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It visits with inconstant glance

Each human heart and countenance;
Like hues and harmonies of evening,—

Like clouds in starlight widely spread,-
Like memory of music fled,-

Like aught that for its grace may be
Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery.

2.

Spirit of BEAUTY, that dost1 consecrate

With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon
Of human thought or form,-where art thou gone?
Why dost thou pass away and leave our state,
This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate ?
Ask why the sunlight not for ever

Weaves rainbows o'er yon mountain river,

Why aught should fail and fade that once is shewn,
Why fear and dream2 and death and birth

Cast on the daylight of this earth

Such gloom, why man has such a scope
For love and hate, despondency and hope?

3.

No voice from some sublimer world hath ever

To sage or poet these responses given

Therefore the names of Demon, Ghost, and Heaven,

Remain the records of their vain endeavour,

Frail spells-whose uttered charm might not avail to sever,
From all we hear and all we see,

Doubt, chance, and mutability.

Thy light alone-like mist o'er mountains driven,

1 In The Examiner, dost; but doth
in the Rosalind and Helen volume.
2 Mr. Garnett tells me an interest-

ing MS. variation in this line,-care and pain for fear and dream,-is shewn by Sir Percy Shelley's MS.

12

Or music by the night wind sent,
Thro' strings of some still instrument,
Or moonlight on a midnight stream,

Gives grace and truth to life's unquiet dream.

4.1

Love, Hope, and Self-esteem, like clouds depart
And come, for some uncertain moments lent.
Man were immortal, and omnipotent,

Didst thou, unknown and awful as thou art,
Keep with thy glorious train firm state within his heart.
Thou messenger of sympathies,

That wax and wane in lovers' eyes-
Thou that to human thought art nourishment,

Like darkness to a dying flame!

Depart not as thy shadow came,

Depart not-lest the grave should be,

Like life and fear, a dark reality.

5.

While yet a boy I sought for ghosts, and sped
Thro' many a listening chamber, cave and ruin,
And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing
Hopes of high talk with the departed dead.

I called on poisonous names with which our youth is fed,
I was not heard-I saw them not-

When musing deeply on the lot

Of life, at that sweet time when winds are wooing
All vital things that wake to bring
News of birds and blossoming,—

1 Mr. Garnett tells me this stanza is not in the original draft.

2 In both the Examiner version and that of 1819, this word is lover's in

stead of lovers'.

3 In the Rosalind and Helen version, we read are for art.

Sudden, thy shadow fell on me;

I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy!1

6.

I vowed that I would dedicate my powers

To thee and thine-have I not kept the vow?
With beating heart and streaming eyes, even now

I call the phantoms of a thousand hours

Each from his voiceless grave: they have in visioned bowers
Of studious zeal or love's delight

Outwatched with me the envious night-
They know that never joy illumed my brow
Unlinked with hope that thou wouldst free
This world from its dark slavery,
That thou-O awful LOVELINESS,

Wouldst give whate'er these words cannot express.3

1 Spelt extacy in both versions.

2 We read loves instead of love's, both in the version printed in The Examiner, and in that published with Rosalind and Helen.

3 There can be but little doubt that these two stanzas (5 and 6) have reference to the same awakening of Shelley's spirit to its sublime mission, referred to in another passage of like autobiographic value, namely stanzas 3, 4, and 5 of the Dedication to Laon and Cythna (pp. 102 and 103). In a note on those stanzas the question whether the awakening was at Eton or at Brentford is referred to; and whichever be the correct version as to period and locality in that case is also correct as to this. The passage in Sir John Rennie's Autobiography alluded to there seems to me to correspond still more strikingly with these two stanzas of the Hymn than with the version of the same spiritual situation in the Dedication; and I have herefore reserved the following extract from the Autobiography as more fitting to be given here than there :-"During the time that I was

there the most remarkable scholar was the celebrated poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was then about twelve or thirteen (as far as I can remember), and even at that early age exhibited considerable poetical talent, accompanied by a violent and extremely excitable temper, which manifested itself in all kinds of eccentricities. ...His imagination was always roving upon something romantic and extraordinary, such as spirits, fairies, fighting. volcanoes, &c., and he not unfrequently astonished his schoolfellows by blowing up the boundary palings of the playground with gunpowder, also the lid of his desk in the middle of schooltime, to the great surprise of Dr. Greenlaw himself and the whole school. In fact, at times he was considered to be almost upon the borders of insanity; yet with all this, when treated with kindness, he was very amiable, noble, high-spirited, and generous; he used to write verse, English and Latin, with considerable facility, and attained a high position in the school before he left for Eton, where I understand, he was equally, if not

7.

The day becomes more solemn and serene
When noon is past-there is a harmony
In autumn, and a lustre in its sky,

Which thro' the summer is not heard or seen,
As if it could not be, as if it had not been !
Thus let thy power, which like the truth
Of nature on my passive youth
Descended, to my onward life supply
Its calm-to one who worships thee,
And every form containing thee,1
Whom, SPIRIT fair, thy spells did bind
To fear himself, and love all human kind.

more, extraordinary and eccentric." In reading this beside the two stanzas in the Hymn, allowance must of course be made for the difference between a poet's conception of incidents in his sensitive and persecuted boyhood, and another man's conception of those same incidents as seen by a schoolfellow, who probably, like most of the schoolfellows that any of us can recall, would have no sympathy whatever with a boy like Shelley. The dryly recorded fact that he wrote " verse, English and Latin, with considerable facility," is probably the best corroborative evidence we can get of that vowed service to the spirit of Intellectual Beauty recorded by the poet in the words

I vowed that I would dedicate my powers
To thee and thine.

1 The repetition here of the word thee, instead of finding a rhyme, is highly significant of deliberate intention, and certainly tends to confirm the view expressed in some of the notes on analogous and similar instances throughout Laon and Cythna, that it is not safe to regard such cases as "metric irregularities." In this case there could have been no possible difficulty (as there sometimes would be in the complex stanzas of Laon and Cythna); and I should look upon it as almost certain that here, at all events, the repetition of the word was well considered with regard to effect.

SONNET.1

OZYMANDIAS.

I MET a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

1 In Mr. Middleton's Shelley and His Writings (Vol. II, p. 71) we are told that Shelley, Keats, and Leigh Hunt "tried to excel each other in writing a sonnet on the Nile ;" and he adds that Shelley's Ozymandias "was one of these." He gives no authority for this latter statement; and I presume it rests upon the fact that Lord Houghton, in his Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats, appends the Ozymandias Sonnet, with those of Keats and Hunt, to the letter in which Keats recounts the

friendly strife. Lord Houghton (Vol. 1, p. 99) merely introduces the three Sonnets with the words, "These are the three sonnets on the Nile here alluded to, and very characteristic they are." At all events it is to be remarked that this is not a sonnet on the Nile, and that, among the Leigh Hunt MSS. placed at my disposal by Mr. Townshend Mayer. there is a sonnet in Shelley's handwriting addressed "To the Nile, which will duly appear in this edition of his works.