Of waves, flowers, clouds, woods, rocks, and all that we Read in their smiles, and call reality.

This isle and house are mine, and I have vowed

Thee to be lady of the solitude.--

And I have fitted up some chambers there
Looking towards the golden Eastern air,
And level with the living winds, which flow
Like waves above the living waves below. ---
I have sent books and music there, and all
Those instruments with which high spirits call
The future from its cradle, and the past
Out of its grave, and make the present last
In thoughts and joys which sleep, but cannot die,
Folded within their own eternity.

Our simple life wants little, and true taste
Hires not the pale drudge Luxury, to waste
The scene it would adorn, and therefore still,
Nature with all her children, haunts the hill.
The ring-dove, in the embowering ivy, yet
Keeps up her love-lament, and the owls flit
Round the evening tower, and the young stars glance
Between the quick bats in their twilight dance;
The spotted deer bask in the fresh moon-light

Before our gate, and the slow, silent night
Is measured by the pants of their calm sleep.
Be this our home in life, and when years heap
Their withered hours, like leaves, on our decay,
Let us become the over-hanging day,

The living soul of this Elysian isle,
Conscious, inseparable, one. Meanwhile

We two will rise, and sit, and walk together,
Under the roof of blue Ionian weather,

And wander in the meadows, or ascend

525

530

535

540

The mossy mountains, where the blue heavens bend
With lightest winds, to touch their paramour;

Or linger, where the pebble-paven shore,
Under the quick, faint kisses of the sea
Trembles and sparkles as with ecstasy,1---
Possessing and possest by all that is
Within that calm circumference of bliss,
And by each other, till to love and live
Be one:
or, at the noontide hour, arrive
Where some old cavern hoar seems yet to keep
The moonlight of the expired night asleep,

--

Through which the awakened day can never peep;
A veil for our seclusion, close as Night's,
Where secure sleep may kill thine innocent lights;
Sleep, the fresh dew of languid love, the rain
Whose drops quench kisses till they burn again.
And we will talk, until thought's melody
Become too sweet for utterance, and it die
In words, to live again in looks, which dart
With thrilling tone into the voiceless heart,
Harmonizing silence without a sound.

Our breath shall intermix, our bosoms bound,
And our veins beat together; and our lips
With other eloquence than words, eclipse

The soul that burns between them, and the wells
Which boil under our being's inmost cells,

The fountains of our deepest life, shall be
Confused in passion's golden purity,

As mountain-springs under the morning Sun.
We shall become the same, we shall be one

Spirit within two frames, oh! wherefore two?

545

550

555

560

565

570

One passion in twin-hearts, which grows and grew, 75

1 In Shelley's edition, ecstacy, though the word is correctly spelt in line 39, p. 370.

Till like two meteors of expanding flame,

Those spheres instinct with it become the same,
Touch, mingle, are transfigured; ever still
Burning, yet ever inconsumable:

In one another's substance finding food,
Like flames too pure and light and unimbued
To nourish their bright lives with baser prey, 、
Which point to Heaven and cannot pass away:
One hope within two wills, one will beneath
Two overshadowing minds, one life, one death,
One Heaven, one Hell, one immortality,

And one annihilation. Woe is me!

The winged words on which my soul would pierce
Into the height of love's rare Universe,

Are chains of lead around its flight of fire.--

I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire!

Weak Verses, go, kneel at your Sovereign's feet,

And say:-"We are the masters of thy slave;

"What wouldest thou with us and ours and thine ?” Then call your sisters from Oblivion's cave,

All singing loud: "Love's very pain is sweet,

"But its reward is in the world divine

'Which, if not here, it builds beyond the grave.” So shall ye live when I am there. Then haste Over the hearts of

men, until ye meet

Marina, Vanna, Primus,2 and the rest,

And bid them love each other and be blest:

And leave the troop which errs, and which reproves, And come and be my guest, for I am Love's.

1 In Shelley's edition, 'Till.

2 Marina is a pet-name of Mrs. Shelley's: Vanna is the diminutive of Giovanna (Joan or Jane), and might, as Mr. Rossetti hints, refer to Mrs.

STUDIES FOR EPIPSYCHIDION, AND CANCELLED PASSAGES.1

Here, my dear friend, is a new book for you;

I have already dedicated two

To other friends, one female and one male,-
What you are, is a thing that I must veil;
What can this be to those who praise or rail?
I never was attached to that great sect
Whose doctrine is that each one should select
Out of the world a mistress or a friend,

And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend
To cold oblivion-though 'tis in the code

Of modern morals, and the beaten road.

Which those poor slaves with weary footsteps tread
Who travel to their home among the dead
By the broad highway of the world-and so
With one sad friend, and many a jealous foe,
The dreariest and the longest journey go.

Free love has this, different from gold and clay, That to divide is not to take away.

Like ocean, which the general north wind breaks

1 Under the general title of "Fragments," Mrs. Shelley added, in her second edition of 1839, several exquisite "gleanings from Shelley's manuscript books and papers," the first of which, headed "To- consisted of lines 1 to 37 and 62 to 91 of the ensuing group of Studies, &c. The rest were disentangled from the same sources by Mr. Garnett; and he printed the whole of them in his Relics of Shelley,-lines 1 to 141 under the very appropriate title To His Genius (pp.

5

10

15

34 to 39), dated 1820, and lines 142 to 174 as four cancelled passages of Epipsychidion, all dated 1821, and being Nos. XXXII to XXXV of the "Miscellaneous Fragments" (pp.86 and 87). It seems convenient to number the whole consecutively in this edition, as an addendum to Epipsychidion. The portions dated 1820 (lines 1to141) are obviously approaches to that most glorious poem,-metre and method being alike identical in these and that, and indeed whole passages being also

Into ten thousand waves, and each one makes
A mirror of the moon-like some great glass,
Which did distort whatever form might pass,
Dashed into fragments by a playful child,
Which then reflects its eyes and forehead mild;
Giving for one, which it could ne'er express,
A thousand images of loveliness.

If I were one whom the loud world held wise,
I should disdain to quote authorities

In commendation of this kind of love :-
Why there is first the God in heaven above,
Who wrote a book called Nature, 'tis to be
Reviewed, I hear, in the next Quarterly;
And Socrates, the Jesus Christ of Greece,
And Jesus Christ himself did never cease

To urge all living things to love each other,

And to forgive their mutual faults, and smother
The Devil of disunion in their souls.

25

I love you!-Listen, O embodied Ray

Of the great Brightness; I must pass away
While you remain, and these light words must be
Tokens by which you may remember me.
Start not the thing you are is unbetrayed,
If you are human, and if but the shade

identical; but there is a tone of gentle sarcasm which, appearing in these approaches, had wholly worked off in the progress of the poet's mind towards the fervent and most earnest raptures of the ultimate poem. The fragment Fiordispina, doubtless, may also be regarded as a "preliminary though unconscious" study for Epipsychidion, as Mr. Garnett says, at p. 29 of Relics

40

of Shelley; but that fragment, and Ginevra, which also has some reference to Emilia Viviani, are different in method from these, and would not follow so appropriately here as in their place in the general distribution of posthumous poems.

So in Relics of Shelley; but in Mrs. Shelley's edition we read In the support of &c.