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As like his father, as I'm unlike mine,
Which is not his fault, as you may divine.1
Though we eat little flesh and drink no wine,
Yet let's be merry: we'll have tea and toast;
Custards for supper, and an endless host
Of syllabubs and jellies and mince-pies,
And other such lady-like luxuries,—

Feasting on which we will philosophize!

And we'll have fires out of the Grand Duke's wood,
To thaw the six weeks' winter in our blood.

And then we'll talk;-what shall we talk about?
Oh! there are themes enough for many a bout
Of thought-entangled descant;—as to nerves—
With cones and parallelograms and curves
I've sworn to strangle them if once they dare
To bother me when you are with me there.
And they shall never more sip laudanum,
From Helicon or Himeros*;-well, come,2
And in despite of God3 and of the devil,
We'll make our friendly philosophic revel

300

305

310

31

Outlast the leafless time; till buds and flowers
Warn the obscure inevitable hours,

320

Sweet meeting by sad parting to renew ;-
"Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new."

* "Iμepos, from which the river Himera was named, is, with some slight shade of difference, a synonyme of Love.

1 This line, which is in the transcript, appears now, I believe, for the first time.

2 In the transcript, in the Posthumous Poems, and in the first edition of 1839, we'll come; but in the second edition of 1839, and onwards, well,

come.

3 Three asterisks have hitherto stood in this place in all editions; and the blank has been much discussed and debated. Sir Percy Shelley's MS. affords no clue to the lost word, now

[SHELLEY'S NOTE.]

given from the transcript, which also supports the word despite, given in the Posthumous Poems, but dropped in favour of spite, in Mrs. Shelley's later editions.

4 So in the transcript, and of course rightly; but in all Mrs. Shelley's editions we read Will for We'll, a corruption doubtless consequent on the former one, we'll for well in line 317, but not corrected when that was put right.

THE WITCH OF ATLAS.

VOL. III.

[Mrs. Shelley tells us that, during some of the hottest days of August 1820, Shelley made an excursion from the Baths of San Giuliano to the summit of Monte San Pellegrino, and wrote, in the three days immediately after his return, The Witch of Atlas,-a poem which Mrs. Shelley characterizes as "a brilliant congregation of ideas, such as his senses gathered, and his fancy coloured, during his rambles in the sunny land he so much loved." The poem was sent to Mr. Ollier for publication; and in writing to that gentleman on the 22nd of February 1821, Shelley directed that it should not be included in the same volume as Julian and Maddalo, adding (Shelley Memorials, p. 154)—“You may put my name to The Witch of Atlas, as usual." It was not, however, published until 1824, when Mrs. Shelley included it in the Posthumous Poems. Sir Percy Shelley has a perfect MS. of it in Shelley's handwriting, from which Mr. Garnett gave some emendations in his Relics of Shelley; and among the Leigh Hunt MSS. placed at my disposal by Mr. Townshend Mayer, is a transcript in Mrs. Shelley's writing. This transcript is of great interest, as shewing variations from the received text. The six stanzas to Mary were not given in the Posthumous Poems, perhaps on account of the references to Wordsworth in the last three,-which Mrs. Shelley issued for the first time in her second collected edition of 1839, Wordsworth being still alive. The reference to Laon and Cythna in the third of these stanzas is very striking. Shelley seems to have hardly suspected that there would be a resurrection for that poem, in any form, much less in the very form in which it was most dear to him.-H. B. F.]

TO MARY,

(ON HER OBJECTING TO THE FOLLOWING POEM, UPON THE SCORE OF ITS CONTAINING NO HUMAN INTEREST.)

I.

How, my dear Mary, are you critic-bitten,

(For vipers kill, though dead,) by some review, That you condemn these verses I have written, Because they tell no story, false or true!

What, though no mice are caught by a young kitten,
May it not leap and play as grown cats do,
Till its claws come? Prithee, for this one time,
Content thee with a visionary rhyme.

II.

What hand would crush the silken-wingèd fly,
The youngest of inconstant April's minions,
Because it cannot climb the purest sky,

Where the swan sings, amid the sun's dominions? Not thine. Thou knowest 'tis its doom to die, When day shall hide within her twilight pinions, The lucent eyes, and the eternal smile,

Serene as thine, which lent it life awhile.

III.

To thy fair feet a wingèd Vision came,

Whose date should have been longer than a day, And o'er thy head did beat its wings for fame, And in thy sight its fading plumes display;

244

LINES TO MARY ON THE WITCH OF ATLAS.

The watery bow burned in the evening flame,

But the shower fell, the swift sun went his wayAnd that is dead.- O, let me not believe That any thing of mine is fit to live!

IV.

Wordsworth informs us he was nineteen years
Considering and retouching Peter Bell;
Watering his laurels with the killing tears

Of slow, dull care, so that their roots to hell
Might pierce, and their wide branches blot the spheres
Of heaven, with dewy leaves and flowers; this well
May be, for Heaven and Earth conspire to foil
The over-busy gardener's blundering toil.

V.

My Witch indeed is not so sweet a creature
As Ruth or Lucy, whom his graceful praise
Clothes for our grandsons-but she matches Peter,
Though he took nineteen years, and she three days
In dressing. Light the vest of flowing metre

She wears; he, proud as dandy with his stays,
Has hung upon his wiry limbs a dress

Like King Lear's "looped and windowed raggedness.'

VI.

If you strip Peter, you will see a fellow,
Scorched by Hell's hyperequatorial climate
Into a kind of a sulphureous yellow:

A lean mark, hardly fit to fling a rhyme at;
In shape a Scaramouch, in hue Othello.1

If you unveil my Witch, no priest nor primate
Can shrive you of that sin,-if sin there be
In love, when it becomes idolatry.

1 In Mrs. Shelley's editions this period is misprinted as a comma.

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