For the negro-ship, whose freight
Is the theme of their debate,
Wrinkling their red gills the while -

IV

365

Are ye, two vultures sick for battle,
Two scorpions under one wet stone,
Two bloodless wolves whose dry throats
rattle,

Two crows perched on the murrained cattle,

e

Two vipers tangled into one.

ENGLAND IN 1819

This sonnet was sent by Shelley to Hunt, November 23, 1819, -'I don't expect you to publish it, but you may show it to whom you please.' It was published by Mrs. Shelley, in her first collected edition, 1839.

AN old, mad, blind, despised and dying king;

Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who

flow

Through public scorn - mud from a muddy spring;

Rulers, who neither see, nor feel, nor know, But leech-like to their fainting country cling,

Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow;

A people starved and stabbed in the untilled field;

An army which liberticide and prey Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield;

Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay;

Religion Christless, Godless -a book sealed;

A Senate-Time's worst statute unrepealed, Are graves from which a glorious Phantom

may

Burst to illumine our tempestuous day.

NATIONAL ANTHEM

I

GOD prosper, speed, and save, God raise from England's grave Her murdered Queen!

Shelley writes as follows: 'Shelley was a disciple of the immaterial philosophy of Berkeley. This theory gave unity and grandeur to his ideas, while it opened a wide field for his imagination. The creation, such as it was perceived by his mind -- a unit in immensity, was slight and narrow compared with the interminable forms of thought that might exist beyond, to be perceived perhaps hereafter by his own mind; all of which are perceptible to other minds that fill the universe, not of space in the material sense, but of infinity in the immaterial one. Such ideas are, in some degree, developed in his poem entitled Heaven: and when he makes one of the interlocutors exclaim,

"Peace! the abyss is wreathed in scorn

Of thy presumption, atom-born "

he expresses his despair of being able to conceive, far less express, all of variety, majesty, and beauty, which is veiled from our imperfect senses in the unknown realm, the mystery of which his poetic vision sought in vain to pene

trate.'

CHORUS OF SPIRITS

FIRST SPIRIT

PALACE-ROOF of cloudless nights!
Paradise of golden lights!
Deep, immeasurable, vast,
Which art now, and which wert then,
Of the present and the past,
Of the eternal where and when,
Presence-chamber, temple, home,
Ever-canopying dome

Of acts and ages yet to come!

Glorious shapes have life in thee,
Earth, and all earth's company;

Living globes which ever throng
Thy deep chasms and wildernesses;
And green worlds that glide along;
And swift stars with flashing tresses;
And icy moons most cold and bright,
And mighty suns beyond the night,
Atoms of intensest light.

Even thy name is as a god,
Heaven! for thou art the abode
Of that power which is the glass
Wherein man his nature sees.
Generations as they pass
Worship thee with bended knees.
Their unremaining gods and they
Like a river roll away;

Thou remainest such alway.

utill