"As I remember with the lady's shawl"I might be six years old-but after all

605

"She left him"... "Why, her heart must have been tough: "How did it end?" "And was not this enough? "They met-they parted "-"Child, is there no more ?" 'Something within that interval which bore

"The stamp of why they parted, how they met: "Yet if thine agèd eyes disdain to wet

610

"Those wrinkled cheeks with youth's remembered tears,
"Ask me no more, but let the silent years
"Be closed and cered over their memory

"As yon mute marble where their corpses lie."
I urged and questioned still, she told me how
All happened-but the cold world shall not know.

1 In the MS. But stood originally in this place: Yet is written over it.

615

CANCELLED PASSAGES OF JULIAN AND

MADDALO.

What think you the dead are?

Why, dust and clay,

What should they be?

'Tis the last hour of day.

Look on the west, how beautiful it is

Vaulted with radiant vapours! The deep bliss

Of that unutterable light has made

The edges of that cloud

fade

Into a hue, like some harmonious thought,

Wasting itself on that which it had wrought,

Till it dies

and between

The light hues of the tender, pure, serene,

And infinite tranquility of heaven.

Aye, beautiful! but when not....

Perhaps the only comfort which remains
Is the unheeded clanking of my chains,
The which I make, and call it melody.

(GARNETT'S Relics of Shelley, pp. 78 and 79.)

PRINCE ATHANASE

&c.

[In addition to the Fragment of Prince Athanase there was a selection of smaller poems which Shelley meant to have published with Julian and Maddalo. In a letter to Mr. Ollier, dated "Pisa, November 10th, 1820," printed in the Shelley Memorials (pp. 139 and 140), he says: "I send some poems to be added to the pamphlet of Julian and Maddalo. I think you have some other smaller poems belonging to that collection.... The Julian and Maddalo, and the accompanying poems, are all my saddest verses raked up into one heap. I mean to mingle more smiles with my tears in future." These remarks may not afford a sufficient key to the poems which were intended; but we cannot be far wrong in selecting from the Posthumous Poems all the saddest lyrics written before the end of 1820 and not published till they appeared in that volume in 1824. It will be remembered that Mrs. Shelley recovered from Mr. Ollier a quantity of MSS. for the purposes of that volume (eventually issued by John and Henry L. Hunt); and it is but natural to assume that the lyrics for the Julian and Maddalo collection were among them. I do not pretend to infallibility in the selection which, on these data, I have made from the Posthumous Poems, and placed after Prince Athanase; but it seems to me that the arrangement must be according to the spirit of Shelley's intention.-H. B. F.]

PRINCE ATHANASE.1

A FRAGMENT.

PART I.

THERE was a youth, who, as with toil and travel,
Had grown quite weak and grey before his time;
Nor any could the restless griefs unravel

Which burned within him, withering up his prime
And goading him, like fiends, from land to land.
Not his the load of any secret crime,

For nought of ill his heart could understand,
But pity and wild sorrow for the same;-
Not his the thirst for glory or command

Baffled with blast of hope-consuming shame;
Nor evil joys which fire the vulgar breast
And quench in speedy smoke its feeble flame,

Had left within his soul their dark unrest:
Nor what religion fables of the grave
Feared he,-Philosophy's accepted guest.

mous Poems,-and Marlow, 1817," at the end of the Fragments of Part II.