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, tho' 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 drowned In an ocean of dreams without a sound;

Whose waves never mark, tho' they ever impress

The light sand which paves it, consciousness;

(Only over head the sweet nightingale

Ever sang more sweet as the day might fail,
And snatches of its Elysian chant

Were mixed with the dreams of the Sensitive Plant.)

The Sensitive Plant1 was the earliest
Up-gathered into the bosom of rest;
A sweet child weary of its delight,
The feeblest and yet the favourite,
Cradled within the embrace of night.

PART SECOND.

There was a Power in this sweet place,
An Eve in this Eden; a ruling grace
Which to the flowers did they waken or dream,
Was as God is to the starry scheme.

A Lady, the wonder of her kind,

Whose form was upborne by a lovely mind

Which, dilating, had moulded her mien and motion
Like a sea-flower unfolded beneath the ocean,

Tended the garden from morn to even:
And the meteors of that sublunar heaven,

Like the lamps of the air when night walks forth,
Laughed round her footsteps up from the Earth!

She had no companion of mortal race,

But her tremulous breath and her flushing face
Told, whilst the morn1 kissed the sleep from her eyes
That her dreams were less slumber than Paradise:

As if some bright Spirit for her sweet sake
Had deserted heaven while the stars were awake,
As if yet around her he lingering were,

5

10

16

Tho' the veil of daylight concealed him from her.

20

Her step seemed to pity the grass it prest;
You might hear by the heaving of her breast,

1 In Shelley's edition moon, but morn in all other editions known to

me,-doubtless one of his own corrections.

That the coming and going1 of the wind
Brought pleasure there and left passion behind.

And wherever her airy footstep trod,
Her trailing hair from the grassy sod

Erased its light vestige, with shadowy sweep,
Like a sunny storm o'er the dark green deep.

I doubt not the flowers of that garden sweet
Rejoiced in the sound of her gentle feet;
I doubt not they felt the spirit that came
From her glowing fingers thro' all their frame.

She sprinkled bright water from the stream

On those that were faint with the sunny beam;
And out of the cups of the heavy flowers
She emptied the rain of the thunder showers.

She lifted their heads with her tender hands,
And sustained them with rods and ozier bands;
If the flowers had been her own infants she
Could never have nursed them more tenderly.

And all killing insects and gnawing worms,
And things of obscene and unlovely forms,
She bore in a basket of Indian woof,
Into the rough woods far aloof,

In a basket, of grasses and wild flowers full,
The freshest her gentle hands could pull
For the poor banished insects, whose intent,
Although they did ill, was innocent.

1 In Mrs. Shelley's editions we read the coming and the going; but the VOL. II.

second the, which is certainly wrong, is not in Shelley's edition.

S

But the bee and the beamlike ephemeris

Whose path is the lightning's, and soft moths that kiss 50 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!

60

PART THIRD.

Three days the flowers of the garden fair,
Like stars when the moon is awakened, were,
Or the waves of Baiæ, ere luminous
She floats up through the smoke of Vesuvius.

And on the fourth, the Sensitive Plant
Felt the sound of the funeral chaunt,

And the steps of the bearers, heavy and slow,
And the sobs of the mourners deep and low;

The weary sound and the heavy breath,
And the silent motions of passing death,
And the smell, cold, oppressive, and dank,
Sent through the pores of the coffin plank;

10

The dark grass, and the flowers among the grass,
Were bright with tears as the crowd did pass;
From their sighs the wind caught a mournful tone,
And sate in the pines, and gave groan for groan.

The garden, once fair, became cold and foul,
Like the corpse of her who had been its soul,
Which at first was lovely as if in sleep,

1

Then slowly changed, till it grew a heap
To make men tremble who never weep.

Swift summer into the autumn flowed,
And frost in the mist of the morning rode,
Though the noonday sun looked clear and bright,
Mocking the spoil of the secret night.

The rose leaves, like flakes of crimson snow,2
Paved the turf and the moss below.
The lilies were drooping, and white, and wan,
Like the head and the skin of a dying man.

And Indian plants, of scent and hue
The sweetest that ever were fed on dew,
Leaf after leaf, day after day,3
Were massed into the common clay.

1 In Shelley's edition we read lively; but Mrs. Shelley substituted lovely in her first edition of 1839,-of course rightly.

In Shelley's edition we read now; but snow was substituted in Mrs. Shelley's first edition of 1839,again, presumably, from the list of

errata.

3 So in Shelley's edition, but day by day in Mrs. Shelley's editions. Mr. Swinburne (Essays and Studies, p. 186) says, with reference to a correspondence in Notes and Queries, that this

line seems to him "right as it stands--
'Leaf after leaf, day by day'-
if the weight and fall of the sound be
properly given. Mr. Rossetti would
slip in the word 'and'; were it there,
I should rather wish to excise it."
Neither critic would appear at that
time to have considered what bearing
Shelley's own edition had on the
matter; but Mr. Rossetti's edition of
Shelley, which was subsequent to the
correspondence, gives the line accord-
ing to the original text. Neverthe-
less I think it is quite open to ques-