Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone, Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce, My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened earth

The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

AN ODE

WRITTEN OCTOBER, 1819, BEFORE THE SPANIARDS HAD RECOVERED THEIR LIBERTY

ARISE, arise, arise!

There is blood on the earth that denies ye

Be your wounds like eyes

To weep for the dead, the dead, the dead. What other grief were it just to pay?

bread!

Your sons, your wives, your brethren, were they! Who said they were slain on the battle-day?

Awaken, awaken, awaken!

The slave and the tyrant are twin-born foes.

An Ode written October, 1819, before the Spaniards had recovered their Liberty, Shelley, 1820 || An Ode to the Assertors of Liberty, Mrs. Shelley, 18391. Published with Prometheus Unbound, 1820.

Be the cold chains shaken

To the dust where your kindred repose, repose.
Their bones in the grave will start and move
When they hear the voices of those they love
Most loud in the holy combat above.

Wave, wave high the banner,

When Freedom is riding to conquest by!
Though the slaves that fan her

Be Famine and Toil, giving sigh for sigh.
And ye who attend her imperial car,
Lift not your hands in the banded war
But in her defence whose children ye are.

Glory, glory, glory,

To those who have greatly suffered and done! Never name in story

Was greater than that which ye shall have won. Conquerors have conquered their foes alone,

Whose revenge, pride, and power, they have overthrown.

Ride ye, more victorious, over your own.

Bind, bind every brow

With crownals of violet, ivy, and pine!

Hide the blood-stains now

With hues which sweet nature has made di

vine

Green strength, azure hope, and eternity;

But let not the pansy among them be
Ye were injured, and that means memory.

ON THE MEDUSA OF LEONARDO DA VINCI

IN THE FLORENTINE GALLERY

I

Ir lieth, gazing on the midnight sky,
Upon the cloudy mountain peak supine;
Below, far lands are seen tremblingly;
Its horror and its beauty are divine.
Upon its lips and eyelids seems to lie
Loveliness like a shadow, from which shine,
Fiery and lurid, struggling underneath,
The agonies of anguish and of death.

II

Yet it is less the horror than the grace

Which turns the gazer's spirit into stone,
Whereon the lineaments of that dead face
Are graven, till the characters be grown
Into itself, and thought no more can trace;
'Tis the melodious hue of beauty thrown
Athwart the darkness and the glare of pain,
Which humanize and harmonize the strain.

III

And from its head as from one body grow,
As
grass out of a watery rock,
Hairs which are vipers, and they curl and flow
And their long tangles in each other lock,

On the Medusa of Leonardo Da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery. Published by Mrs. Shelley, 1824. Composed at Florence. ii. 6 hues, Rossetti.

And with unending involutions show

Their mailed radiance, as it were to mock The torture and the death within, and saw The solid air with many a ragged jaw.

IV

And, from a stone beside, a poisonous eft
Peeps idly into those Gorgonian eyes;
Whilst in the air a ghastly bat, bereft

Of sense, has flitted with a mad surprise Out of the cave this hideous light had cleft, And he comes hastening like a moth that hies After a taper; and the midnight sky Flares, a light more dread than obscurity.

'Tis the tempestuous loveliness of terror; For from the serpents gleams a brazen glare Kindled by that inextricable error,

Which makes a thrilling vapor of the air Become a and ever-shifting mirror

Of all the beauty and the terror there

A woman's countenance, with serpent locks,

Gazing in death on heaven from those wet

rocks.

THE INDIAN SERENADE

I

I ARISE from dreams of thee
In the first sweet sleep of night,
When the winds are breathing low,
And the stars are shining bright;
I arise from dreams of thee,
And a spirit in my feet

Hath led me - who knows how?
To thy chamber window, sweet!

II

The wandering airs, they faint
On the dark, the silent stream;
The champak odors fail

Like sweet thoughts in a dream ;
The nightingale's complaint,

It dies upon her heart,

MS. || Song

Lines to an

The Indian Serenade, Browning MS., Harvard written for an Indian Air, The Liberal, ii., 1822. Indian Air, Mrs. Shelley, 1824. Published in The Liberal, ii., 1822.

i. 2 In | From, Copy of Browning MS.

3 When, omit, Harvard MS.

4 shining || burning, Harvard MS., The Liberal, 1822.

7 Hath led, Browning MS., The Liberal, 1822 || Has borne, Harvard MS.; has led, Mrs. Shelley, 1824.

ii. 3 The champak odors fail, Harvard MS., The Liberal, 1822, Mrs. Shelley, 1824 || And the champak's, Browning MS. And the champak, Dowden. And the champak odors pine, Allingham. odors of my chaplet, Boscombe MS.