These woodland paths, and streams, and knelling waves 135 Fast to each sad pulsation of my breast, And made their melancholy arms the haven of my rest. Here will I live, within a little dell, Which but a month ago1 I saw full well:— A dream then pictured forth the solitude A voice then whispered a strange prophecy, My dearest, widowed friend,2 that thou and I As we before have done in Spezia's bay, 140 145 As through long hours we watched the sails that neared O'er the far sea, their3 vessel ne'er appeared; One pang of agony, one dying gleam Of hope led us along, beside the ocean stream, 1 This would seem to indicate that the poem was composed within two or three weeks of Shelley's death,—in which case, sad revolving year, in line 152, must be taken merely as referring to the lapse of time, not the lapse of a year. 2 Mrs. Williams,-the "Jane" of Shelley's exquisite song, "The keen stars were twinkling." 150 155 3 That originally, but altered to their in Mrs. Shelley's writing. 4 Williams, who was drowned with Shelley. 5 Leigh Hunt suggests as an emendation, thou too! thou too! ... for thy voice was hushed; but, as the pen has not been drawn through either of the readings, I leave Mrs. Shelley's in the text. With aspiration heaves no more-a part Of heaven-resumed past thou art become, Thy spirit waits with his in 1 The word the is inserted after Of in Hunt's writing: it does not seem to me an improvement. 2 I cannot find a more appropriate place than the present in which to give the little poem by Mrs. Shelley, originally published in The Keepsake for 1831, and entitled A DIRGE. BY THE AUTHOR OF "FRANKENSTEIN." This morn, thy gallant bark, love, Sail'd on the sunny sea; Ah, woe! ah, woe! ah, woe! Thou liest upon the shore, love, Beside the swelling surge; our far home.2 But sea-nymphs ever more, love, O come! O come! O come From far across the sea, love, In her first collected edition of Shelley's Poetical Works (1839), Mrs. Shelley headed the Notes to the Poems of 1822 with a revised version of this Dirge; varying sufficiently from the original to make it quite worth while to rescue the earlier version. [The little volume containing Alastor and other poems, whereof the original title-page is reproduced opposite, seems to have become scarce as early as 1824, for Mrs. Shelley says, in her preface to the Posthumous Poems of that year, "I have added a reprint of 'Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude' :-the difficulty with which a copy can be obtained is the cause of its republication." This volume has no table of contents, but consists of title, 4 pages of preface, a fly-title with quotation from St. Augustine, and 101 pages of text, including the respective fly-titles to the Poems and The Dæmon of the World. The poems printed with Alastor are (1) the Stanzas addressed to Coleridge, headed AAKPTEI AIOIEN HOTMON AñоTMON, (2) Stanzas, April, 1814, (3) Mutability, (4) the Stanzas on the verse of Ecclesiastes, "There is no work, nor device," &c., (5) A Summer-Evening Church-yard, (6) Sonnet To Wordsworth, (7) Sonnet, Feelings of a Republican on the Fall of Bonaparte, (8) Superstition (an excerpt from Queen Mab), (9) Sonnet from the Italian of Dante, (10) Sonnet, Translated from the Greek of Moschus, (11) The Damon of the World. I am not aware of any extant manuscript of Alastor.-H. B. F.] |
