This letter was written from the house of Mrs. Gisborne, where Shelley had turned the workshop of her son, Mr. Reveley, an engineer, into a study. 'Mrs. Gisborne,' writes Mrs. Shelley, 'had been a friend of my father in her younger days. She was a lady of great accomplishments, and charming from her frank and affectionate nature. She had the most intense love of knowledge, a delicate and trembling sensibility, and preserved freshness of mind after a life of considerable adversity. As a favorite friend of my father we had sought her with eagerness, and the most open and cordial friendship was established between us.' Shelley also describes her: 'Mrs. Gisborne is a sufficiently amiable and very accomplished woman; [she is δημοκρατικη and αθεη - how far she may be piλav@рwлη I don't know, for] she is the antipodes of enthusiasm.'

The poem was published by Mrs. Shelley, Posthumous Poems, 1824.

LEGHORN, July 1, 1820.

THE spider spreads her webs whether she be In poet's tower, cellar, or barn, or tree; The silkworm in the dark green mulberry leaves

His winding sheet and cradle ever weaves;
So I, a thing whom moralists call worm,
Sit spinning still round this decaying form,
From the fine threads of rare and subtle
thought-

No net of words in garish colors wrought
To catch the idle buzzers of the day
But a soft cell, where when that fades away
Memory may clothe in wings my living

Unless in treacherous wrath, as on the

morn

When the exulting elements in scorn, 40 Satiated with destroyed destruction, lay Sleeping in beauty on their mangled prey, As panthers sleep; and other strange and dread

Magical forms the brick floor overspread
Proteus transformed to metal did not make
More figures, or more strange; nor did he
take

Such shapes of unintelligible brass,
Or heap himself in such a horrid mass
Of tin and iron, not to be understood,
And forms of unimaginable wood
To puzzle Tubal Cain and all his brood;
Great screws, and cones, and wheels, and
grooved blocks,

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