One human step alone, has ever broken
The stillness of its solitude:-one voice
Alone inspired its echoes;-even that voice.

Which hither came, floating among the winds,
And led the loveliest among human forms.
To make their wild haunts the depository
Of all the grace and beauty that endued
Its motions, render up its majesty,
Scatter its music on the unfeeling storm,

And to the damp leaves and blue cavern mould,
Nurses of rainbow flowers and branching moss,
Commit the colours of that varying cheek,
That snowy breast, those dark and drooping eyes.

The dim and hornèd moon hung low, and poured
A sea of lustre on the horizon's verge
That overflowed its mountains. Yellow mist
Filled the unbounded atmosphere, and drank
Wan moonlight even to fulness: not a star
Shone, not a sound was heard; the very winds,
Danger's grim playmates, on that precipice
Slept, clasped in his embrace.-O, storm of death!
Whose sightless speed divides this sullen night:
And thou, colossal Skeleton, that, still

Guiding its irresistible career

In thy devastating omnipotence,

Art king of this frail world, from the red field

Of slaughter, from the reeking hospital,

The patriot's sacred couch, the snowy bed

Of innocence, the scaffold and the throne,
A mighty voice invokes thee. Ruin calls
His brother Death. A rare and regal prey
He hath prepared, prowling around the world;
Glutted with which thou mayst repose, and men
Go to their graves like flowers or creeping worms,

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Nor ever more offer at thy dark shrine

The unheeded tribute of a broken heart.

When on the threshold of the green recess
The wanderer's footsteps fell, he knew that death
Was on him. Yet a little, ere it fled,

Did he resign his high and holy soul

To images of the majestic past,

That paused within his passive being now,

Like winds that bear sweet music, when they breathe
Through some dim latticed chamber. He did place
His pale lean hand upon the rugged trunk
Of the old pine. Upon an ivied stone
Reclined his languid head, his limbs did rest,
Diffused and motionless, on the smooth brink
Of that obscurest chasm;-and thus he lay,
Surrendering to their final impulses

The hovering powers of life. Hope and despair,
The torturers, slept; no mortal pain or fear
Marred his repose, the influxes of sense,
And his own being unalloyed by pain,
Yet feebler and more feeble, calmly fed

The stream of thought, till he lay breathing there
At peace, and faintly smiling:-his last sight
Was the great moon, which o'er the western line
Of the wide world her mighty horn suspended,
With whose dun beams inwoven darkness seemed
To mingle. Now upon the jagged hills
It rests, and still as the divided frame

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Of the vast meteor sunk, the Poet's blood,
That ever beat in mystic sympathy

With nature's ebb and flow, grew feebler still:
And when two lessening points of light alone.
Gleamed through the darkness, the alternate gasp
Of his faint respiration scarce did stir

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The stagnate night-till the minutest ray

Was quenched, the pulse yet lingered in his heart.
It paused-it fluttered. But when heaven remained
Utterly black, the murky shades involved

An image, silent, cold, and motionless,

As their own voiceless earth and vacant air.
Even as a vapour fed with golden beams.
That ministered on sunlight, ere the west
Eclipses it, was now that wondrous1 frame-
No sense, no motion, no divinity—

A fragile lute, on whose harmonious strings

The breath of heaven did wander-a bright stream

Once fed with many-voiced waves-a dream

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Of youth, which night and time have quenched for ever, 670 Still, dark, and dry, and unremembered now.2

O, for Medea's wondrous alchemy,

Which wheresoe'er it fell made the earth gleam
With bright flowers, and the wintry boughs exhale
From vernal blooms fresh fragrance! O, that God,

1 Wonderous in Shelley's edition. 2 Mr. Rossetti re-punctuates the last three and a half lines of this passage thus :

a bright stream Once fed with many-voiced waves (a dream Of youth which night and time have

quenched for ever), Still, dark, and dry, and unremembered

now.

He says we "ought not, without strong grounds, to attribute to Shelley so incongruous and unmeaning an expression as a youthful dream now dry"; and he adds-" The punctuation which I have adopted welds the two images into one; viz.: a stream which used to be bright, and is now dark-flowing, and is now dry-sonorous, and is now still; it has been a dreamy reminiscence of youth, but now, through the influence of night (or oblivion) and time, is unremem

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bered." I have left Shelley's punctuation undisturbed, first because I do not think he would ever have altered it, even if his meaning were what Mr. Rossetti supposes, and secondly because the poet's own punctuation seems to me best fitted to express what I conceive to be his meaning, viz., a fragile lute, now still-a bright stream, now dry-a dream of youth, now dark. Thus the three adjectives, still, dark, and dry would refer to the three symbols applied to the wondrous frame, while the unremembered, I should take as referring to the wondrous frame independently of the symbols. The fact that the whole construction is quite illogical and inexact goes for nothing: we all know that Shelley was not punetiliously exact in matters of grammatical construction.

Profuse of poisons, would concede the chalice

Which but one living man1 has drained, who now,
Vessel of deathless wrath, a slave that feels
No proud exemption in the blighting curse

He bears, over the world wanders for ever,

Lone as incarnate death! O, that the dream
Of dark magician in his visioned cave,
Raking the cinders of a crucible

For life and power, even when his feeble hand
Shakes in its last decay, were the true law
Of this so lovely world! But thou art fled
Like some frail exhalation; which the dawn
Robes in its golden beams,-ah! thou hast fled !
The brave, the gentle, and the beautiful,
The child of grace and genius. Heartless things
Are done and said i' the world, and many worms
And beasts and men live on, and mighty Earth
From sea and mountain, city and wilderness,
In vesper low or joyous orison,

Lifts still its solemn voice :-but thou art fled-
Thou canst no longer know or love the shapes
Of this phantasmal scene, who have to thee
Been purest ministers, who are, alas!
Now thou art not. Upon those pallid lips
So sweet even in their silence, on those eyes

That image sleep in death, upon that form
Yet safe from the worm's outrage, let no tear

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Be shed-not even in thought. Nor,2 when those hues

1 This allusion to the Wandering Jew, Ahasuerus, should be noted among the evidences of Shelley's tenacity of imagination. When he was about fifteen years old, he and Medwin wrote a poem on the subject of Ahasuerus (of which most of Shelley's portion remains to be discovered); in Queen Mab, the Jew figures again; and even in Shelley's

latest work published during his lifetime, Hellas, we find the character re-introduced.

2 Note, among the reasons for not interfering with Shelley's grammar, the licence of the double negative, in which he follows Shakespeare and other writers who preceded him, and which, I presume, no one dare deny him.

Are gone, and those divinest lineaments,

Worn by the senseless wind, shall live alone
In the frail pauses of this simple strain,
Let not high verse, mourning the memory
Of that which is no more, or painting's woe
Or sculpture, speak in feeble imagery
Their own cold powers. Art and eloquence,

And all the shews o' the world are frail and vain
To weep a loss that turns their lights1 to shade.
It is a woe too deep for tears,' when all
Is reft at once, when some surpassing Spirit,
Whose light adorned the world around it, leaves
Those who remain behind, not sobs2 or groans,
The passionate tumult of a clinging hope;
But pale despair and cold tranquillity,
Nature's vast frame, the web of human things,
Birth and the grave, that are not as they were.

1 Light for lights in Mrs. Shelley's editions.

2 Mrs. Shelley substitutes nor sobs

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nor groans for not sobs or groans in her editions, ruinously as it seems to me.