THE SUNSET.1

THERE late was One within whose subtle being,
As light and wind within some delicate cloud
That fades amid the blue noon's burning sky,
Genius and death2 contended. None may know
The sweetness of the joy which made his breath
Fail, like the trances of the summer air,
When, with the Lady of his love, who then
First knew the unreserve of mingled being,
He walked along the pathway of a field
Which to the east a hoar wood shadowed o'er,
But to the west was open to the sky.

There now the sun had sunk, but lines of gold
Hung on the ashen clouds, and on the points
Of the far level grass and nodding flowers
And the old dandelion's hoary beard,
And, mingled with the shades of twilight, lay
On the brown massy woods-and in the east
The broad and burning moon lingeringly rose
Between the black trunks of the crowded trees,
While the faint stars were gathering overhead.—
"Is it not strange, Isabel," said the youth,
"I never saw the sun? We will walk here
To-morrow; thou shalt look on it with me."

That night the youth and lady mingled lay In love and sleep-but when the morning came

1 Mrs. Shelley says this poem was written in the Spring of 1816, while Shelley lived at Bishopgate, near Windsor Forest. It first occurs entire in the Posthumous Poems; but, in The Literary Pocket-Book for 1821, over the signature "A," lines 9 to 20 ap

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The lady found her lover dead and cold.
Let none believe that God in mercy gave
That stroke. The lady died not, nor grew wild,
But year by year lived on-in truth I think
Her gentleness and patience and sad smiles,
And that she did not die, but lived to tend
Her agèd father, were a kind of madness,
If madness 'tis to be unlike the world.
For but to see her were to read the tale

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Woven by some subtlest bard, to make hard hearts
Dissolve away in wisdom-working grief;—

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Her eyes were black and lustreless and wan :1

Her eyelashes were worn away with tears,

Her lips and cheeks were like things dead-so pale;
Her hands were thin, and through their wandering veins
And weak articulations might be seen

Day's ruddy light. The tomb of thy dead self
Which one vexed ghost inhabits, night and day,
Is all, lost child, that now remains of thee!

"Inheritor of more than earth can give,

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Passionless calm and silence unreproved,
Whether the dead find, oh, not sleep! but rest,
And are the uncomplaining things they seem,
Or live, or drop in the deep sea of Love;
Oh, that like thine, mine epitaph were-Peace!"
This was the only moan she ever made.

text without authority, I feel sure this line is corrupt, and should be

I never saw the sun-rise? We will wake here...

As it stands, the youth's statement and proposal seem preposterous,—one in improbability, the other in tameness as leading up to the violent close. That two young people should choose to sleep out of doors to see the sunrise would be an idea likely to commend itself to Shelley; and that he within whose being "genius and death

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contended" should die in the cold night air is eminently probable.

1 This lovely line is in the PocketBook; but I believe all editions but mine lack it.

2 In the Pocket-Book and Posthumous Poems, worn; but in the first edition of 1839 and onwards, torn,— certainly a misprint.

3 There is a comma at Passionless in the Posthumous Poems; but not in later editions.

FRAGMENT ON HOME.1

DEAR home, thou scene of earliest hopes and joys,
The least of which wronged Memory ever makes
Bitterer than all thine unremembered tears.

FRAGMENT OF A GHOST-STORY.2

A SHOVEL of his ashes took
From the hearth's obscurest nook,
Muttering mysteries as she went.
Helen and Henry knew that Granny
Was as much afraid of ghosts as any,
And so they followed hard-

But Helen clung to her brother's arm,
And her own spasm made her shake.

POEMS WRITTEN IN 1817.

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[It will be remembered that, to this eventful year 1817 belong Laon and Cythna and a portion of Rosalind and Helen, and that, during the same period, Shelley was occupied with his Chancery case, and with the two prose pamphlets published under the pseudonym of "The Hermit of Marlow," namely A Proposal for Putting Reform to the Vote throughout the United Kingdom, and An Address to the People on the Death of the Princess Charlotte (usually, and incorrectly, designated We pity the Plumage, but Forget the Dying Bird,—which words are an epigraph, not a title); so that this was altogether a year of great productiveness.-H. B. F.]