several Greeks, and, ever ready to identify himself with the cause of freedom against oppression, had entered deeply into the future prospect of Greece.

Associated with every thing great and glorious, both in the annals of peace and war, the fate of this classic land was sure to excite the warmest sympathies of a mind so richly stored with her history, her philosophy, and her literature.

Her present degraded and servile condition, under the deplorable misrule of the Turks, called forth his utmost abhorrence and indignation, and he earnestly looked forward to the hour of her delivery.

The sacred fire that had lighted up Spain and Italy, and the triumphant march of events that immediately followed, had been watched by the Greek patriots with exultation and delight. It rendered such a crisis by no means improbable, though there seemed nothing at the present moment to represent it as at all imminent.

Shelley had contracted a close intimacy with Prince Mavrocordato, an illustrious Greek, of the family of Caradja, formerly Hospodar of Wallachia, under whom he had officiated as Secretary for Foreign Affairs, and with whom he had fled from that province, on the former hearing that the bowstring was on its way to deprive him of his viceroyalty.

He had become the poet's constant visitor and frequent companion in study.

Besides being an elegant scholar, he possessed many of the qualities of a great statesman, and was pronounced at a later period by Lord Byron, who flatteringly associated him with Washington and Kosciusko, the only one among the Greeks worthy of that name. He was an ardent lover of his country, and constantly spoke of the possibility of an insurrection in Greece.

One morning, on the 1st of April, 1821, when such an event was little anticipated, Mavrocordato called on Shelley, bringing the proclamation of his cousin Prince Ipsilanti, and, radiant with exultation and delight, declared that henceforth Greece would be free.*

Such were the events that called forth the beautiful lyrical drama of "Hellas," in the same spirit of burning enthusiasm that had inspired the "Odes" on the revolutions in Spain and * Mrs Shelley's notes.

Naples. The concentrated energy, however, exhibited in those sublime rhapsodies is wanted in this composition.

Constructed on the model of the Persæ of Æschylus, Shelley has succeeded in producing a classical drama which he has adorned with many of his most brilliant thoughts. The same inspired eloquence, the same spirit of enthusiasm pervades it, and the choruses are written with all the lyrical beauty he was so eminently capable of; but there is not sufficient dramatic incident to spread over the space it is made to оссиру.

The reappearance of the Wandering Jew, the favourite impersonation of Shelley's earlier years, is not a little curious, and the language he is made to speak, in the dialogue with Mahmud, while it is the finest in the drama, is perhaps the most perfect exemplification we have of the poet's peculiar style of thought.

MAHMUD.

"I apprehend not

What thou hast taught me, but I now perceive
That thou art no interpreter of dreams;

Thou dost not own that art, device, or God

Can make the future present-let it come
Moreover thou disdainest us and ours!
Thou art as God whom thou contemplatest.

AHASUERUS.

"Disdain thee?-not the worm beneath thy feet !
The Fathomless has care for meaner things
Than thou canst dream, and has made pride for those
Who would be what they may not, or would seem
That which they are not. Sultan! talk no more
Of thee and me, the future and the past;
But look on that which cannot change the One
The unborn and the undying. Earth and ocean,
Space and the isles of life, or light, that gem
The sapphire floods of interstellar air,
This firmament pavilioned upon chaos,
With all its cressets of immortal fire,
Whose outwall bastioned impregnably
Against the escape of boldest thoughts, repels them
As Calpe the Atlantic clouds-this whole

Of suns, and worlds, and men, and beasts, and flowers,
With all the silent or tempestuous workings
By which they have been, are, or cease to be,
Is but a vision ;-all that it inherits

Are motes of a sick eye, bubbles and dreams;
Thought is its cradle and its grave, nor less
The future and the past are idle shadows
Of thought's eternal flight-they have no being;
Nought is but that it feels itself to be.

MAHMUD.

"What meanest thou? thy words stream like a tempest Of dazzling mist within my brain-they shake

The earth on which I stand, and hang like night
On Heaven above me. What can they avail ?
They cast on all things, surest, brightest, best,
Doubt, insecurity, astonishment.

AHASUERUS.

"Mistake me not! All is contained in each.
Dordona's forest to an acorn's cup

To that which has been or will be, to that
Which is the absent to the present. Thought
Alone, and its quick elements, Will, Passion,
Reason, Imagination, cannot die;

They are what that which they regard appears,
The stuff whence mutability can weave
All that it hath dominion o'er,-worlds, worms,
Empires, and superstitions. What has thought
To do with time, or place, or circumstance?
Wouldst thou behold the future? - ask and have!
Knock, and it shall be opened-look, and lo!
The coming age is shadowed on the past,
As on a glass."

Shelley had hoped this winter for the companionship of a brother poet, for whose genius he entertained the profoundest admiration; but his wishes were not to be fulfilled.

He had seen little of John Keats since they parted at Hampstead; but amidst all the trials, the sorrows and the sufferings that had befallen him since then, he never ceased to remember this