O'er Ruin desolate,

O'er Falsehood's fallen state,

Sit thou sublime, unawed; be the Destroyer pale!
And equal laws be thine,
And winged words let sail,

Freighted with truth even from the throne of God:
That wealth, surviving fate,

Be thine.-All hail!

ANTISTROPHE I B

Didst thou not start to hear Spain's thrilling paean
From land to land re-echoed solemnly,
Till silence became music? From the Aeaean

1

To the cold Alps, eternal Italy
Starts to hear thine! The Sea
Which paves the desert streets of Venice laughs
In light and music; widowed Genoa wan
By moonlight spells ancestral epitaphs,
Murmuring, Where is Doria?' fair Milan,
Within whose veins long ran

The viper's palsying venom, lifts her heel
To bruise his head. The signal and the seal
(If Hope and Truth and Justice can avail)
Art thou of all these hopes.-O hail !

ANTISTROPHE II ẞ

Florence! beneath the sun,

Of cities fairest one,

Blushes within her bower for Freedom's expectation :

From eyes of quenchless hope

Rome tears the priestly cope,

As ruling once by power, so now by admiration,-
An athlete stripped to run

From a remoter station

For the high prize lost on Philippi's shore:-
As then Hope, Truth, and Justice did avail,
So now may Fraud and Wrong! O hail!

EPODE I B

Hear ye the march as of the Earth-born Forms
Arrayed against the ever-living Gods?
The crash and darkness of a thousand storins
Bursting their inaccessible abodes

Of crags and thunder-clouds?

See ye the banners blazoned to the day,
Inwrought with emblems of barbaric pride?

Dissonant threats kill Silence far away,

The serene Heaven which wraps our Eden wide

With iron light is dyed;

1 Aeaea, the island of Circe.-[SHELLEY'S NOTE.]

The viper was the armorial device of the Visconti, tyrants of Milan. -[SHELLEY'S NOTE.]

120

125

130

135

The Anarchs of the North lead forth their legions
Like Chaos o'er creation, uncreating;
An hundred tribes nourished on strange religions
And lawless slaveries,-down the aëreal regions
Of the white Alps, desolating,

Famished wolves that bide no waiting,
Blotting the glowing footsteps of old glory,
Trampling our columned cities into dust,
Their dull and savage lust

On Beauty's corse to sickness satiating

They come! The fields they tread look black and hoary
With fire-from their red feet the streams run gory!

EPODE II 8

Great Spirit, deepest Love!

Which rulest and dost move

All things which live and are, within the Italian shore ;
Who spreadest Heaven around it,

Whose woods, rocks, waves, surround it;

Who sittest in thy star, o'er Ocean's western floor;
Spirit of beauty! at whose soft command

The sunbeams and the showers distil its foison

From the Earth's bosom chill;

Oh, bid those beams be each a blinding brand

Of lightning! bid those showers be dews of poison!

Bid the Earth's plenty kill!

Bid thy bright Heaven above,

Whilst light and darkness bound it,
Be their tomb who planned

To make it ours and thine!

Or, with thine harmonizing ardours fill

140

145

150

155

160

165

And raise thy sons, as o'er the prone horizon

Thy lamp feeds every twilight wave with fire

Be man's high hope and unextinct desire

The instrument to work thy will divine!

Then clouds from sunbeams, antelopes from leopards,
And frowns and fears from thee,

170

Would not more swiftly flee

Than Celtic wolves from the Ausonian shepherds.

175

Whatever, Spirit, from thy starry shrine

Thou yieldest or withholdest, oh, let be

This city of thy worship ever free!

AUTUMN: A DIRGE

[Published by Mrs. Shelley, Posthumous Poems, 1824.]

I

THE warm sun is failing, the bleak wind is wailing,
The bare boughs are sighing, the pale flowers are dying,

143 old 1824; lost B.

147 black 1824; blue B.

And the Year

On the earth her death-bed, in a shroud of leaves dead,
Is lying.

Come, Months, come away,
From November to May,
In your saddest array;
Follow the bier

Of the dead cold Year,

And like dim shadows watch by her sepulchre.

II

The chill rain is falling, the nipped worm is crawling,
The rivers are swelling, the thunder is knelling

For the Year;

The blithe swallows are flown, and the lizards each gone
To his dwelling;

Come, Months, come away;

Put on white, black, and gray;

Let your light sisters play-
Ye, follow the bier

Of the dead cold Year,

And make her grave green with tear on tear.

THE WANING MOON

[Published by Mrs. Shelley, Posthumous Poems, 1824.]
AND like a dying lady, lean and pale,
Who totters forth, wrapped in a gauzy veil,
Out of her chamber, led by the insane

And feeble wanderings of her fading brain,
The moon arose up in the murky East,
A white and shapeless mass-

TO THE MOON

ΤΟ

15

20

[Published (I) by Mrs. Shelley, Posthumous Poems, 1824, (II) by W. M. Rossetti, Complete P. W., 1870.]

I

ART thou pale for weariness

Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless

Among the stars that have a different birth,-
And ever changing, like a joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy?

II

Thou chosen sister of the Spirit,

That gazes on thee till in thee it pities. .

5

5

DEATH

[Published by Mrs. Shelley, Posthumous Poems, 1824.]

[Published by Mrs. Shelley, Posthumous Poems, 1824.]

I

THE fiery mountains answer each other;

Their thunderings are echoed from zone to zone;
The tempestuous oceans awake one another,

And the ice-rocks are shaken round Winter's throne,
When the clarion of the Typhoon is blown.

II

From a single cloud the lightening flashes,
Whilst a thousand isles are illumined around,
Earthquake is trampling one city to ashes,

An hundred are shuddering and tottering; the sound
Is bellowing underground.

III

But keener thy gaze than the lightening's glare,
And swifter thy step than the earthquake's tramp;
Thou deafenest the rage of the ocean; thy stare
Makes blind the volcanoes; the sun's bright lamp
To thine is a fen-fire damp.

IV

From billow and mountain and exhalation

The sunlight is darted through vapour and blast;
From spirit to spirit, from nation to nation,
From city to hamlet thy dawning is cast,-

And tyrants and slaves are like shadows of night
In the van of the morning light.

SUMMER AND WINTER

15

[Published by Mrs. Shelley in The Keepsake, 1829. Mr. C. W. Frederickson of Brooklyn possesses a transcript in Mrs. Shelley's handwriting.] Ir was a bright and cheerful afternoon,

Towards the end of the sunny month of June,

Liberty-4 zone edd. 1824, 1839; throne later edd.

When the north wind congregates in crowds
The floating mountains of the silver clouds
From the horizon-and the stainless sky
Opens beyond them like eternity.

All things rejoiced beneath the sun; the weeds,

The river, and the corn-fields, and the reeds;

The willow leaves that glanced in the light breeze,
And the firm foliage of the larger trees.

It was a winter such as when birds die
In the deep forests; and the fishes lie
Stiffened in the translucent ice, which makes
Even the mud and slime of the warm lakes
A wrinkled clod as hard as brick; and when,
Among their children, comfortable men
Gather about great fires, and yet feel cold:
Alas, then, for the homeless beggar old!

THE TOWER OF FAMINE

[Published by Mrs. Shelley in The Keepsake, 1829. Mr. C. W. Frederickson of Brooklyn possesses a transcript in Mrs. Shelley's handwriting.]

AMID the desolation of a city,

Which was the cradle, and is now the grave
Of an extinguished people,-so that Pity

Weeps o'er the shipwrecks of Oblivion's wave,
There stands the Tower of Famine. It is built
Upon some prison-homes, whose dwellers rave

For bread, and gold, and blood: Pain, linked to Guilt,
Agitates the light flame of their hours,

Until its vital oil is spent or spilt.

There stands the pile, a tower amid the towers
And sacred domes; each marble-ribbed roof,
The brazen-gated temples, and the bowers

Of solitary wealth, the tempest-proof
Pavilions of the dark Italian air,-

Are by its presence dimmed-they stand aloof,
And are withdrawn-so that the world is bare;
As if a spectre wrapped in shapeless terror
Amid a company of ladies fair

Should glide and glow, till it became a mirror
Of all their beauty, and their hair and hue,
The life of their sweet eyes, with all its error,
Should be absorbed, till they to marble grew.
Summer and Winter.-11 birds die 1839; birds do die 1829.
of Famine.-7 For] With 1829.

The Tower