EPIPSYCHIDION

VERSES ADDRESSED TO THE NOBLE

AND UNFORTUNATE LADY

EMILIA V[IVIANI]

NOW IMPRISONED IN THE CONVENT of [st. anne]

L'anima amante si slancia fuori del creato, e si crea nel infinito un Mondo tutto per essa, diverso assai da questo oscuro e pauroso baratro.

HER OWN WORDS.

ADVERTIZEMENT

[By Shelley]

fiction

THE Writer of the following Lines died at A poetic Florence, as he was preparing for a voyage to one of the wildest of the Sporades, which he had bought, and where he had fitted up the ruins of an old building, and where it was his hope to have realized a scheme of life, suited perhaps to that happier and better world of which he is now an inhabitant, but hardly practicable in this. His life was singular; less on account of the romantic vicissitudes which diversified it, than the ideal tinge which it received from his own character and feelings.

chidion

and Vita

Epipsy. The present Poem, like the Vita Nuova of Dante, is sufficiently intelligible to a certain Nuova class of readers without a matter-of-fact history of the circumstances to which it relates; and to a certain other class it must ever remain incomprehensible, from a defect of a common organ of perception for the ideas of which it treats. Not but that, gran vergogna sarebbe a colui, che rimasse cosa sotto veste di figura, o di colore rettorico e domandato non sapesse denudare le sue parole da cotal veste, in guisa che avessero verace intendimento.

The present poem appears to have been intended by the Writer as the dedication to some longer one. The stanza on the opposite page is almost a literal translation from Dante's famous Canzone

Voi, ch' intendendo, il terzo ciel movete, etc.

The presumptuous application of the concluding lines to his own composition will raise a smile at the expense of my unfortunate friend: be it a smile not of contempt, but pity.

S.

[STANZAS FROM DANTE
REFERRED TO OPPOSITE]

My Song, I fear that thou wilt find but few
Who fitly shall conceive thy reasoning,
Of such hard matter dost thou entertain;
Whence, if by misadventure, chance should bring
Thee to base company, (as chance may do,)
Quite unaware of what thou dost contain,
I prithee, comfort thy sweet self again,
My last delight! tell them that they are dull,
And bid them own that thou art beautiful.

From Dante's "Voi

ch'intendendo"

LIX

She And where within the surface of the river observes The shadows of the massy temples lie, sleeping mortals And never are erased-but tremble ever

Like things which every cloud can doom to die, Through lotus-paven canals, and wheresoever The works of man pierced that serenest sky With tombs, and towers, and fanes, 'twas her delight

To wander in the shadow of the night.

LX

With motion like the spirit of that wind
Whose soft step deepens slumber, her light
feet

Passed through the peopled haunts of human
kind,

Scattering sweet visions from her presence sweet,

Through fane, and palace-court, and labyrinth mined

With many a dark and subterranean street Under the Nile, through chambers high and deep

She passed, observing mortals in their sleep.

LXI

A pleasure sweet doubtless it was to see
Mortals subdued in all the shapes of sleep.
Here lay two sister twins in infancy;

There, a lone youth who in his dreams did

weep;

Within, two lovers linkèd innocently

In their loose locks which over both did

creep

Like ivy from one stem ;—and there lay calm
Old age with snow-bright hair and folded palm.

LXII

But other troubled forms of sleep she saw,
Not to be mirrored in a holy song-
Distortions foul of supernatural awe,

And pale imaginings of visioned wrong;
And all the code of custom's lawless law
Written the brows of old and young:
"This," said the wizard maiden, "is the strife
Which stirs the liquid surface of man's life."

upon

LXIII

And little did the sight disturb her soul.-
We, the weak mariners of that wide lake,
Where'er its shores extend or billows roll,
Our course unpiloted and starless make
O'er its wild surface to an unknown goal;
But she in the calm depths her way could take,
Where in bright bowers immortal forms abide
Beneath the weltering of the restless tide.

LXIV

And she saw princes couched under the glow
Of sunlike gems; and round each temple-

court

In dormitories ranged, row after row,

She saw the priests asleep-all of one sortFor all were educated to be so.

The peasants in their huts, and in the port

in all their varieties