his study and reading-room of the shadowed copse, the stream, the lake, and the waterfall. Ill health and continual pain preyed upon his powers, and the solitude in which we lived, particularly on our first arrival in Italy, although congenial to his feelings, must frequently have weighed upon his spirits; those beautiful and affecting "Lines, written in dejection at Naples," were composed at such an interval; but when in health, his spirits were buoyant and youthful to an extraordinary degree.

Such was his love for nature, that every page of his poetry is associated in the minds of his friends with the loveliest scenes of the countries which he inhabited. In early life he visited the most beautiful parts of this country and Ireland. Afterwards the Alps of Switzerland became his inspirers. 66 Prometheus Unbound" was written among the deserted and flower-grown ruins of Rome; and when he made his home under the Pisan hills, their roofless recesses harboured him as he composed "The Witch of Atlas," ," "Adonais," and "Hellas." In the wild but beautiful Bay of Spezia, the winds and waves which he loved became his playmates. His days were chiefly spent on the water; the management of his boat, its alterations and improve ments, were his principal occupation. At night, when the unclouded moon shone on the calm sea, he often went alone in his little shallop to the rocky caves that bordered it, and sitting beneath their shelter, wrote "The Triumph of Life," the last of his productions. The beauty but strangeness of this lonely place, the refined pleasure which he felt in the nionship of a few selected friends, our entire sequestration from the rest of the world, all contributed to render this period of his life one of continued enjoyment. I am convinced that the two months we passed there were the happiest he had ever known: his health even rapidly improved, and he was never better than when I last saw him, full of spirits and joy, embark for Leghorn, that he might there welcome Leigh Hunt to Italy. I was to have accompanied him, but illness confined me to my room, and thus put the seal on my misfortune. His vessel bore out of sight with a favourable wind, and I remained awaiting his return by the breakers of that sea which was about to engulph him.

return to us.

We waited for them in vain; the sea, by its restless moaning, seemed to desire to inform us of what we would not learn :-but a veil may well be drawn over such misery. The real anguish of these moments transcended all the fictions that the most glowing ima. gination ever pourtrayed: our seclusion, the savage nature of the inhabitants of the surrounding villages, and our immediate vicinity to the troubled sea, combined to imbue with strange horror our days of uncertainty. The truth was at last known,-a truth that made our loved and lovely Italy appear a tomb, its sky a pall. Every heart echoed the deep lament; and my only consolation was in the praise and earnest love that each voice bestowed, and each countenance demonstrated, for him we had lost,-not, I fondly hope, for ever: his unearthly and elevated nature is a pledge of the continuation of his being, although in an altered form. Rome received his ashes: they are deposited beneath its weed-grown wall, and "the world's sole monument" is enriched by his remains.

solemnity-the compa

He spent a week at Pisa, employed in kind offices towards his friend, and enjoying with keen delight the renewal of their intercourse. He then embarked with Mr Williams, the chosen and beloved sharer of his pleasures and of his fate, to

a

This volume, which contains a republication of his " Alastor,' collection of all his smaller poems which have been scattered through different periodical works, with the addition of several unpublished poems and fragments, and some translalanguages, possesses exactly the same tions from the Greek and modern beauties and defects which characterize his published works-the same same obscurity— the same, or rather greater carelessness, and the same perfection of poetical expression. It is this last quality which will always give to Shelley an original and distinct character among the poets of the age; and in this, we have little hesitation cidedly superior to them all. in saying, that we consider him deEvery word he uses, even though the idea exaggerated, or unnatural, is intensehe labours to express be vague, or ly poetical. In no writer of the age is the distinction between poetry and prose so strongly marked: deprive his verses of the rhymes, and still the exquisite beauty of the language, the harmony of the pauses, the arrangement of the sentences, is perceptible. This is in itself a talent of no ordinary kind, perfectly separate in its nature, though generally found united with that vigour of imagina◄

tion which is essential to a great poet, and in Mr Shelley it overshadows even his powers of conception, which are unquestionably very great. It is by no means improbable, however, that this extreme anxiety to embody his ideas in language of a lofty and uncommon cast, may have contributed to that which is undoubtedly the besetting sin of his poetry, its extreme vagueness and obscurity, and its tendency to allegory and personification.

Among the many-folded hills,-they were Those famous Euganean hills, which bear,

As seen from Lido through the harbour
piles,

The likeness of a clump of peaked isles-
And then, as if the earth and sea had been
Dissolv'd into one lake of fire, were seen
Those mountains tow'ring, as from waves
of flame,

Around the vaporous sun, from which

Hence it is in the vague, unearthly, and mysterious, that the peculiar power of his mind is displayed. Like the Goule in the Arabian Tales, he leaves the ordinary food of men, to banquet among the dead, and revels with a melancholy delight in the gloom of the churchyard and the cemetery. He is in poetry what Sir Thomas Browne is in prose, perpetually hovering on the confines of the grave, prying with a terrible curiosity Said my companion, “I will show you into the secrets of mortality, and speculating with painful earnestness on every thing that disgusts or appals mankind.

But when, abandoning these darker themes, he yields himself to the description of the softer emotions of the heart, and the more smiling scenes of Nature, we know no poet who has felt more intensely, or described with more glowing colours the enthusiasm of love and liberty, or the varied aspects of Nature. His descriptions have a force and clearness of painting which are quite admirable ; and his imagery, which he accumulates and pours forth with the prodigality of genius, is, in general, equally appropriate and original. How forcible is this Italian sunset, from the first poem in the present collection, entitled Julian and Maddalo, a piece of a very wild, and not a very agreeable cast, but rich in eloquent and fervid painting!

As those who pause on some delightful

there came

The inmost purple spirit of light, and made
Their very peaks transparent.
"Ere it
fade,"

soon

A better station." So o'er the lagune
We glided; and from that funereal bark
I lean'd, and saw the city, and could mark
How from their many isles, in evening's

In melancholy gloom, the pinnace past,
By many a star-surrounded pyramid
Of icy crag cleaving the purple sky,
And caverns yawning round unfathom-
ably.

The silver noon into that winding dell,
With slanted gleam athwart the forest

tops,
Temper'd like golden evening, feebly fell;
A green and glowing light, like that
which drops

From folded lilies in which glowworms dwell,

When earth over her face night's man

tle wraps;

Between the severed mountains lay on

high,

Over the stream, a narrow rift of sky.

And ever as she went, the Image lay With folded wings and unawakened eyes;

And o'er its gentle countenance did play The busy dreams, as thick as summer flies,

Chasing the rapid smiles that would not stay,

and how much it may be injured by a harsh line, an imperfect or forced rhyme, a defective syllable, or, as is often the case here, an unfortunate [ occurring in the middle of a stanza. Others, however, are fortunately in a more finished state; and

And drinking the warm tears, and the though even in these it is probable

sweet sighs

Inhaling, which, with busy murmur vain,
They had arous'd from that full heart and

brain.

And ever down the prone vale, like a cloud
Upon a stream of wind, the pinnace

went :

Now lingering on the pools, in which abode

The calm and darkness of the deep content

In which they paus'd; now o'er the shallow road

Of white and dancing waters, all be sprent

With sand and polish'd pebbles :-mortal boat

In such a shallow rapid could not float.

And down the earthquaking cataracts, which shiver

Their snow-like waters into golden air, Or under chasms unfathomable ever Sepulchre them, till in their rage they

tear

A subterranean portal for the river,

It fled, the circling sunbows did up.
bear

Its fall down the hoar precipice of spray,
Lighting it far upon its lampless way.

By far the greater number of the pieces which the present volume contains are fragments, some of them in a very unfinished state indeed; and though we approve the feeling which led the friends of Mr Shelley to collect them all, we question whether a selection, from the more finished pieces, would not have been a more prudent measure, as far as his fame is concerned. It dissolves entirely the illusion which we wish to cherish as to the intuitive inspiration—the estro of poetry—to be thus admitted, as it were, into the workshop of Genius, and to see its materials confused and heaped together, before they have received their last touches from the hand of the poet, and been arranged in their proper order.

And it is wonderful how much the effect of the finest poem depends on an attention to minutiæ,

that much is wanting, which the last touches of the author would have given, we have no fear but that, imperfect as they are, they will bear us out in what we have said of the powers of the poet.

What a quiet stillness breathes over this description of

The Pine Forest

OF THE CASCINE, NEAR PISA!
We wandered to the Pine Forest
That skirts the Ocean's foam,
The lightest wind was in its nest,
The tempest in its home.

The whispering waves were half asleep,
The clouds were gone to play,
And on the woods, and on the deep,

The smile of Heaven lay.

It seemed as if the day were one
Sent from beyond the skies,
Which shed to earth above the sun
A light of Paradise.

We paused amid the Pines that stood

The giants of the waste,

Tortured by storms to shapes as rude,

With stems like serpents interlaced.
How calm it was !-the silence there

By such a chain was bound,
That even the busy woodpecker
Made stiller by her sound.
The inviolable quietness;

The breath of peace we drew,
With its soft motion made not less

The calm that round us grew.

It seemed that from the remotest seat
Of the white mountain's waste,
To the bright flower beneath our feet,
A magic circle traced ;—
A spirit interfused around,
To momentary peace it bound
A thinking, silent life,

Our mortal Nature's strife.-
For still it seemed the centre of

The magic circle there,
Was one whose being filled with love
The breathless atmosphere.
Were not the crocusses that grew
Under that ilex tree,
As beautiful in scent and hue
As ever fed the bee?

We stood beside the pools that lie
Under the forest bough,
And each seemed like a sky
Gulphed in a world below ;-

A purple firmament of light,

Which in the dark earth lay,
More boundless than the depth of night,
And clearer than the day-

In which the massy forests grew,
As in the upper air,
More perfect both in shape and hue
Than any waving there.

Like one beloved, the scene had lent
To the dark water's breast

Its every leaf and lineament
With that clear truth expressed.

There lay for glades and neighbouring
lawn,

And through the dark green crowd The white sun twinkling like the dawn Under a speckled cloud.

Sweet views, which in our world above

Can never well be seen,
Were imaged by the water's love
Of that fair forest green.
And all was interfused beneath
Within an Elysium air,
An atmosphere without a breath,
A silence sleeping there.

Until a wandering wind crept by,

Like an unwelcome thought,
Which from my mind's too faithful eye

Blots thy bright image out.

For thou art good, and dear, and kind,
The forest ever green,

But less of peace in S's mind,
Than calm in waters seen.

We should pity any one who could peruse the following affecting lines, entitled "Stanzas written in dejection, near Naples," without the strongest sympathy for their unfortunate author.

The sun is warm, the sky is clear,

The waves are dancing fast and bright, Blue isles and snowy mountains wear

The purple noon's transparent light
Around its unexpanded buds;

Like many a voice of one delight,
The winds, the birds, the ocean floods,
The City's voice itself is soft, like Soli-
tude's.

I see the Deep's untrampled floor

With green and purple seaweeds strown; I see the waves upon the shore,

Like light dissolv'd in star-show'rs, thrown:

I sit upon the sands alone,
The lightning of the noon-tide ocean
Is flashing round me, and a tone
Arises from its measur'd motion,
How sweet! did any heart now share
in my emction.

Alas! I have nor hope nor health,

Nor peace within nor calm around,
Nor that content surpassing wealth

The sage in meditation found,
And walk'd with inward glory crown'd-
Nor fame, nor pow'r, nor love, nor
leisure.

Others I see whom these surround,—
Smiling they live and call life pleasure;
To me that cup has been dealt in ano-
ther measure.

Yet now despair itself is mild,

Even as the winds and waters are ;
I could lie down like a tired child,
And weep away the life of care
Which I have borné and yet must bear,
Till death like sleep might steal on me,
And I might feel in the warm air

My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea
Breathe o'er my dying brain its last
monotony.

Some might lament that I were cold,

As I, when this sweet day is gone, Which my lost heart, too soon grown old, Insults with this untimely moan; They might lament, for I am one

Whom men love not,-and yet regret, Unlike this day, which, when the sun' Shall on its stainless glory set,

Will linger, though enjoy'd, like joy in memory yet.

The following lines also appear to us extremely beautiful, though, in order to preserve the full effect of the rythm, they require some management in the reading.

Lines.

When the lamp is shattered
The light in the dust lies dead-
When the cloud is scattered
The rainbow's glory is shed.

When the lute is broken,
Sweet tones are remembered not;
When the lips have spoken,
Loved accents are soon forgot.

As music and splendour
Survive not the lamp and the lute,

The heart's echoes render
No song when the spirit is mute :--
No song but sad dirges,
Like the wind through a ruined cell,
Or the mournful surges
That ring the dead seaman's knell.