afterwards we lost at Rome, written under the idea that we might suddenly be forced to cross the sea, so to preserve him. This poem, as well as the one previously quoted, were not written to exhibit the pangs of distress to the public; they were the spontaneous outbursts of a man who brooded over his wrongs and woes, and was impelled to shed the grace of his genius over the uncontrollable emotions of his heart : The billows on the beach are leaping around it, The bark is weak and frail, The sea looks black, and the clouds that bound it Come with me, thou delightful child, They have taken thy brother and sister dear, Come thou, beloved as thou art, Another sleepeth still, Near thy sweet mother's anxious heart, And which in distant lands will be Fear not the tyrants will rule for ever, Rest, rest, shriek not, thou gentle child! Who hunt thee o'er these sheltering waves. This hour will in thy memory Be a dream of days forgotten; We soon shall dwell by the azure sea Of Grecian lore; that by such name I ought to observe that the fourth verse of this effusion is introduced in Rosalind and Helen. When afterwards this child died at Rome, he wrote, apropos of the English burying-ground in that city, "This spot is the repository of a sacred loss, of which the yearnings of a parent's heart are now prophetic; he is rendered immortal by love, as his memory is by death. My beloved child lies buried here. I envy death the body far less than the oppressors the minds of those whom they have torn from me. The one can only kill the body, the other crushes the affections." In this new edition I have added to the poems of this year," Peter Bell the Third." A critique on Wordsworth's Peter Bell reached us at Leghorn, which amused Shelley exceedingly and suggested this poem. I need scarcely observe that nothing personal to the Author of Peter Bell is intended in this poem. No man ever admired Wordsworth's poetry more; he read it perpetually, and taught others to appreciate its beauties. This poem is, like all others written by Shelley, ideal. He conceived the idealism of a poet-a man of lofty and creative genius,-quitting the glorious calling of discovering and announcing the beautiful and good, to support and propagate ignorant prejudices and pernicious errors; imparting to the unenlightened, not that ardour for truth and spirit of toleration which Shelley looked on as the sources of the moral improvement and happiness of mankind; but false and injurious opinions, that evil was good, and that ignorance and force were the best allies of purity and virtue. His idea was that a man gifted even as transcendantly as the Author of Peter Bell, with the highest qualities of genius, must, if he fostered such errors, be infected with dulness. This poem was written, as a warning-not as a narration of the reality. He was unacquainted personally with Wordsworth or with Coleridge, (to whom he alludes in the fifth part of the poem,) and therefore, I repeat, his poem is purely ideal ;-it contains something of criticism on the compositions of these great poets, but nothing injurious to the men themselves. No poem contains more of Shelley's peculiar views, with regard to the errors into which many of the wisest have fallen, and of the pernicious effects of certain opinions on society. Much of it is beautifully written—and though, like the burlesque drama of Swellfoot, it must be looked on as a plaything, it has so much merit and poetry-so much of himself in it, that it cannot fail to interest greatly, and by right belongs to the world for whose instruction and benefit it was written. POEMS WRITTEN IN MDCCCXX. THE SENSITIVE PLANT. PART I. A SENSITIVE Plant in a garden grew, And the Spring arose on the garden fair, But none ever trembled and panted with bliss The snowdrop, and then the violet, Then the pied windflowers and the tulip tall, And the Naiad-like lily of the vale, And the hyacinth purple, and white, and blue, And the rose like a nymph to the bath addrest, And the wand-like lily, which lifted up, Gazed through the clear dew on the tender sky; And the jessamine faint, and the sweet tuberose, And on the stream whose inconstant bosom Broad water-lilies lay tremulously, And the sinuous paths of lawn and of moss, Which led through the garden along and across, Some open at once to the sun and the breeze, Some lost among bowers of blossoming trees, Were all paved with daisies and delicate bells, And from this undefiled Paradise When Heaven's blithe winds had unfolded them, For each one was interpenetrated With the light and the odour its neighbour shed, Like young lovers whom youth and love make dear, Wrapped and filled by their mutual atmosphere. But the Sensitive Plant, which could give small fruit For the sensitive Plant has no bright flower; The light winds, which from unsustaining wings The plumed insects swift and free, The unseen clouds of the dew, which lie The quivering vapours of dim noontide, Which, like a sea o'er the warm earth glide, In which every sound, and odour, and beam, Move, as reeds in a single stream; Each and all like ministering angels were For the Sensitive Plant sweet joy to bear, Whilst the lagging hours of the day went by Like windless clouds o'er a tender sky. And when evening descended from heaven above, And the Earth was all rest, and the air was all love, And delight, though less bright, was far more deep, And the day's veil fell from the world of sleep. And the beasts, and the birds, and the insects were In an ocean of dreams without a sound; [drowned Whose waves never mark, though they ever impress The light sand which paves it, consciousness; (Only overhead the sweet nightingale Were mixed with the dreams of the Sensitive Plant.) The Sensitive Plant was the earliest PART II. THERE was a Power in this sweet place, Which to the flowers, did they waken or dream, A Lady, the wonder of her kind, Tended the garden from morn to even : She had no companion of mortal race, But her tremulous breath and her flushing face Told whilst the morn kissed the sleep from her eyes, That her dreams were less slumber than Paradise: As if some bright spirit for her sweet sake Her step seemed to pity the grass it prest: And wherever her airy footstep trod, I doubt not the flowers of that garden sweet She sprinkled bright water from the stream And all killing insects and gnawing worms, In a basket, of grasses and wild flowers full, But the bee and the beamlike ephemeris, kiss The sweet lips of the flowers, and harm not, did she Make her attendant angels be. And many an antenatal tomb, Where butterflies dream of the life to come, She left clinging round the smooth and dark Edge of the odorous cedar bark. This fairest creature from earliest spring Thus moved through the garden ministering All the sweet season of summer tide, And ere the first leaf looked brown-she died! PART III. THREE days the flowers of the garden fair, And on the fourth, the Sensitive Plant The weary sound and the heavy breath, CONCLUSION. WHETHER the Sensitive Plant, or that Whether that lady's gentle mind, I dare not guess; but in this life It is a modest creed, and yet That garden sweet, that lady fair, For love, and beauty, and delight, There is no death nor change; their might A VISION OF THE SEA. 'Tis the terror of tempest. The rags of the sail Are flickering in ribbons within the fierce gale: From the stark night of vapours the dim rain is driven, And when lightning is loosed like a deluge from heaven, She sees the black trunks of the water-spouts spin, And bend, as if heaven was ruining in, Which they seemed to sustain with their terrible mass As if ocean had sunk from beneath them: they pass To their graves in the deep with an earthquake of sound, And the waves and the thunders, made silent around, Leave the wind to its echo. The vessel, now tossed Through the low trailing rack of the tempest, is lost In the skirts of the thunder-cloud: now down the sweep Of the wind-cloven wave to the chasm of the deep Dim mirrors of ruin, hang gleaming about; With splendour and terror the black ship environ; Or like sulphur-flakes hurled from a mine of pale The great ship seems splitting! it cracks as a tree, While an earthquake is splintering its root, ere the blast Of the whirlwind that stript it of branches has past. The intense thunder-balls which are raining from heaven Have shattered its mast, and it stands black and riven. The chinks suck destruction. The heavy dead hulk On the living sea rolls an inanimate bulk, Like a corpse on the clay which is hung'ring to fold Its corruption around it. Meanwhile, from the O'er the populous vessel. And even and morn, With their hammocks for coffins the seamen aghast Like dead men the dead limbs of their comrades cast Down the deep, which closed on them above and around, And the sharks and the dog-fish their grave-clothes unbound, And were glutted like Jews with this manna rained down From God on their wilderness. One after one His scorn of the embalmer; the seventh, from the deck An oak splinter pierced through his breast and his back, And hung out to the tempest, a wreck on the wreck. S |