Its top with vine-leaves sprinkled, but no more,-
And a young bay-tree either side the door.
The door was to the wood, forward and square,
The rest was domed at top, and circular;
And through the dome the only light came in,
Tinged as it entered by the vine-leaves thin.

It was a beauteous piece of ancient skill,
Spared from the rage of war, and perfect still;
By some supposed the work of fairy hands,-
Famed for luxurious taste, and choice of lands,
Alcina or Morgana,-who from fights

And errant fame inveigled amorous knights,
And lived with them in a long round of blisses,
Feasts, concerts, baths, and bower-enshaded kisses.
But 'twas a temple, as its sculpture told,

Built to the Nymphs that haunted there of old;
For o'er the door was carved a sacrifice

By girls and shepherds brought, with reverend eyes,
Of sylvan drinks and foods, simple and sweet,
And goats with struggling horns and planted feet:
And round about, ran, on a line with this,

In like relief, a world of pagan bliss,

That shewed, in various scenes, the nymphs themselves; Some by the water-side, on bowery shelves

Leaning at will, some in the stream at play,—

Some pelting the young Fauns with buds of May,

Or half-asleep, pretending not to see.

The latter in the brakes come creepingly,
While from their careless urns, lying aside
In the long grass, the straggling waters glide.
Never, be sure, before or since was seen

A summer-house so fine in such a nest of green.

RONDEAU.

Jenny kissed me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief, who love to get

Sweets into your list, put that in:
Say I'm weary, say I'm sad,

Say that health and wealth have missed me,
Say I'm growing old, but add,

Jenny kissed me.

TO THE GRASSHOPPER AND THE CRICKET.

Green little vaulter in the sunny grass,
Catching your heart up at the feel of June,
Sole voice that's heard amidst the lazy noon,
When even the bees lag at the summoning brass;
And you, warm little housekeeper, who class
With those who think the candles come too soon,
Loving the fire, and with your tricksome tune
Nick the glad silent moments as they pass;

O sweet and tiny cousins, that belong,

One to the fields, the other to the hearth,

Both have your sunshine; both, though small, are strong At your clear hearts; and both seem given to earth

To ring in thoughtful ears this natural song—

In doors and out, summer and winter, Mirth.

THE FISH, THE MAN, AND THE SPIRIT.
To Fish.

You strange, astonished-looking, angle-faced,
Dreary-mouthed, gaping wretches of the sea,
Gulping salt-water everlastingly,

Cold-blooded, though with red your blood be graced,
And mute, though dwellers in the roaring waste;

And you, all shapes beside, that fishy be,-
Some round, some flat, some long, all devilry,
Legless, unloving, infamously chaste :—

O scaly, slippery, wet, swift, staring wights,
What is 't ye do? what life lead? eh, dull goggles?
How do ye vary your vile days and nights ?

How pass your Sundays? Are ye still but joggles
In ceaseless wash? Still nought but gapes, and bites,
And drinks, and stares, diversified with boggles ?

A Fish answers.

Amazing monster! that, for aught I know,
With the first sight of thee didst make our race
For ever stare! O flat and shocking face,
Grimly-divided from the breast below!
Thou that on dry land horribly dost go
With a split body and most ridiculous pace,
Prong after prong, disgracer of all grace,
Long-useless-finned, haired, upright, unwet, slow !
O breather of unbreathable, sword-sharp air,
How canst exist? How bear thyself, thou dry
And dreary sloth! What particle canst share
Of the only blessed life, the watery?

I sometimes see of ye an actual pair

Go by! linked fin by fin! most odiously.

The Fish turns into a Man, and then into a Spirit, and again speaks
Indulge thy smiling scorn, if smiling still,

O man! and loathe, but with a sort of love:
For difference must its use by difference prove,
And, in sweet clang, the spheres with music fill.
One of the spirits am I, that at his will
Live in whate'er has life-fish, eagle, dove-
No hate, no pride, beneath nought, nor above,
A visitor of the rounds of God's sweet skill.

Man's life is warm, glad, sad, 'twixt loves and graves,
Boundless in hope, honoured with pangs austere,
Heaven-gazing; and his angel-wings he craves :—
The fish is swift, small-needing, vague yet clear,
A cold, sweet, silver life, wrapp'd in round waves,
Quickened with touches of transporting fear.

PERCY BYSSHE

SHELLEY.

[PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, eldest son of Timothy Shelley (afterwards Sir Timothy Shelley, Bart.), was born at Field Place, near Horsham in Sussex, August 4, 1792. He was educated at Eton and at University College, Oxford; but was expelled from Oxford in 1811 on account of his authorship of a tract on The Necessity of Atheism. In the same year he married Harriet Westbrook, a girl of sixteen, daughter of a coffee-house keeper, but separated from her in 1814. His intimacy with Mary Godwin, daughter of William Godwin, author of Political Justice, and of Mary Wollstonecraft, led to a marriage with her after his first wife's death in 1816. In 1817 he was deprived by Lord Eldon of the custody of his children by his first marriage, and in 1818 he left England for Italy, in which country he resided, mainly at Naples, Leghorn, and Pisa, till his death by drowning in the gulf of Spezia, July 8, 1822. Queen Mab, his first work of any note, was privately printed in 1813; Alastor was published in 1816; and Laon and Cythna, published and withdrawn in 1817, was reissued as The Revolt of Islam in 1818. The Cenci and Prometheus Unbound were both published in 1820. Epipsychidion was printed, and Adonais published in 1821, and the list is ended by Hellas published in 1822,—the year of the poet's untimely death.]

The title of 'the poets' poet,' which has been bestowed for various reasons on very different authors, applies perhaps with a truer fitness to Shelley than to any of the rest. For all students of Shelley must in a manner feel that they have before them an extreme, almost an extravagant, specimen of the poetic character; and the enthusiastic love, or contemptuous aversion, which his works have inspired has depended mainly on the reader's sympathy or distaste for that character when exhibited in its unmixed intensity.

And if a brief introductory notice is to be prefixed to a selection from those poems, it becomes speedily obvious that it is on Shelley's individual nature, rather than on his historical position, that stress must be laid. Considered as a link in the chain of English literature, his poetry is of less importance than we might expect. It is not closely affiliated to the work of any preceding school, nor,

with one or two brilliant exceptions, has it modified subsequent poetry in any conspicuous way. It is no doubt true that Shelley, belonging to that group of poets whose genius was awakened by the stirring years which ushered in this century, shows traces of the influence of more than one contemporary. There are echoes of Wordsworth in Alastor, echoes of Moore in the lyrics, echoes even of Byron in the later poems. But, with the possible exception of Wordsworth, whose fresh revelation of Nature supplied poetic nutriment even to minds quite alien from his own, none of these can be said to have perceptibly modified either the substance or the style of Shelley's works as a whole.

Nor, again, will it be useful to dwell at length here on the special characteristics of each of his poems in order. They show indeed much apparent diversity both of form and content. Alastor is the early reflection of the dreamy and solitary side of its author's nature. The Revolt of Islam embodies in a fantastic tale the poet's eager rebellion against the cruelties and oppressions of the world. In Prometheus Unbound these two strains mingle in their highest intensity. The drama of The Cenci shows Shelley's power of dealing objectively with the thoughts and passions of natures other than his own. Adonais, his elegy on the death of Keats, is the most carefully finished, and the most generally popular, of his longer pieces. And in the songs and odes which he poured forth during his last years, his genius, essentially lyrical, found its most unmixed and spontaneous expression. But in fact the forms which Shelley's poems assumed, or the occasions which gave them birth, are not the points on which it is most important to linger. It is in 'the one Spirit's plastic stress' which pervades them all,-in the exciting and elevating quality which all in common possess,-that the strange potency of Shelley lies.

For although the directly traceable instances of this great poet's influence on the style of his successors may be few or unimportant, it by no means follows that the impression left by his personality has been small. On the contrary, it has, I believe, been deeply felt by most of those who since his day have had any share of poetic sensibility as at once an explanation and a justification of the points in which they feel themselves different from the mass of mankind. His character and his story,-more chequered and romantic than Wordsworth's, purer and loftier than Byron's,-are such as to call forth in men of ardent and poetic temper the maximum at once of sympathetic pity and sympathetic triumph.