And this apostrophe to Music: No, Music, thou art not the God of Love, In another fragment he calls it The silver key of the fountain of tears, Where the spirit drinks till the brain is wild; Softest grave of a thousand fears, Where their mother, Care, like a drowsy child, Is laid asleep in flowers. And then again this melancholy trace of the sad thronging thoughts, which were the well whence he drew the idea of Athanase, and express the restless, passion-fraught emotions of one whose sensibility, kindled to too intense a life, perpetually preyed upon itself: To thirst and find no fill-to wail and wander Till dim imagination just possesses The half-created shadow. In the next page I find a calmer sentiment, better fitted to sustain one whose whole being was love: Wealth and dominion fade into the mass All that frail stuff which will be-or which was. In another book, which contains some pass.onate outbreaks with regard to the great injustice that he endured this year, the poet writes My thoughts arise and fade in solitude; The verse that would invest them melts away 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: OTHO. Thou wert not, Cassius, and thou couldst not be, 'Twill wrong thee not-thou wouldst, if thou couldst feel, 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, 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, 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 Of aught but thine own features, imaged there; 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 66 port or madeira," but in youth he had read of "Illuminati and Eleutherarchs," and believed that he posessed 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. |