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Published by Mrs. Shelley, Posthumous Poems, 1824.

I

ONE word is too often profaned For me to profane it,

One feeling too falsely disdained For thee to disdain it;

One hope is too like despair

For prudence to smother, And pity from thee more dear Than that from another.

II

I can give not what men call love,
But wilt thou accept not
The worship the heart lifts above
And the Heavens reject not,
The desire of the moth for the star,
Of the night for the morrow,
The devotion to something afar
From the sphere of our sorrow?

REMEMBRANCE

Shelley sent these lines enclosed in a letter to Mrs. Williams: Dear Jane, - If this melancholy old song suits any of your tunes, or any that humor of the moment may dictate, you are welcome to it. Do not say it is mine to any one, even if you think so; indeed, it is from the torn leaf of a book out of date. How are you to-day, and how is Williams? Tell him that I dreamed of nothing but sailing and fishing up coral. Your ever affectionate P. B. S.' It was published by Mrs. Shelley, Posthumous Poems, 1824.

Shelley wrote on this poem, 'For Jane and Williams only to see.' Medwin, who published it, The Athenæum, 1832, gives an account of the experiments out of which it grew, in his Shelley Papers: 'Shelley was a martyr to a most painful complaint, which constantly menaced to terminate fatally; and was subject to violent paroxysms which, to his irritable nerves, were each a separate death. I had seen magnetism practised in India and at Paris, and at his earnest request consented to try its efficacy. Mesmer himself could not have hoped for more complete success. The imposition of my hand on his forehead instantaneously put a stop to the spasm, and threw him into a magnetic sleep, which for want of a better word is called somnambulism. Mrs. Shelley and another lady [Mrs. Williams] were present. The experiment was repeated more than once. During his trances I put some questions to him. He always pitched his voice in the same tone as mine. I enquired about his complaint, and its - the usual magnetic enquiries. His reply was, "What would cure me would kill [Shelley answered in Italian.] He improvised also verses in Italian, in which language he was never known to write poetry.' Medwin adds, in his Life of Shelley: After my departure from Pisa he was magnetized by a lady, which gave rise to the beautiful stanzas entitled The Magnetic Lady to her Patient, and during which operation he made the same reply to an enquiry as to his disease and its cure as he had done to me, "What would cure me would kill me." Mrs. Shelley also magnetized him, but soon discontinued the

cure

me

practice, from finding that he got up in his sleep, and went one night to the window (fortunately barred), having taken to his old habit of sleep-walking, which I mentioned, in his boyhood and also in London.'

I

'SLEEP, sleep on! forget thy pain;

My hand is on thy brow,

My spirit on thy brain;

My pity on thy heart, poor friend;
And from my fingers flow

The powers of life, and like a sign,
Seal thee from thine hour of woe;
And brood on thee, but may not blend
With thine.

II

'Sleep, sleep on! I love thee not;
But when I think that he
Who made and makes my lot
As full of flowers, as thine of weeds,
Might have been lost like thee;
And that a hand which was not mine
Might then have charmed his agony
As I another's—my heart bleeds
For thine.

III

Williams, in his Journal, February 2, describes such an excursion: Fine warm day. Jane accompanies Mary and S. to the sea-shore through the Cascine. They return about three. The poem was published by Mrs. Shelley, in an earlier form, in Posthumous Poems, 1824, and, as here given, in her second collected edition, 1839.

BEST and brightest, come away!
Fairer far than this fair Day,
Which, like thee to those in sorrow,
Comes to bid a sweet good-morrow
To the rough Year just awake
In its cradle on the brake.
The brightest hour of unborn Spring
Through the winter wandering,
Found it seems the halcyon Morn,
To hoar February born.

10

Bending from Heaven, in azure mirth,
It kissed the forehead of the Earth,
And smiled upon the silent sea,
And bade the frozen streams be free,
And waked to music all their fountains,
And breathed upon the frozen mountains,
And like a prophetess of May
Strewed flowers upon the barren way,
Making the wintry world appear

Like one on whom thou smilest, dear. 20

Radiant Sister of the Day,
Awake! arise! and come away!
To the wild woods and the plains,
And the pools where winter rains
Image all their roof of leaves,
Where the pine its garland weaves
Of sapless green, and ivy dun,
Round stems that never kiss the sun;
Where the lawns and pastures be
And the sand-hills of the sea;
Where the melting hoar-frost wets
The daisy-star that never sets,
And wind-flowers and violets,
Which yet join not scent to hue,
Crown the pale year weak and new:
When the night is left behind
In the deep east, dun and blind,
And the blue noon is over us,

And the multitudinous
Billows murmur at our feet,
Where the earth and ocean meet,
And all things seem only one,
In the universal sun.

THE RECOLLECTION

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