leaves dead,
Is lying.

Come, Months, come away,
From November to May,

In your saddest array;

Follow the bier

Of the dead cold year,

III

First our pleasures die - and then
Our hopes, and then our fears—and when
These are dead, the debt is due,
Dust claims dust- and we die too.

IV

All things that we love and cherish,
Like ourselves, must fade and perish;
Such is our rude mortal lot -
Love itself would, did they not.

LIBERTY

Published by Mrs. Shelley, Posthumous Poems, 1824.

I

THE fiery mountains answer each other, Their thunderings are echoed from zone to

zone;

chre.

And the ice-rocks are shaken round Winter's throne,

When the clarion of the Typhoon is blown.

II

From a single cloud the lightning flashes, Whilst a thousand isles are illumined around;

Earthquake is trampling one city to ashes, An hundred are shuddering and tottering; the sound

Is bellowing underground.

III

But keener thy gaze than the lightning's glare,

And swifter thy step than the earthquake's tramp;

Thou deafenest the rage of the ocean; thy

stare

Makes blind the volcanoes; the sun's bright lamp

To thine is a fen-fire damp.

IV

From billow and mountain and exhalation The sunlight is darted through vapor and

blast;

From spirit to spirit, from nation to nation, From city to hamlet, thy dawning is cast, And tyrants and slaves are like shadows of night

In the van of the morning light.

LINES TO A REVIEWER Published by Hunt, The Literary PocketBook, 1823.

ALAS! good friend, what profit can you see
In hating such a hateless thing as me?
There is no sport in hate when all the rage
Is on one side. In vain would you assuage
Your frowns upon an unresisting smile,
In which not even contempt lurks to beguile
Your heart by some faint sympathy of hate.
Oh, conquer what you cannot satiate!
For to your passion I am far more coy
Than ever yet was coldest maid or boy
In winter noon. Of your antipathy
If I am the Narcissus, you are free
To pine into a sound with hating me.

Mrs. Shelley gives, as usual, the general scene and atmosphere of the year, which was spent at Pisa or the Baths of San Giuliano: We were not, as our wont had been, alone - friends had gathered round us. Nearly all are dead; and when memory recurs to the past, she wanders among tombs: the genius with all his blighting errors and mighty powers; the companion of Shelley's ocean-wanderings, and the sharer of his fate, than whom no man ever existed more gentle, generous, and fearless; and others, who found in Shelley's society, and in his great knowledge and warm sympathy, delight, instruction and solace, have joined him beyond the grave.

...

Shelley's favorite taste was boating; when living near the Thames, or by the lake of Geneva, much of his life was spent on the water. On the shore of every lake, or stream, or sea, near which he dwelt, he had a boat moored. He had latterly enjoyed this pleasure again. There are no pleasure-boats on the Arno, and the shallowness of its waters, except in winter time, when the stream is too turbid and impetuous for boating, rendered it difficult to get any skiff light enough to float. Shelley, however, overcame the difficulty; he, together with a friend, contrived a boat such as the huntsmen carry about with them in the Maremma, to cross the sluggish but deep

66

streams that intersect the forests, a boat of
laths and pitched canvas; it held three per-
sons, and he was often seen on the Arno in it,
to the horror of the Italians, who remonstrated
on the danger, and could not understand how
any one could take pleasure in an exercise that
risked life. Ma va per la vita!" they ex-
claimed. I little thought how true their words
would prove. He once ventured with a friend
[Williams], on the glassy sea of a calm day,
down the Arno and round the coast, to Leg-
horn, which by keeping close in shore was very
practicable. They returned to Pisa by the
canal, when, missing the direct cut, they got
entangled among weeds, and the boat upset;
a wetting was all the harm done except that
the intense cold of his drenched clothes made
Shelley faint. Once I went down with him to
the mouth of the Arno, where the stream, then
high and swift, met the tideless sea and dis-
turbed its sluggish waters; it was a waste and
dreary scene; the desert sand stretched into a
point surrounded by waves that broke idly
though perpetually around; it was a scene
very similar to Lido, of which he had said,
"I love all waste

And solitary places, where we taste
The pleasure of believing what we see
Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be;
And such was this wide ocean, and this shore
More barren than its billows."