Was born anew within his mind;
He grew dull, harsh, sly, unrefined,

As when he tramped beside the And so his Soul would not be

Otter 1.

602-3 See Editor's Note.

A famous river in the new Atlantis of the Dynastophylic Pantisocratists.[SHELLEY'S NOTE.] 2 See the description of the beautiful colours produced during the agonizing death of a number of trout, in the fourth part of a long poem in blank verse, published within a few years. [The Excursion, VIII. 11. 568-71.-ED.] That poem contains curious evidence of the gradual hardening of a strong but circumscribed sensibility, of the perversion of a penetrating but panic-stricken understanding. The author might have derived a lesson which he had probably forgotten from these sweet and sublime verses :

'This lesson, Shepherd, let us two divide,

Taught both by what she* shows and what conceals,

Never to blend our pleasure or our pride

With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels.'-[SHELLEY'S NOTE.] * Nature.

As soon as he read that, cried Peter,
Eureka! I have found the way
To make a better thing of metre 631
Than e'er was made by living creature
Up to this blessed day.'

XXXVI

cue.

Soon as he read the ode, he drove
his friend Lord MacMurder-
chouse's,
655

To
A man of interest in both houses,
And said:-'For money or for love,

II

'Pray find some cure or sinecure; To feed from the superfluous taxes A friend of ours-a poet-fewer 660 Then Peter wrote odes to the Have fluttered tamer to the lure Than he.' His lordship stands and racks his

Devil;

In one of which he meekly said :

1 It is curious to observe how often extremes meet. Cobbett and Peter use the same language for a different purpose: Peter is indeed a sort of metrical Cobbett. Cobbett is, however, more mischievous than Peter, because he pollutes a holy and now unconquerable cause with the principles of legitimate murder; whilst the other only makes a bad one ridiculous and odious.

If either Peter or Cobbett should see this note, each will feel more indignation at being compared to the other than at any censure implied in the moral perversion laid to their charge.-[SHELLEY'S NOTE.]

A printer's boy, folding those pages, The birds and beasts within the
Fell slumbrously upon one side;
Like those famed Seven who slept

three ages.

725

To wakeful frenzy's vigil-rages,
As opiates, were the same applied.

wood,

The insects, and each creeping thing,

750

Were now a silent multitude; Love's work was left unwroughtno brood

Near Peter's house took wing.

NOTE ON PETER BELL THE THIRD, BY

MRS. SHELLEY

In this new edition I have added Peter intended in this poem. No man ever Bell the Third. A critique on Words-admired Wordsworth's poetry_more; worth's Peter Bell reached us at Leghorn, he read it perpetually, and taught which amused Shelley exceedingly, and suggested this poem.

I need scarcely observe that nothing personal to the author of Peter Bell is

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

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 those great poets, but nothing injurious to the men themselves.

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 No poem contains more of Shelley's and happiness of mankind, but false peculiar views with regard to the errors and injurious opinions, that evil was into which many of the wisest have good, and that ignorance and force were fallen, and the pernicious effects of the best allies of purity and virtue. His certain opinions on society. Much of idea was that a man gifted, even as it is beautifully written: and, though, transcendently as the author of Peter like the burlesque drama of Swellfoot, it Bell, with the highest qualities of must be looked on as a plaything, it genius, must, if he fostered such errors, has so much merit and poetry-so much be infected with dulness. This poem of himself in it-that it cannot fail to was written as a warning-not as a nar- interest greatly, and by right belongs ration of the reality. He was unac- to the world for whose instruction and quainted personally with Wordsworth, benefit it was written.

LETTER TO MARIA GISBORNE

[Composed during Shelley's occupation of the Gisbornes' house at Leghorn, July, 1820; published in Posthumous Poems, 1824. Sources of the text are (1) a draft in Shelley's hand, partly illegible' (Forman), amongst the Boscombe MSS.; (2) a transcript by Mrs. Shelley; (3) the editio princeps, 1824; the text in Poetical Works, 1839, 1st and 2nd edd. Our text is that of Mrs. Shelley's transcript, modified by the Boscombe MS. Here, as elsewhere in this edition, the readings of the editio princeps are preserved in the footnotes.]

LEGHORN, July 1, 1820.

THE spider spreads her webs, whether she be
In poet's tower, cellar, or barn, or tree;
The silk-worm in the dark green mulberry leaves
His winding sheet and cradle ever weaves;
So I, a thing whom moralists call worm,
Sit spinning still round this decaying form,
From the fine threads of rare and subtle thought--
No net of words in garish colours wrought
To catch the idle buzzers of the day-

5

But a soft cell, where when that fades away,
Memory may clothe in wings my living name
And feed it with the asphodels of fame,

Which in those hearts which must remember mo
Grow, making love an immortality.

Whoever should behold me now, I wist,

Would think I were a mighty mechanist,
Bent with sublime Archimedean art

To breathe a soul into the iron heart

13 must Bos. MS.; most ed. 1824.

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