My thoughts arise and fade in solitude,

The verse that would invest them melts away
Like moonlight in the heaven of spreading day:
How beautiful they were, how firm they stood,
Flecking the starry sky like woven pearl!

He had this year also projected a poem on the subject of Otho, inspired by the pages of Tacitus. I find one or two stanzas only, which were to open the subject:

отно.

Thou wert not, Cassius, and thou couldst not be,
Last of the Romans, though thy memory claim
From Brutus his own glory-and on thee
Rests the full splendour of his sacred fame;
Nor he who dared make the foul tyrant quail,
Amid his cowering senate with thy name,
Though thou and he were great—it will avail
To thine own fame that Otho's should not fail.

'Twill wrong thee not-thou wouldst, if thou couldst feel,
Abjure such envious fame-great Otho died
Like thee-he sanctified his country's steel,
At once the tyrant and tyrannicide,

In his own blood-a deed it was to buy

Tears from all men-though full of gentle pride,
Such pride as from impetuous love may spring,
That will not be refused its offering.

I insert here also the fragment of a song, though I do not know the date when it was written,-but it was early:

ΤΟ

Yet look on me-take not thine eyes away,
Which feed upon the love within mine own,
Which is indeed but the reflected ray

Of thine own beauty from my spirit thrown.

Yet speak to me-thy voice is as the tone

Of my heart's echo, and I think I hear
That thou yet lovest me; yet thou alone
Like one before a mirror, without care

Of aught but thine own features, imaged there;
And yet I wear out life in watching thee;
A toil so sweet at times, and thou indeed

Art kind when I am sick, and pity me.

He projected also translating the Hymns of Homer; his version of several of the shorter ones remain, as well as that to Mercury, already published in the Posthumous Poems. His readings this year were chiefly Greek. Besides the Hymns of Homer and the Iliad, he read the Dramas of Eschylus and Sophocles, the Symposium of Plato, and Arrian's Historia Indica. In Latin, Apuleius alone is named. In English, the Bible was his constant study; he read a great portion of it aloud in the evening. Among these evening readings, I find also mentioned the Fairy Queen, and other modern works, the production of his contemporaries, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Moore, and Byron.

His life was now spent more in thought than action-he had lost the eager spirit which believed it could achieve what it projected for the benefit of mankind. And yet in the converse of daily life Shelley was far from being a melancholy man. He was eloquent when philosophy, or politics, or taste, were the subjects of conversation. He was playful-and indulged in the wild spirit that mocked itself and others--not in bitterness, but in sport. The Author of "Nightmare Abbey" seized on some points of his character and some habits of his life when he painted Scythrop. He was not addicted to "port or madeira," but in youth he had read of "Illuminati and Eleutherarchs," and believed that he possessed the power of operating an immediate change in the minds of men and the state of society. These wild dreams had faded; sorrow and adversity had struck home; but he struggled with despondency as he did with physical pain. There are few who remember him sailing paper boats, and

watching the navigation of his tiny craft with eagernessor repeating with wild energy "The Ancient Mariner," and Southey's "Old Woman of Berkeley,"-but those who do, will recollect that it was in such, and in the creations of his own fancy, when that was most daring and ideal, that he sheltered himself from the storms and disappointments, the pain and sorrow, that beset his life.

POEMS WRITTEN IN 1818.

ADVERTISEMENT

TO ROSALIND AND HELEN, AND LINES WRITTEN AMONG THE EUGANEAN HILLS.

NAPLES, Dec. 20, 1818.

THE story of ROSALIND and HELEN is, undoubtedly, not an attempt in the highest style of poetry. It is in no degree calculated to excite profound meditation; and if, by interesting the affections and amusing the imagination, it awaken a certain ideal melancholy favourable to the reception of more important impressions, it will produce in the reader all that the writer experienced in the composition. I resigned myself, as I wrote, to the impulse of the feelings which moulded the conception of the story; and this impulse determined the pauses of a measure, which only pretends to be regular, inasmuch as it corresponds with, and expresses, the irregularity of the imaginations which inspired it.

I do not know which of the few scattered poems I left in England will be selected by my bookseller to add to this collection. One, which I sent from Italy, was written after a day's excursion among those lovely mountains which surround what was once the retreat, and where is now the sepulchre, of Petrarch. If any one is inclined to condemn the insertion of the introductory lines, which image forth the sudden relief of a state of deep despondency by the radiant visions disclosed by the sudden burst of an Italian sunrise in autumn, on the highest peak of those delightful mountains, I can only offer as my excuse, that they were not erased at the request of a dear friend, with whom added years of intercourse only add to my apprehension of its value, and who would have had more right than any one to complain, that she has not been able to extinguish in me the very power of delineating sadness.