The Complete Poetical Works, vol 2 | Page 5

the pages of the same manuscript book that contains poems with the date of whose composition I am fully conversant. In the present arrangement all his poetical translations will be placed together at the end.
The loss of his early papers prevents my being able to give any of the poetry of his boyhood. Of the few I give as "Early Poems", the greater part were published with "Alastor"; some of them were written previously, some at the same period. The poem beginning 'Oh, there are spirits in the air' was addressed in idea to Coleridge, whom he never knew; and at whose character he could only guess imperfectly, through his writings, and accounts he heard of him from some who knew him well. He regarded his change of opinions as rather an act of will than conviction, and believed that in his inner heart he would be haunted by what Shelley considered the better and holier aspirations of his youth. The summer evening that suggested to him the poem written in the churchyard of Lechlade occurred during his voyage up the Thames in 1815. He had been advised by a physician to live as much as possible in the open air; and a fortnight of a bright warm July was spent in tracing the Thames to its source. He never spent a season more tranquilly than the summer of 1815. He had just recovered from a severe pulmonary attack; the weather was warm and pleasant. He lived near Windsor Forest; and his life was spent under its shades or on the water, meditating subjects for verse. Hitherto, he had chiefly aimed at extending his political doctrines, and attempted so to do by appeals in prose essays to the people, exhorting them to claim their rights; but he had now begun to feel that the time for action was not ripe in England, and that the pen was the only instrument wherewith to prepare the way for better things.
In the scanty journals kept during those years I find a record of the books that Shelley read during several years. During the years of 1814 and 1815 the list is extensive. It includes, in Greek, Homer, Hesiod, Theocritus, the histories of Thucydides and Herodotus, and Diogenes Laertius. In Latin, Petronius, Suetonius, some of the works of Cicero, a large proportion of those of Seneca and Livy. In English, Milton's poems, Wordsworth's "Excursion", Southey's "Madoc" and "Thalaba", Locke "On the Human Understanding", Bacon's "Novum Organum". In Italian, Ariosto, Tasso, and Alfieri. In French, the "Reveries d'un Solitaire" of Rousseau. To these may be added several modern books of travel. He read few novels.
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POEMS WRITTEN IN 1816.
THE SUNSET.
[Written at Bishopsgate, 1816 (spring). Published in full in the "Posthumous Poems", 1824. Lines 9-20, and 28-42, appeared in Hunt's "Literary Pocket-Book", 1823, under the titles, respectively, of "Sunset. From an Unpublished Poem", And "Grief. A Fragment".]
There late was One within whose subtle being,?As light and wind within some delicate cloud?That fades amid the blue noon's burning sky,?Genius and death contended. None may know?The sweetness of the joy which made his breath _5 Fail, like the trances of the summer air,?When, with the Lady of his love, who then?First knew the unreserve of mingled being,?He walked along the pathway of a field?Which to the east a hoar wood shadowed o'er, _10 But to the west was open to the sky.?There now the sun had sunk, but lines of gold?Hung on the ashen clouds, and on the points?Of the far level grass and nodding flowers?And the old dandelion's hoary beard, _15 And, mingled with the shades of twilight, lay?On the brown massy woods--and in the east?The broad and burning moon lingeringly rose?Between the black trunks of the crowded trees,?While the faint stars were gathering overhead.-- _20 'Is it not strange, Isabel,' said the youth,?'I never saw the sun? We will walk here?To-morrow; thou shalt look on it with me.'
That night the youth and lady mingled lay?In love and sleep--but when the morning came _25 The lady found her lover dead and cold.?Let none believe that God in mercy gave?That stroke. The lady died not, nor grew wild,?But year by year lived on--in truth I think?Her gentleness and patience and sad smiles, _30 And that she did not die, but lived to tend?Her aged father, were a kind of madness,?If madness 'tis to be unlike the world.?For but to see her were to read the tale?Woven by some subtlest bard, to make hard hearts _35 Dissolve away in wisdom-working grief;--?Her eyes were black and lustreless and wan:?Her eyelashes were worn away with tears,?Her lips and cheeks were like things dead--so pale;?Her hands were thin, and through their wandering veins _40 And weak articulations might be seen?Day's ruddy light. The tomb of thy dead self?Which one vexed ghost inhabits, night