A printer's boy, folding those pages,

Fell slumberously upon one side;

Like those famed seven who slept three ages. To wakeful frenzy's vigil rages,

As opiates, were the same applied. Even the Reviewers who were hired

To do the work of his reviewing, With adamantine nerves, grew tired;Gaping and torpid they retired,

To dream of what they should be doing.
And worse and worse, the drowsy curse
Yawned in him, till it grew a pest-
A wide contagious atmosphere,
Creeping like cold through all things near;
A power to infect and to infest.
His servant-maids and dogs grew dull;
His kitten, late a sportive elf,
The woods and lakes, so beautiful,
Of dim stupidity were full,

All grew dull as Peter's self.
The earth under his feet-the springs,
Which lived within it a quick life,
The air, the winds of many wings,
That fan it with new murmurings,

Were dead to their harmonious strife.

The birds and beasts within the wood,

The insects, and each creeping thing,
Were now a silent multitude;
Love's work was left unwrought—no brood
Near Peter's house took wing.
And every neighbouring cottager
Stupidly yawned upon the other:
No jackass brayed; no little cur
Cocked up his ears;-no man would stir
To save a dying mother.

Yet all from that charmed district went
But some half-idiot and half-knave,
Who rather than pay any rent,
Would live with marvellous content,

Over his father's grave.

No bailiff dared within that space,

For fear of the dull charm, to enter;
A man would bear upon his face,
For fifteen months in any case.

The yawn of such a venture.
Seven miles above-below-around—
This pest of dulness holds its sway;
A ghastly life without a sound;
To Peter's soul the spell is bound
How should it ever pass away?

LINES,

WRITTEN DURING THE CASTLEREAGH ADMINISTRATION.

CORPSES are cold in the tomb,

Stones on the pavement are dumb,
Abortions are dead in the womb,

And their mothers look pale-like the white shore
Of Albion, free no more.

Her sons are as stones in the way-
They are masses of senseless clay-
They are trodden and move not away,-
The abortion, with which she travaileth,
Is Liberty-smitten to death.

Then trample and dance, thou Oppressor,
For thy Victim is no redressor,
Thou art sole lord and possessor

Of her corpses, and clods, and abortions—they pave
Thy path to the grave.

Hearest thou the festival din,

Of death, and destruction, and sin,

And wealth, crying Havoc! within

'Tis the Bacchanal triumph, which makes truth

Thine Epithalamium.

Ay, marry thy ghastly wife!

Let fear, and disquiet, and strife

[dumb,

Spread thy couch in the chamber of life,

Marry Ruin, thou tyrant! and God be thy guide To the bed of the bride.

SONG

TO THE MEN OF ENGLAND.

MEN of England, wherefore plough
For the lords who lay ye low?
Wherefore weave with toil and care,
The rich robes your tyrants wear?

Wherefore feed, and clothe, and save,
From the cradle to the grave,
Those ungrateful drones who would
Drain your sweat-nay, drink your blood!

Wherefore, Bees of England, forge
Many a weapon, chain, and scourge,
That these stingless drones may spoil
The forced produce of your toil!

Have ye leisure, comfort, calm,
Shelter, food, love's gentle balm?
Or what is it ye buy so dear
With your pain and with your fear?

The seed ye sow, another reaps;
The wealth ye find, another keeps;
The robes ye weave, another wears;
The arms ye forge, another bears.

Sow seed, but let no tyrant reap;
Find wealth,-let no impostor heap;
Weave robes.-let not the idle wear;
Forge arms,-in your defence to bear.

Shrink to your cellars, holes, and cells;
In halls ye deck, another dwells.
Why shake the chains ye wrought? Ye see
The steel ye tempered glance on ye.

With plough and spade, and hoe and loom,
Trace your grave, and build your tomb,
And weave your winding-sheet, till fair
England be your sepulchre.

SIMILES.

FOR TWO POLITICAL CHARACTERS OF 1819.

As from an ancestral oak

Two empty ravens sound their clarion, Yell by yell, and croak by croak, When they scent the noonday smoke Of fresh human carrion:

As two gibbering night-birds flit,

From their bowers of deadly hue, Through the night to frighten it, When the morn is in a fit,

And the stars are none or few:

As a shark and dog-fish wait
Under an Atlantic isle,
For the negro-ship, whose freight
Is the theme of their debate,

Wrinkling their red gills the while

Are ye, two vultures sick for battle,

Two scorpions under one wet stone, Two bloodless wolves whose dry throats rattle, Two crows perched on the murrained cattle, Two vipers tangled into one.

AN ODE,

TO THE ASSERTORS OF LIBERTY.

ARISE, arise, arise!

There is blood on the earth that denies ye bread; Be your wounds like eyes

To weep for the dead, the dead, the dead.

What other grief were it just to pay?
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;

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 divine, Green strength, azure hope, and eternity. But let not the pansy among them be; Ye were injured, and that means memory.

ENGLAND IN 1819.

Ax old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king,Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow Through public scorn-mud from a muddy

spring,

Rulers, who neither see, nor feel, nor know,
But leech-like to their fainting country cling,
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow,
A people starved and stabbed in the untilled field,-
An army, which liberticide and prey
Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield,
Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay,-
Religion Christless, Godless-a book sealed;
A Senate-Time's worst statute unrepealed,-
Are graves, from which a glorious Phantom may
Burst, to illume our tempestuous day.

ODE TO HEAVEN.

CHORUS OF SPIRITS.

FIRST SPIRIT.

PALACE-ROOF of cloudless nights! Paradise of golden lights!

Deep, immeasurable, vast, Which art now, and which wert then! Of the present and the past, Of the eternal where and when, Presence-chamber, temple, home, Ever-canopying dome,

Of acts and ages yet to come!

Glorious shapes have life in thee,
Earth, and all earth's company;

Living globes which ever throng
Thy deep chasms and wildernesses;

And green worlds that glide along; And swift stars with flashing tresses; And icy moons most cold and bright, And mighty suns beyond the night, Atoms of intensest light.

Even thy name is as a god,
Heaven! for thou art the abode

Of that power which is the glass Wherein man his nature sees.

Generations as they pass Worship thee with bended knees. Their unremaining gods and they Like a river roll away; Thou remainest such alway.

SECOND SPIRIT.

Thou art but the mind's first chamber,
Round which its young fancies clamber,
Like weak insects in a cave,
Lighted up by stalactites;

But the portal of the grave,
Where a world of new delights
Will make thy best glories seem
But a dim and noonday gleam
From the shadow of a dream!

THIRD SPIRIT.

Peace! the abyss is wreathed with scorn
At your presumption, atom-born!
What is heaven? and what are ye
Who its brief expanse inherit ?

What are suns and spheres which flee
With the instinct of that spirit
Of which ye are but a part?

Drops which Nature's mighty heart Drives through thinnest veins. Depart!

What is heaven? a globe of dew,
Filling in the morning new

Some eyed flower, whose young leaves waken

On an unimagined world:

Constellated suns unshaken,
Orbits measureless, are furled
In that frail and fading sphere,
With ten millions gathered there,
To tremble, gleam, and disappear.

ODE TO THE WEST WIND.*

1.

O WILD West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,

Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,
Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou,
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the spring shall blow
Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odours plain and hill:

Wild Spirit, which art moving every where;
Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh hear!

II.

Thou on whose stream, 'mid the steep sky's commotion,

Loose clouds like earth's decaying leaves are shed,
Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and
Ocean,

Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread
On the blue surface of thine airy surge,
Like the bright hair uplifted from the head

Of some fierce Mænad, even from the dim verge
Of the horizon to the zenith's height,

The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge

Of the dying year, to which this closing night
Will be the doom of a vast sepulchre,
Vaulted with all thy congregated might

Of vapours from whose solid atmosphere
Black rain, and fire, and hail, will burst: Oh hear !

III.

Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,
Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams,
Beside a pumice isle in Baia's bay,
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave's intenser day,

This poem was conceived and chiefly written in a wood that skirts the Arno, near Florence, and on a day when that tempestuous wind, whose temperature is at once mild and animating, was collecting the vapours which pour down the autumnal rains. They began, as 1 foresaw, at sunset, with a violent tempest of hail and rain, attended by that magnificent thunder and lightning peculiar to the Cisalpine regions.

The phenomenon alluded to at the conclusion of the third stanza is well known to naturalists. The vegetation at the bottom of the sea, of rivers, and of lakes, sympathizes with that of the land in the change of seasons, and is consequently influenced by the winds which announce it.

All overgrown with azure moss and flowers
So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou
For whose path the Atlantic's level powers

Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below
The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear
The sapless foliage of the ocean, know

Thy voice and suddenly grow gray with fear, And tremble and despoil themselves: Oh hear !

IV.

If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;
A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share

The impulse of thy strength, only less free
Than thou, O uncontrollable! If even

I were as in my boyhood, and could be

The comrade of thy wanderings over heaven,
As then, when to outstrip the skyey speed
Scarce seemed a vision, I would ne'er have striven

As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.
Oh! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!

I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!

Poets are on this cold earth,
As chameleons might be,
Hidden from their early birth

In a cave beneath the sea;
Where light is, chameleons change!
Where love is not, poets do:
Fame is love disguised: if few
Find either, never think it strange
That poets range.

Yet dare not stain with wealth or power
A poet's free and heavenly mind:
If bright chameleons should devour
Any food but beams and wind,
They would grow as earthly soon
As their brother lizards are.
Children of a sunnier star,
Spirits from beyond the moon,
Oh, refuse the boon!

TO WILLIAM SHELLEY.

(With what truth I may say Roma Roma! Roma! Non e piu come era prima!)

Mr lost William, thou in whom
Some bright spirit lived, and did
That decaying robe consume

Which its lustre faintly hid,
Here its ashes find a tomb,

But beneath this pyramid

Thou art not-if a thing divine
Like thee can die, thy funeral shrine
Is thy mother's grief and mine.

Where art thou, my gentle child?
Let me think thy spirit feeds,
Within its life intense and mild,

The love of living leaves and weeds, Among these tombs and ruins wild ;

Let me think that through low seeds Of the sweet flowers and sunny grass, Into their hues and scents may pass, A portion

June, 1819.

ON

THE MEDUSA OF LEONARDO DA VINCI,

IN THE FLORENTINE GALLERY.

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 shrine, Fiery and lurid, struggling underneath,

The agonies of anguish and of death. 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.

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

And from a stone beside, a poisonous eft
Peeps idly into these 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 hath 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 vapour 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.

FLORENCE, 1819.