The pale purple even Melts around thy flight; Like a star of heaven, In the broad day-light Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight, Keen as are the arrows Of that silver sphere, In the white dawn clear, Until we hardly see, we feel that it is there. All the earth and air As, when night is bare, From one lonely cloud 20 25 The moon rains out her beams, and heaven is overflowed. 30 What thou art we know not; What is most like thee? From rainbow clouds there flow not Drops so bright to see, As from thy presence showers a rain of melody. Like a poet hidden In the light of thought, Singing hymns unbidden, Till the world is wrought To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not: melody on the celestial lightness and freedom in which it now expatiates. To the swift sympathetic imagination of the poet, the scorner of the ground, floating far up in the golden light, had become an aërial rapture, a dis embodied joy, a 'delighted spirit,' whose ethereal race had just begun. This is a representation at once profoundly poetical and profoundly true. But its force and consistency is destroyed by the so-called emendation." Like a high-born maiden Soul in secret hour With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower: 45 Like a glow-worm golden In a dell of dew, Its aërial1 hue Among the flowers and grass, which screen it from the view : Like a rose embowered In its own green leaves, By warm winds deflowered, Till the scent it gives 50 Makes faint with too much sweet these heavy-winged thieves: Sound of vernal showers On the twinkling grass, All that ever was 55 Joyous, and clear, and fresh, thy music doth surpass: 60 Teach us, sprite or bird, What sweet thoughts are thine: I have never heard 2 Praise of love or wine That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine. 1 In Shelley's edition, aerial in this instance, as in some others. 2 In Shelley's edition there is an apparently accidental comma after heard. Chorus Hymenæal, Or triumphal chaunt, Matched with thine would be all But an empty vaunt, A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want. What objects are the fountains Of thy happy strain? What fields, or waves, or mountains? What shapes of sky or plain? 70 What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of pain? 75 With thy clear keen joyance Languor1 cannot be: Shadow of annoyance Never came near thee: Thou lovest; but ne'er knew 2 love's sad satiety. Waking or asleep, Thou of death must deem Things more true and deep Than we mortals dream, 80 Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream? 85 We look before and after, And pine for what is not: Our sincerest laughter With some pain is fraught; Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought. 90 1 In Shelley's edition, Langour. 2 Mr. Rossetti points out that there is a "grammatical laxity" here, but admits that "the sound of this lovely line would be so spoiled by changing the word into 'knew'st' that no rectification of grammar is permissible." Every lover of Shelley must heartily concur in this opinion; but one na turally wonders what reason against Thou too, O Comet beautiful and fierce, Yet if we could scorn Hate, and pride, and fear; If we were things born Not to shed a tear, I know not how thy joy we ever should come near. Better than all measures Of delightful sound, Better than all treasures That in books are found, Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground! Teach me half the gladness That thy brain must know, Such harmonious madness From my lips would flow, The world should listen then, as I am listening now. 95 100 105 ODE TO LIBERTY.1 Yet, Freedom, yet thy banner torn but flying, Streams like a thunder-storm against the wind. BYRON. I. A GLORIOUS people vibrated again The lightning of the nations: Liberty From heart to heart, from tower to tower, o'er Spain, Gleamed. My soul spurned the chains of its dismay, As a young eagle soars the morning clouds among,' This poem is assigned by Mrs. Shelley to the year 1820, to which year the events commemorated in the first stanza likewise point. In Shelley's edition the opening lines are printed as in the text. My brother, Alfred Forman, suggests as an emendation A glorious people vibrated again : I confess that to me it seems absol- contagious fire into the sky, unless in direct apposition to lightning, is a strained use of language. On the other hand the simple statement that a people vibrated, and that Liberty, the lightning of nations, gleamed, is at once perfectly simple and extremely grand. The rhythm is also more characteristic. I have little doubt that an error occurred by the misunderstanding of a correction on the proof-sheet: probably the colon had to be supplied in the margin, and the printer dropped it in in the wrong place. Nevertheless, I am bound to record that Mr. Rossetti, and, I am told, Mr. Swinburne, hold by the original reading. U |