, nor like any discourse, nor any science. Nor does it subsist in any other that lives and is, either in earth, or in heaven, or in any other place; but it is eternally uniform and consistent, and monoeidic with itself. All other things are beautiful through a participation of it, with this condition, that, although they are subject to production and decay, it never becomes more or less, or endures any change. When any one, ascending from the correct system of Love, begins to contemplate this supreme beauty,

he already touches the consummation of his labour. For such as discipline themselves upon this system, or are conducted by another beginning to ascend through these transitory objects which are beautiful, towards that which is beauty itself, proceeding as on steps from the love of one form to that of two, and from that of two, to that of all forms which are beautiful; and from beautiful forms to beautiful habits and institutions, and from institutions to beautiful doctrines; until, from the meditation of many doctrines, they arrive at that which is nothing else than the doctrine of supreme beauty itself, in the knowledge and contemplation of which at length they repose."

Through the perception of such beauty, the soul receives, according to Shelley, its highest and best stimulus. The desire of this beauty lifts us above the petty and ignoble. Unfortunately, it is only at times that we are fully conscious of it. Its absence is lamented, and its power celebrated in the Hymn before us. It will be noted that there is a certain parallelism between this poem and Wordsworth's Ode on Intimations of Immortality; in the latter Wordsworth laments the vanishing in mature life of the perception of the divine beauty of the universe.

28 25-36. The attempts to solve the mystery of the universe have failed; nothing serves to lighten the world except the perception of the beauty which lies behind it.

28 26.

29 45.

29 49-52.

these responses: the responses to the questions of stanza ii.
The simile seems scarcely appropriate.

Cf. Alastor, 11. 23-29.

29 50-51. Shelley probably pronounced 'pursuing' pursuin'; at the present time in England this is at once a fashionable and a vulgar error. The same imperfect rhyme is found in Wordsworth, e.g., Ode on Intimations of Immortality, 11. 43–46.

30 73 ff. Compare the opening of the last stanza of Wordsworth's Ode on the Intimations of Immortality.

ON FANNY GODWIN.

Fanny Godwin (daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and adopted by William Godwin, hence the elder half-sister of Mary Shelley) poisoned herself October 9, 1816. She was of a tender, melancholy nature, and the only reason she assigned for her act was that she brought trouble to others. Shelley had seen her a short time before her death.

OZYMANDIAS.

First published in The Examiner of January 11, 1818. The Greek historian Diodorus gives an account of the statue referred to in the poem. It was reputed, he says, the largest in Egypt, the foot exceeding seven cubits in length; the inscription was, "I am Ozymandias, king of kings; if any one wishes to know what I am and where I lie, let him surpass me in some of my exploits " (see Diodorus, I, 47; or Wilkinson's Ancient Egypt, Vol. I, chap. ii).

The freedom, or even carelessness, of Shelley's treatment of the laws of the regular sonnet and the success of the poem, notwithstanding, are characteristic of his art. Presumably, lines 2 and 4, 9 and 11 are intended to rhyme.

31 7. survive inasmuch as they are depicted on the features of the statue.

31 8. The hand: of the sculptor.

them the passions.

the heart

of the monarch.

PASSAGE OF THE APENNINES.

32 9. lay: note the violation of grammar for the sake of rhyme, and cf. Byron's Childe Harold, IV, 1. 1620.

LINES WRITTEN AMONG THE EUGANEAN HILLS.

66

This poem was written at a villa near Este where the Shelleys lived for a short time during the autumn of 1818. We looked from the garden,” writes Mrs. Shelley, “over the plains of Lombardy, bounded to the west by the far Apennines, while to the east the horizon was lost in misty distance." A few weeks before this poem was written the Shelleys had been in Venice, where Byron was then living. There their infant daughter died. Sorrow and ill health combined to make this a season of deep depression to the poet.

34 43.

34 45-65.

are: the grammar is defective.

These lines contain a concrete illustration of the assertions in the passage immediately preceding.