XXXII.

A soft and healing potion to my lips
At intervals he raised-now looked on high,
To mark if yet the starry giant dips
His zone in the dim sea-now cheeringly,
Though he said little, did he speak to me.
"It is a friend beside thee-take good cheer,
Poor victim, thou art now at liberty!"

I joyed as those a human tone to hear,

Who in cells deep and lone have languished many a year.

XXXIII.

A dim and feeble joy, whose glimpses oft
Were quenched in a relapse of wildering dreams,
Yet still methought we sailed, until aloft
The stars of night grew pallid, and the beams
Of morn descended on the ocean streams,
And still that agèd man, so grand and mild,
Tended me, even as some sick mother seems
To hang in hope over a dying child,

Till in the azure East darkness again was piled.

XXXIV.

And then the night-wind steaming1 from the shore,

Sent odours dying sweet across the sea,

And the swift boat the little waves which bore,2
Were cut by its keen keel, tho' slantingly;
Soon I could hear the leaves sigh, and could see

The myrtle blossoms starring the dim grove,
As past the pebbly beach the boat did flee
On sidelong wing, into a silent cove,

Where ebon pines a shade under the starlight wove.

M

Canto Fourth.

I.

THE old man took the oars, and soon the bark Smote on the beach beside a tower of stone; It was a crumbling heap, whose portal dark With blooming ivy trails was overgrown; Upon whose floor the spangling sands were strown, And rarest sea-shells, which the eternal flood, Slave to the mother of the months, had thrown Within the walls of that grey tower, which stood A changeling of man's art, nursed amid Nature's brood.

II.

When the old man his boat had anchored,
He wound me in his arms with tender care,
And very few, but kindly words he said,
And bore me thro' the tower adown a stair,
Whose smooth descent some ceaseless step to wear
For many a year had fallen1-We came at last
To a small chamber, which with mosses rare

The duties of the dash in Shelley's system of punctuation are very varied; and instances such as this are to be

seen in some of his MSS. There is another case in stanza II, Canto V (p. 174),

Was tapestried, where me his soft hands placed Upon a couch of grass and oak-leaves interlaced.

III.

The moon was darting through the lattices
Its yellow light, warm as the beams of day—
So warm, that to admit the dewy breeze,
The old man opened them; the moonlight lay
Upon a lake whose waters wove their play
Even to the threshold of that lonely home :
Within was seen in the dim wavering ray,

The antique sculptured roof, and many a tome Whose lore had made that sage all that he had become.

IV.

The rock-built barrier of the sea was past,—
And I was on the margin of a lake,

A lonely lake, amid the forests vast
And snowy mountains: did my spirit wake
From sleep, as many-coloured as the snake
That girds eternity? in life and truth,
Might not my heart its cravings ever slake?
Was Cythna then a dream, and all my youth,

And all its hopes and fears, and all its joy and ruth?

V.

Thus madness came again,-a milder madness,
Which darkened nought but time's unquiet flow

With supernatural shades of clinging sadness;

That gentle Hermit, in my helpless woe,

By my sick couch was busy to and fro,

Like a strong spirit ministrant of good:
When I was healed, he led me forth to shew
The wonders of his sylvan solitude,

And we together sate by that isle-fretted flood.

VI.

He knew his soothing words to weave with skill
From all my madness told; like mine own heart,
Of Cythna would he question me, until

That thrilling name had ceased to make me start,
From his familiar lips-it was not art,

Of wisdom and of justice when he spoke-
When mid soft looks of pity, there would dart
A glance as keen as is the lightning's stroke
When it doth rive the knots of some ancestral oak.

VII.

Thus slowly from my brain the darkness rolled,
My thoughts their due array did re-assume
Thro' the inchantments of that Hermit old;
Then I bethought me of the glorious doom
Of those who sternly struggle to relume
The lamp of Hope o'er man's bewildered lot,
And, sitting by the waters, in the gloom

Of eve, to that friend's heart I told my thoughtThat heart which had grown old, but had corrupted not.

VIII.

That hoary man had spent his livelong age

In converse with the dead, who leave the stamp
Of ever-burning thoughts on many a page,
When they are gone into the senseless damp
Of graves; his spirit thus became a lamp.
Of splendour, like to those on which it fed:1
Thro' peopled haunts, the City and the Camp,
Deep thirst for knowledge had his footsteps led,
And all the ways of men among mankind he read.

1 There is no stop here in Shelley's edition. Mrs. Shelley puts a full stop; but I think the colon

more

likely to be the one dropped out in the original edition.