This boast, beloved brethren, and withdraw
No portion of your wonted favour now!

Mother of this unfathomable world!
Favour my solemn song, for I have loved
Thee ever, and thee only; I have watched
Thy shadow, and the darkness of thy steps,
And my heart ever gazes on the depth
Of thy deep mysteries. I have made my bed
In charnels and on coffins, where black death
Keeps record of the trophies won from thee,
Hoping to still these obstinate questionings
Of thee and thine, by forcing some lone ghost
Thy messenger, to render up the tale

Of what we are. In lone and silent hours,

When night makes a weird sound of its own stillness, 30
Like an inspired and desperate alchymist

Staking his very life on some dark hope,
Have I mixed awful talk and asking looks

With my most innocent love, until strange tears
Uniting with those breathless kisses, made

Such magic as compels the charmed night

35

To render up thy charge:... and, though ne'er yet
Thou hast unveiled1 thy inmost sanctuary,

Enough from incommunicable dream,

And twilight phantasms, and deep noonday thought,
Has shone within me, that serenely now

And moveless, as a long-forgotten lyre

Suspended in the solitary dome

Of some mysterious and deserted fane,

I wait thy breath, Great Parent, that my strain
May modulate with murmurs of the air,

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45

1 Unveil'd in Shelley's edition; but as he does not use the contraction

throughout the volume it was probably unintentional here.

And motions of the forests and the sea,

And voice of living beings, and woven hymns
Of night and day, and the deep heart of man.

There was a Poet whose untimely tomb
No human hands with pious reverence reared,
But the charmed eddies of autumnal winds
Built o'er his mouldering bones a pyramid
Of mouldering leaves in the waste wilderness :-
A lovely youth,-no mourning maiden decked
With weeping flowers, or votive cypress wreath,
The lone couch of his everlasting sleep:-

Gentle, and brave, and generous, no lorn bard
Breathed o'er his dark fate one melodious sigh:
He lived, he died, he sung, in solitude.
Strangers have wept to hear his passionate notes,
And virgins, as unknown he past, have pined 2
And wasted for fond love of his wild eyes.
The fire of those soft orbs has ceased to burn,
And Silence, too enamoured of that voice,
Locks its mute music in her rugged cell.

By solemn vision, and bright silver dream,

His infancy was nurtured. Every sight

And sound from the vast earth and ambient air,
Sent to his heart its choicest impulses.

The fountains of divine philosophy

Fled not his thirsting lips, and all of great,
Or good, or lovely, which the sacred past
In truth or fable consecrates, he felt

1 So in Shelley's edition and in the Posthumous Poems; but sang in the editions of 1839.

2 In the Posthumous Poems Mrs. Shelley substituted sighed for pined; but she restored pined in 1839. Shelley

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would have been unlikely to make a change involving a repetition : line 59 ends with sigh.

3 Mrs. Shelley changed the sense by putting the comma after too in her second edition of 1839.

And knew. When early youth had past, he left
His cold fireside and alienated home

To seek strange truths in undiscovered lands.
Many a wide waste and tangled wilderness
Has lured his fearless steps; and he has1 bought
With his sweet voice and eyes, from savage men,
His rest and food. Nature's most secret steps
He like her shadow has pursued, where'er
The red volcano overcanopies

Its fields of snow and pinnacles of ice
With burning sinoke, or where bitumen lakes
On black bare pointed islets ever beat
With sluggish surge, or where the secret caves
Rugged and dark, winding among the springs
Of fire and poison, inaccessible

To avarice or pride, their starry domes

Of diamond and of gold expand above
Numberless and immeasurable halls,

Frequent with crystal column, and clear shrines
Of pearl, and thrones radiant with chrysolite.
Nor had that scene of ampler majesty
Than gems or gold, the varying roof of heaven
And the green earth lost in his heart its claims.
To love and wonder; he would linger long
In lonesome vales, making the wild his home,
Until the doves and squirrels would partake
From his innocuous hand his bloodless food,
Lured by the gentle meaning of his looks,
And the wild antelope, that starts whene'er
The dry leaf rustles in the brake, suspend
Her timid steps to gaze upon a form
More graceful than her own.

1 In the Posthumous Poems, the words as he are substituted for he has; but

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80

85

90

95

100

105

Mrs. Shelley restored the right reading in 1839.

His wandering step

Obedient to high thoughts, has visited

The awful ruins of the days of old:

Athens, and Tyre, and Balbec, and the waste
Where stood Jerusalem, the fallen towers

Of Babylon, the eternal pyramids,

Memphis and Thebes, and whatsoe'er of strange
Sculptured on alabaster obelisk,

Or jasper tomb, or mutilated sphynx,

Dark Æthiopia in her desert hills

Conceals. Among the ruined temples there,
Stupendous columns, and wild images

Of more than man, where marble dæmons watch

The Zodiac's brazen mystery, and dead men

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115

Hang their mute thoughts on the mute walls around, 120 He lingered, poring on memorials

Of the world's youth, through the long burning day
Gazed on those speechless shapes, nor, when the moon
Filled the mysterious halls with floating shades
Suspended he that task, but ever gazed

And gazed, till meaning on his vacant mind
Flashed like strong inspiration, and he saw
The thrilling secrets of the birth of time.

125

Meanwhile an Arab maiden brought his food,

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Her daily portion, from her father's tent,

And spread her matting for his couch, and stole
From duties and repose to tend his steps:-
Enamoured, yet not daring for deep awe

To speak her love:-and watched his nightly sleep,
Sleepless herself, to gaze upon his lips

Parted in slumber, whence the regular breath

Of innocent dreams arose: then, when red morn
Made paler the pale moon, to her cold home
Wildered, and wan, and panting, she returned.

135

The Poet wandering on, through Arabie

And Persia, and the wild Carmanian waste,

And o'er the aërial mountains which pour down
Indus and Oxus from their icy caves,

In joy and exultation held his way;
Till in the vale of Cashmire, far within

Its loneliest dell, where odorous plants entwine
Beneath the hollow rocks a natural bower,
Beside a sparkling rivulet he stretched

140

145

His languid limbs. A vision on his sleep

There came, a dream of hopes that never yet

150

Had flushed his cheek. He dreamed a veilèd maid ·

Sate near him, talking in low solemn tones.

Her voice was like the voice of his own soul
Heard in the calm of thought; its music long,
Like woven sounds of streams and breezes, held
His inmost sense suspended in its web
Of many-coloured woof and shifting hues.
Knowledge and truth and virtue were her theme,
And lofty hopes of divine liberty,

Thoughts the most dear to him, and poesy,

Herself1 a poet. Soon the solemn mood.

Of her pure mind kindled through all her frame

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160

A permeating fire: wild numbers then

She raised, with voice stifled in tremulous sobs
Subdued by its own pathos: her fair hands
Were bare alone, sweeping from some strange harp

So in Shelley's edition, but himself in Mrs. Shelley's second edition of 1839 and later collections. Mr. Rossetti prints himself, and says it is "not quite clear" that herself "is a misprint," though he strongly inclines to suppose it is. I feel convinced that the misprint is in Mrs. Shelley's later editions: it would be altogether unlike Shelley to remind us at this stage that his hero was a poet; but the idea involved in his telling us that

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the veiled maid was a poet is both beautiful and characteristic. Shelley's ideal of female perfection,—the ideal of the poet-hero of Alastor,-—should naturally be, inter alia, a poet; and she whose speech of knowledge and truth and virtue, and lofty hopes of divine liberty, kindled through all her frame a permeating fire, until she raised wild numbers, fulfilled the precise conditions of the poetic state.