So now my summer-task is ended, Mary, Its doubtful promise thus I would unite With thy belovèd name, thou Child of love and light. 2. The toil which stole from thee so many an hour, Is ended, and the fruit is at thy feet! No longer where the woods to frame a bower Or where with sound like many voices sweet, 1 Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. I leave the blanks as Shelley left them, presuming we are meant to read simply "To Mary." 3. Thoughts of great deeds were mine, dear Friend, when first My spirit's sleep: a fresh May-dawn it was, 4. And then I clasped my hands and looked around— And just, and free, and mild, if in me lies The selfish and the strong still tyrannise Without reproach or check." I then controuled My tears, my heart grew calm, and I was meek and bold. 5. And from that hour did I with earnest thought 1 In Shelley's edition we read spirits' instead of spirit's; but it is almost inconceivable that he can have meant the sleep of his spirits and not the sleep of his spirit. Lady Shelley connects this passage with Shelley's experience at Eton (Memorials, p. 7); but according to Medwin (Shelley Papers, pp. 3 and 4), the reference is to school-life of an earlier date, at Sion House, Brentford. I am disposed to think, with Mr. Rossetti, that Medwin, not always trustworthy, is veracious on this point; and Shelley's version of his school-life, as given in the text, agrees with certain expressions in Sir John Rennie's Autobio graphy. Referring to his own experience at Sion House, he relates how Shelley behaved "when irritated by other boys, which they, knowing his infirmity, frequently did by way of teasing him"; and he adds that Shelley's "imagination was always roving upon something romantic and extraordinary, such as spirits, fairies, fighting, volcanoes, &c." This is certainly like the "knowledge from forbidden mines of lore" referred to in stanza 5. See also note 3, p. 374. Yet nothing that my tyrants knew or taught Thus power and hope were strengthened more and more A sense of loneliness, a thirst with which I pined. 6. Alas, that love should be a blight and snare Yet never found I one not false to me, Hard hearts, and cold, like weights of icy stone1 Which crushed and withered mine, that could not be Aught but a lifeless clog, until revived by thee. 7. Thou Friend, whose presence on my wintry heart 1 Mr. Garnett tells me that lines 6 and 7 of stanza 6 stand, in Sir Percy Shelley's MS. of the dedication, thus: One whom I found was dear, but false to me, The other's heart was like a heart of stone. "One" refers to Shelley's first love, his Cousin Harriet Grove, "the other" to his first wife, Harriett Westbrook. No doubt he did well to cancel at the time so explicit a reference; but it is now of the greatest value. 2 So in all authoritative editions ; but Mr. Rossetti substitutes clod,-a doubtful emendation, as Shelley may well have used clog in its sense of weight, encumbrance. 3 I take walked to stand for walkedst, a word which would naturally seem to Shelley more heinous than a breach of grammatic rule. Mr. Rossetti reads walk,-a liberty which only slightly improves the grammar. He reconstructs the whole passage so as to Which many an envious slave then breathed in vain To meet thee from the woes which had begirt it long. 8. No more alone through the world's wilderness, And cherished friends turn with the multitude 9. Now has descended a serener hour, And with inconstant fortune, friends return; 10. Is it, that now my inexperienced fingers make the dungeon that of Custom And walk (as free as light the clouds among Which many an envious slave then breathed in vain) From his dim dungeon; but it seems to me that the clouds are the dense atmosphere breathed by many an envious slave from his dim dungeon. Mr. Rossetti's construction is very tortuous for Shelley. |