CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND GIVEN IN 1891 BY HENRY WILLIAMS SAGE Cornell University Library PR5434.M16 With Shelley In Italy; being a selection 3 1924 013 550 383 Cornell University Library The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013550383 With Shelley in Italy Uniform with this volume Edited by Mrs. McMahak FLORENCE IN THE POETRY OF THE BROWNINGS. With over 60 full-page illustrations. 13mo edition net $1.40 Large-paper edition . . . net 3.75 Florentine edition .... net 10.00 A. C. McCLURG & CO., PubUshers CHICAGO 1 ^ ^ CO t3r -d iM '^ ■*-» QO -t! ^ 1-^ Q With Shelley in Italy Being a Selection of the Poems and Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley Which have to do with his Life in Italy from 1818 to 1822 Selected and Arranged by Anna Benneson McMahan Editor of " Florence in the Poetry of the Brownings," etc. With over Siacty Full-page Illustrations from Photographs Chicago \ A. C. McClukg & Co. 1905 Copyright A. C. McClurg & Co. 1905 All righia reserved Published October 14, 1905 About one-half of the illustrationB of this volume are from the photo- graphs of Alinari Brothers, Florence. Of the otherB, some are from the local photographers at Bpezia, Yiare^o, and Pisa, some from old engraringa made in the early part of the nineteenth century, and the remainder from photographs made expressly for this work by Miss Una McMahan. THE UNIVERSITY PRES3, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A. TO UNA AND FLO'RENCE IN MEMORY OF OtTK SHELLEY PILGRIMAGES Thm Paradise of exiles, Italy! Julian and Maddalo TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Genebal Intbodtjction xv THE YEAR 1818 Intkodtjction to the Year 1818 3 Passage of the Apennines 5 Letter from Milan 6 Letter from Leghorn. 9 Letter from Bagni di Lucca 9 Extracts from "Rosaliild and Helen" 10 Lettef from Florence 13 To Mary Shelley . '. 14 Lines Written among the Euganean Hills 16 Marenghi ( 29 Julian and Maddalo 36 Letter from Venice 59 Letter from Este 62 Letter from Bologna 64 Letter from Kome 67 Letter- from Naples 70 Stanzas Written in Dejection, near Naples 73 Letter from Naples 75 Letter from Naples 80 [viij TABLE OF CONTENTS TEE TEAR 1819 Fags Inteodttction to the Yeab 1819 87 Fragment : To Italy 90 Fragment : A Roman's Chamber 90 Fragment : Rome and Nature 91 Letter from Rome 91 Extracts from " Prometheus Unbound " 103 Letter from Rome 125 Letter from Leghorn 126 Extracts from " The Cenoi " 127 The Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci 143 Love's Philosophy 145 Ode to the West Wind 146 The Lidiau Serenade 149 the tears 1820 and 1821 Introdttction to the Yeaks 1820 and 1821 153 Letter from Leghorn 156 Letter to Maria Gisborne 157 The Cloud 169 To a Skylark 172 Ode to Liberty 176 Letter from Naples 187 Ode to Naples 195 Autumn : A Dirge 202 The Tower of Famine 203 Epipsychidion 204 To 226 To 227 Adpnais 227 [viii] TABLE OP CONTENTS Page Letter from llorenee 34,3 Letter from Ravenna 24i Letter from Ravenna 347 Letter from Pisa 248 The Boat on the Serchio 249 Evening : Ponte al Mare. Pisa 254 Chorus to Hellas 255 TEE TEAR 1822 Intkodttction to the Year 1822 259 To Jane : The Invitation 264 To Jane : The Recollection 267 With a Guitar : to Jane 270 To Jane : The Keen Stars were Twinkling 274 A Dirge 275 Lines Written in the Bay of Lerici 275 The Isle 277 Letter from Lerici 278 Letter from Lerici 279 Ckitical Notices op the Sculptube in the Flokence Gallbey 280 On the Mobe 280 The Minerva 282 On the Venus called Anadyomeue 285 Michael Angelo's Bacchus 286 Index 289 [ix] ILLUSTRATIONS Fase Casa Magni, Shelley's home on the Bay of Lerici, ia 1823 Frontispiece Among the Apennines of Tuscany 3 Lake of Como 4 Cathedral at Milan 6 Cathedral at Milan 8 Interior Valley of the Lima, at Bagni di Lucca, near home of Shelley in Summer of 1818 10 Scene in Tuscany 14 Petrarch's House at Arqua 16 View of Venice from the Lagoon SO Padua and Piazza Vittorio Emanuele 24 Landscape among the Euganean Hills .- 28 Florence 32 The Lido at Venice 36 Among the Eugauean Hills 40 The Doge's Palace at Venice 46 Leaning Towers of Bologna 62 Bridge and Aqueduct at Spoleto 58 St. Cecilia by Raphael 62 The Virgin appearing to Saint Bruno. By Guercino ... 66 In Bologna Gallery- Waterfall at Terni 68 The Coliseum in Shelley's time 70 [xi] ILLUSTRATIONS Faoe Temple of Neptuue at Paestum ' * So-called Basilica at Paestum ' ° The Baths of Caracalla in Shelley's time 80 City and Bay of Salemo 82 The Roman Campagna 86 Arch of Constantiue at Rome 90 A Comer of the Forum in Shelley's time 92 Interior of Pantheon 96 Bas-Reliefs on Arch of Titus 98 The Coliseum seen through the Arch of Titus 102 Portrait of Beatrice Cenci 126 In the Barberini Gallery, Rome Cenci Palace at Rome 132 Castle St. Angelo 138 Head of Medusa, commonly attributed to Leonardo da Vinci 142 In Uffizi Galleiy Woods of the Cascine and the River Amo, near Elorence . 146 Pioeta between Pisa and the Sea 152 Portress at Staggia 180 Street in Pompeii 186 Amphitheatre at Pompeii, with Vesuvius in the background . 192 View of Baise and Mare Morto, taken from Cape Misenum . 196 Porum of Pompeii, with Vesuvius in the distance .... 200 Street of Tombs at Pompeii 204 Grave of John Keats in Protestant Cemetery at Rome . . 206 Monument to John Keats 210 Shelley's Grave in the Protestant Cemetery at Rome . . . 214 Niobe 218 In Uffizi Galleiy Basilica of San Vitale, Ravenna 222 Tomb of Theodoric the Great at Ravenna 226 [xii] ILLUSTRATIONS PAaa Church of Saut' ApoUinave at Eavenna 230 Behind Shelley's house in Pisa 234 The Arno at Pisa 238 Shelley's house in the foreground at left Protestant Cemetery and Pyramid of Cestius at Rome . . . 242 Bay of Lerici, with town and castle of Lerici 246 Hills and woods of San Terenzo on Bay of Lerici .... 248 San Terenzo and the Bay of Lerici 250 Shelley's house in foreground at the right. Photograph made about 1880, previous to building of modern road Porto Venere on Gulf of Spezia, opposite Bay of Lerici . . 254 View on the River Serchio 258 Shelley's home on the Bay of Lerici 262 Photograph of 1904 The shore at Yiareggio where Shelley's funeral pyre was made August 16, 1822 : . 266 Monument to Shelley at Yiareggio 270 In Piazza Shelley, formerly Piazza Paolina Minerva 274 In Uffizi Gallery Venus Anadyomene 278 In Uffizi Gallery Michael Angelo's Bacchus 282 In I^ational Museum [xiii] Introduction UNDEE whatever circumstances and in whatever land Percy Bysshe Shelley's days might have been passed, his innate poetic temperament would have been sure to express itself j but it is the Italian note in Shelley's poetry that makes him the particular kind of great poet that he is. Self-exiled from England at the age of twenty-six, he never returned to that country, but spent the remainder of his life, four years, in Italy ; here his genius developed toward maturity, here his muse found a con- genial home and utterance. Sky, storm, tree, mountain, and sea, the whole spirit of Italian landscape lives in Shelley's verse — " I depend on these things for life, for in the smoke of cities and the tumult of human kind and the chilling fogs of our own country I can scarcely be said to live." He seldom composed within four walls, but found his inspiration on some solitary hillside, within some garden pergola, on a house-top terrace, or in a boat upon the waves. The Shelley lover is constrained to follow in his footsteps; he longs to stroll through the lanes about Leghorn where Shelley heard the skylark singj to plunge into the Pisan Pineta whose very atmosphere breathes in "A Eecollection "; to wander among the ruins of the Baths of Caracalla and to conjure there the elfin figure perched [xv] INTRODUCTION ou high while creating a new Prometheus ; to explore that "divine bay^' of Lerici where the brilliant dreams and poetic visions of a new and regenerated humanity were so soon to come to a fatal close. A strange, wandering life it was that he led those four years, " yoked to all sorts of miseries and discomforts," especially during its early period. Yet never did these stifle the high thoughts and continual literary production. " A Passage of the Apennines," his first Italian poem, was written at a little inn among the mountains, in the midst of a wild landscape not far from Bologna where he passed but a single night ; the " Lines Written among the Euganean Hills " are full of local color. From the summer-house where he loved to write, in the garden of their own villa near Este he could himself see. Spread like a green sea The waveless plain of Lombardy; Bounded by the vaporous air. Islanded by cities fair. At this time also he was meditating on different subjects as a groundwork of a lyrical drama, " having taken the resolution to see what kind of tragedy a person without dramatic talent could write." " The Madness of Tasso " was undertaken, but only one short scene and an unfinished song are extant ; the " Prometheus Unbound " was begun and the first act nearly completed in the same congenial atmosphere. This radiant time of Summer and sunshine seems to have been followed by days of deep depression. The "Lines Written in Dejection near Naples" express his habitual mood during his stay in that city the following Winter. [xvi] INTRODUCTION Howeveij red-letter days were not lacting ; the impressions made by BaisBj Vesuvius, and Pompeii are recorded not only in charming letters but in the magnificent " Ode to Naples/' written two years later. Has Pompeii's peculiar power over the imagiaation ever been more exactly as welb as poetically expressed than in these lines ? — I stood within the city disinterred, And heard the autumnal leaves like light footfalls Of spirits passing through the streets ; and heard The mountain's slumberous voice at intervals Thrill through those roofless halls. Or has the spirit of the Bay of Naples been seized more happily than in the lines ? — Where the Baian ocean Welters with air-hke motion, Within, above, around its bowers of starry green. Moving the sea-flowers in those purple caves. The most important year in Shelley's life, however, was his second year in Italy. Then, in the midst of an always changing, usually ailing, often sorrowful and distracted existence, he produced those two masterpieces, — so great yet so different, — "Prometheus Unbound" and "The Cenci " ; several political and satirical poems, including "The Masque of Anarchy" and "Peter Bell the Third"; a long list of lyrics, including the matchless " Ode to the "West Wind," the " Ode to Heaven," and the impassioned "Indian Serenade." In some cases we know the exact circumstances and hour that kindled the poetic fire. " The bright blue sky of Eome and the effect of the vigorous awakening of Spring in that diviuest climate, and the new [xvii] INTRODUCTION life with which it drenches the spirit even to intoxication were the inspiration of this drama/' he tells us in the preface of "Prometheus Unbound"; during a walk in the Cascine near Florence he conceived and wrote that " Ode to the West "Wind," which, as a lyric, has not been excelled in English poetry. The galleries of Florence filled him with delight, and one picture at least — "The Medusa" — in- spired a poem. Sculpture he enjoyed especially, and would sit for hours before the "Niobe" or some favorite Apollo. " What would we think," he wrote, " if we were forbidden to read the great writers who have left us their works ? And yet, to be forbidden to live at Florence or Rome is an evil of the same kind and hardly of less magnitude." But it was neither air, nor scenery, nor works of art that led to Shelley's most intense, though not his longest- lived, poetic fervor; it was his introduction to a beautiful and accomplished Italian girl, Emilia Viviani, imprisoned by a father and a jealous stepmother in the miserable Convent of St. Anna, near Pisa, until such time as a hus- band pould be found who would take her without a dowry. She had already been a prisoner for two years when the Shelleys were taken by a friend to see her. Shelley was a bom knight-errant ; he could never see or hear of a wrong without an instant rush to right it, regardless of conse- quence. And what more compelling circumstances than these — the persecution of a being so innocent, so beauti- ful, so spiritual, so exalted ? Plans, correspondence, visits, presents, greetings of one kind or another crowded every hour of the day ; but the practical difiiculties of releasing the imprisoned maiden proved so great that in the end [xviii] INTRODUCTION Emilia had to beg the Shelleys to come to her no more, as her coadition was only made more unbearable thereby. But nothing could silence or abate the idealizing power of Shelley^s imagination, and Emilia Viviani now stood in his mind as an image of all that was lovely in womankind. He had always been fully in sympathy with Plato's doctrine of man as a divided human being whom Love impels to seek his severed half of self throughout his mortal life. He had translated Plato's "Symposium" and followed it by be- ginning in prose "A Discourse on the Manners of the Ancients Relating to the Subject of Love." This was never finished, perhaps because he did not find it easy to handle so delicate a matter in prose. The poem " To His Genius " is also a partial explanation of the long poem now addressed to Emilia called "Epipsychidion" — a word coined by Shelley from the Greek, which Stopford Brooke suggests is to be translated by the line, " Whither 't was fled this soul out of my soul." But no amount of explanation or comment could re- veal the inner spirit of the poem to the world at large, nor did Shelley expect that it would. He sent it to the pub- lisher, ordering only one hundred copies to be printed, saying it was only for the esoteric few, that indeed in a certain sense it was a "production of a portion of me already dead " and " it would give me no pleasure that the vulgar should read it." Time, which rights so many things, has now set " Epip- sychidion" in its right place — alone in English poetry, but alongside of Dante's " Vita Nuova," as a poem touch- ing with supreme art on the ideal forms of a passionate [xix] INTRODUCTION love. Emilia, like Beatrice, is less a mortal woman than a figure standing as a representative of the poet's vision of her who is his second soul, the earthly embodiment of all his ideals of Love and Beauty and Knowledge and Truth. No other English poet could have written it, and perhaps none will ever attempt another like it. As an idealized history of Shelley's inner life it is priceless. The motive of " Epipsychidion,'' and even its first draft, existed before the meeting of Shelley and Emilia ; that meeting simply furnished the final impulse to complete the poem. It is well that circumstances finally combined to give to us this late and full expression of an underlying principle, held throughout Shelley's life, which, however, both then and for many years after his death, subjected him to much mis- understanding by the world at large. As to conduct and character, certainly the same stand- ards of morality should prevail for all members of society ; the poet must be counted amenable to the same laws as the hod-carrier. But also let it be granted that as to thought and feeling great differences exist between these types of men; spheres shut out from the hod-carrier are open to the poet. It is this that makes him a poet; and even he cannot live for any long period in the rarefied air of a visionary world where the very act of expression serves to exorcise and banish the image. This Shelley himself acknowledges in the closing lines : Woe is me ! The winged words on which my soul would pierce Into the heights of love's rare universe Are chains of lead around its flight of fire. I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire ! [XX] INTRODUCTION - The Bay of Lerici, which gives its name to one poem and was the inspiration of several others, was Shelley's last home. " The blue extent of the waters, the almost land-locked bay, the near castle of Lerioi shutting it in to the east and distant Porto Venere to the west ; the varied forms of the precipitous rocks that bound in the beach; ... the tideless sea leaving no sands nor shingle, ... a picture such as one sees in Salvator Rosa's landscapes only" — are portions of Mary Shelley's descriptions of the place, as true to-day as when they were written. Here were passed Shelley's happiest days ; here, almost for the first time, he had something like health and serenity of spirits. The poem now "begun — "The Triumph of Life" — is the ex- pression of the attitude of mind which he had now attained — of peace achieved through passion, of insight gained through suffering and through error. Its opening lines, with its magnificent picture of sunrise and himself in wak- ing vision Beneath the hoary stem Which an old chestnut flung athwart the steep Of a green Apennine, embalm the very spirit of the Italy which was so dear to Shelley's heart and so mighty a power in his life. Frag- ment as it is, it is yet a poem full of ethical and spiritual import. It breaks off suddenly with the line, " 'Then, what is Life ? ' I cried." But this question was to have no answer from Shelley. A sudden storm at sea capsized the boat in which he and his friend were sailing, and both were drowned almost within [xxi] INTRODUCTION sight of their own home. Many days later both bodies ■were washed ashore near Yiareggio. They were buried in sand on the beach. The harrowing details of the identifi- cation of the two bodies, their removal from the temporary graves and their burning on the shore a month later, the suspense suffered by the two viddowed women in the lonely Casa Magni during the days when they hoped against hope and drove frantically from place to place along the shore hoping for tidings of the missing boat — are the distressing but well-known chapters that close the record of the Shelley household in Italy. Viareggio keeps his memory green by a monument erected in 1894 in its principal square, the work of an Italian sculptor. Here, each year, celebrations are held and laurel wreaths are placed, with speeches and poems by Italy's most illustrious speakers and writers. The " lyrical cry " in Shelley's verse appeals particularly to the Italian nature; his prophecies of a Golden Age are eagerly read, and the country which received England's exiled poet wiU always claim him as in part her very own. Not alone in his poems is Italy celebrated by Shelley; his letters are full of descriptions of places and people and things which one would not willingly miss to-day, which are, indeed, all the more valuable to-day because of the changes wrought in the passage of nearly one hundred years. Shelley's judgment in some mattSrs was partial, in some entirely wrong; his weakness as an art critic is apparent at times even to the amateur. But all such allow- ances being made, it cannot be otherwise than inspiring to walk hand in hand with Shelley, seeing Italy with his eyes, [xxiij INTRODUCTION and hearing the message it spoke to his sympathetic heart and poetic spirit. A quarter of a century ago one of Shelley's most sympa- thetic editors^ declared the only serious obstacles to the general comprehension of SheUey to be " his erudition and the Italian atmosphere which envelops much of his poetry/' Since that time much textual criticism, many biographies, and no end of annotated editions have teen offered in eluci- dation of obscurities or learned allusions. But no attempt has been made to set the poems in their original environ- ment, or to conduct the reader himself into that very Italian atmosphere where they were bom. To do this as far as may be possible, through illustration and the grouping of letters and passages from note-books with the poems, so that the poems may be seen in the making, so to speak, is the object of the present volume. A. B. McM. Spezu, Italy, 1905. ^Eichard Gamett. [xxiii] THE YEAR 1818 A MONG the Apennines -^of Tuscany. " The Apennine in the light of day Is a mighty mountain dim and grey. " — Passage of The Apennines, p. 5. WITH SHELLEY IN ITALY THE YEAR 1818 BAGNI DI LUCCA; ESTE ; NAPLES INTRODUCTORY Jf^ROKEN in health and spirits and warned by his #~X physicitm against the excitement of literary com- position, without a settled abode, and travelling from place to pUux encumbered with a helpless pcurty of women, children, and servants, and, moreover, engaged in that most depressing of all occupations, house-hunting, we should hardly look for numerous or important poetical creations as the immediate result of Shelley's arrival in Italy. And though in truth the list is not long, it shows at once the impress of the new scenes and experiences, the strong impulse given by the ideality of Italy, Both Shelley a/nd his wife, Mary Shelley, were enthusiastic travellers, and the hardships were quite obscured by the delights of this first summer in Tuscany. Travelling by carriage over winding roads among the Apennines, climb- ing on foot or on horseback their wooded peaks, exploring in small boats many a river and stream, — these things were sure to appeal to a poet whose chief delight always had been the contemplation of nature. To him. Nature [3] WITH SHELLEY IN ITALY was no dead thing, hut a livmg spirit ; to him, every natural 'phenomenon was some form of the utterance of this spirit. Such a poem as " The Cloud "" shows the Shelley attitude toward nature, and is perhaps its most exquisitely wrought out example. But all of these early Italian poems breathe more or less of the scume spirit ; they are mostly poems of pure nature. The only one in which human life plays any important part is " Julian and Maddah,"" written late in the year and as the result of a visit to Lord Byron in Venice. " Rosalind and Helen" thrown aside in England hut hrought along in an. unfinished state, was found hy Mrs. Shelley among the papers, and at her urgency finished. Shelley himself said of it, " / lay no stress on it one way or the other.'''' Considered as a whole, the world perhaps shares Shelley'' s opinion, hut there are some pas- sages which must he rescued from this general indiffer- ence for their charming pictures of the Italiam, landscape. The scene is laid on the shores of Lake Como, in whose " divine solittcde " Shelley had vainly tried to find a home; amd its pictures of the "forest's solitude^'' the " chestnut woods," and " lawny dells," bear plainly the impress of Bagni di Lucca, where the discarded poem was taken up and finished. JEste, their second home, has its poet laureate in the " Lines Written among the Euganean Hills,'" while tha^ letters of this time, glomng with the freshness cf^fim, impressions, are scarcely less poetical than the verses. Often, indeed, the letters furnish the precise setting and conditions which led to the poetical inspiration, and are [4] ■^ Si, I' > THE YEAR 1818 glimpses into the poefs inner mind, rough draughts of the poem, as it were. They confirm what, indeed, we should divine without them, that the poems of this year were written for their own sake and to express Shelley'' s pure joy in that living spirit which he conceived Nature to he. In a time like our own, when the interest in scientific theories concerning the processes of nature is so absorb- ing, all the more welcome is a voice like Shelley''s to speak of the spiritual side, the side seen by the artist and lover of Nature for her own sake. PASSAGE OF THE APENNINES Listen, listen, Mary mine, To the whisper of the Apennine, It bursts on the roof like the thunder's roar. Or like the sea on a northern shore, Heard in its raging ebb and flow By the captives pent in the cave below. The Apennine in the light of day Is a mighty mountain dim and grey. Which between the earth and sky doth lay ; But when night comes, a chaos dread On the dim starlight then is spread. And the Apennine walks abroad with the storm. May 4, 1818.1 1 Note that this, Shelley's first poem in Italy, was inspired by his delight in storm and tempest. For other instances, see " Revolt of Islam," Books I and XI, the poetical " Letter to Maria Gisbome," the " Vision of the Sea," the opening lines of "Ode to the West Wind." — Ed. [5] WITH SHELLEY IN ITALY Milan, April, 1818. Mt dear Peacock^: . . . We have beea to Como, looking for a house. This lake exceeds any thing I ever beheld in beauty, with the exception of the arbutus islands of Killarney. It is long and narrow, and has the appear- ance of a mighty river winding among the mountains and the forests. We sailed from the town of Como to a tract of country called the Tremezina, and saw the various aspects presented by that part of the lake. The mountains be- tween Como and that village, or rather cluster of villages, are covered on high with chestnut forests (the eating chest- nuts, on which the inhabitants of the country subsist in time of scarcity), which sometimes descend to the very verge of the lake, overhanging it with their hoary branches. But usually the immediate border of this shore is com- posed of laurel-trees, and bay, and myrtle, and wild-fig trees, and olives, which grow in the crevices of the rocks, and overhang the caverns, and shadow the deep glens, which are filled with the flashing light of the waterfalls. Other flowering shrubs, which I cannot name, grow there also. On high, the towers of village churches are seen white among the dark forests. Beyond, on the opposite shore, which faces the south, the mountains descend less precipitously to the lake, and although they are much higher, and some covered with perpetual snow, there intervenes between them and the lake a range of lower hills, which 1 Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866), novelist and poet of some dis- tinction in Ms time. He was the warm friend of Shelley and his constant correspondent after his departure from England. Unless otherwise stated, all the letters in this collection were addressed to Mr. Peacock in London. [6] ^^!-ltC» THE YEAR 1818 have glens and rifts opening to the other^ such as I should fancy the abysses of Ida or Parnassus. Here are planta- tions of olive, and orange, and lemon trees, which are now so loaded with fruit, that there is more fruit than leaves, — and vineyards. ""This shore of the lake is one continued village, and th^ Milanese nobility have their villas here. The union of culture and the untameable profusion and loveliness of nature is here so close, that the line where they are divided can hardly be discovered. But the finest scenery is that of the Villa Pliniana ; so called from a fountain which ebbs and flows every three hours, described by the younger Pliny, which is in the court-yard. This house, which was once a magnificent palace, and is now half in ruins, we are endeavouring to procure. It is built upon terraces raised from the bottom of the lake, together with its garden, at the foot of a semicircular precipice, overshadowed by profound forests of chestnut. The scene from the colonnade is the most extraordinary, at once, and the most lovely that eye ever behel^.,. On one side is the mountain, and immediately over you are clusters of cypress- trees of an astonishing height, which seem to pierce the sky. Above you, from among the clouds, as it were, de- scends a waterfall of immense size, broken by the woody rocks into a thousand channels to the lake. On the other side is seen the blue extent of the lake and the mountains, speckled with sails and spires. The apartments of the Pliniana are immensely large, but ill furnished and antique. The terraces, which overlook the lake, and conduct under the shade of such immense laurel-trees as deserve the epithet of Pythian, are most delightful. / We stayed at [7] / WITH SHELLEY IN ITALY Como two days, and have now returned to Milan, waiting the issae of our negotiation about a house. Como is only six leagues from Milan, and its mountains are seen from the cathedral. This cathedral [Milan] is a most astonishing work of art. It is built of white marble, and cut into pinnacles of immense height, and the utmost delicacy of workmanship, and loaded with sculpture. The effect of it, piercing the solid blue with those groups of dazzling spires, relieved by the serene depth of this Italian heaven, or by moonlight when the stars seem gathered among those clustered shapes, is beyond anything I had imagined architecture capable of producing. The interior, though very sublime, is of a more earthly character, and with its stained glass and massy granite columns overloaded with antique figures, and the silver lamps, that bum for ever under the canopy of black cloth beside the brazen altar and the marble fretwork of the dome, give it the aspect of some gorgeous sepulchre. There is one solitary spot among those aisles, behind the altar, where the light of day is dim and yellow under the storied window, which I have chosen to visit, and read Dante there. I have devoted this summer, and indeed the next year, to the composition of a tragedy on the subject of Tasso's madness, which I find upon inspection is, if properly treated, admirably dramatic and poetical. But you will say I have no dramatic talent. Very true in a cer- tain sense j but I have taken the resolution to see what kind of tragedy a person without drarhatic talent could write. [8] c A.THEDIUL at Milan. Interior. " There is one solitary spot amonff those aisles, behind the altar, where the light of day is dim and yellow under the storied window which I have chosen to visit, and read I)ante there.'' — Letter from Milan, p. i THE YEAR 1818 Leghorn, June 5, 1818. • ••••■ "We left Milan on the first of May, and travelled across tLe Apennines to Pisa. This part of the Apennine is far less beautiful than the Alps ; the mountains are wide and wild^ and the whole scenery broad and undetermined — the im- agination cannot find a home in it. The plain of the Milanese, and that of Parma, is exquisitely beautiful — it is like one garden, or rather cultivated wilderness ; because the corn and the meadow-grass grow under high and thick trees, festooned to one another by regular festoons of vines. On the seventh day we arrived at Pisa, where we remained three or four days. A large disagreeable city, almost with- out inhabitants. We then proceeded to this great trading town, where we have remained a month, and which, in a few days, we leave for the Bagni di Lucca, a kind of watering-place situated in the depth of the Apennines ; the scenery surrounding this village is very fine. TO MR. AND MES. GI8B0RNE (Leghobn) Bagni di Ltjcca, July 10, 1818. We have ridden, Mary and I, once only, to a place called Prato Fiorito,^ on the top of the mountains : the * Prato Eorito (Flowering Meadow) is still a favorite excursion from Bagni di Lucca. On tie occasion of Shelley's visit the jonquils were blooming in such abundance that their odor almost caused him to faint. In " Epipsychidiou " occurs a reminiscence of this experience : — " And from the moss violets and jonquils peep. And dart their arrowy odour through the brain Till you might faint with that delicious pain." [9] WITH SHELLEY IN ITALY road, winding through forests, and over torrents, and on the verge of green ravines, affords scenery magnificently fine. I cannot describe it to you, but bid you, tnough vainly, come and see. I take great delight in watching the changes of the atmosphere here, and the growth of the thunder showers with which the noon is often over- shadowed, and which break and fade away towards even- ing into flocks of delicate clouds. Our fire-flies are fading away fast; but there is the planet Jupiter, who rises majes- tically over the rift in the forest-covered mountains to the south, and the pale Summer lightning which is spread out every night, at intervals, over the sky. No doubt Provi- dence has contrived these things, that, when the fire-flies go out, the low-flying owl may see her way home. EEOM "EOSALIND AND HELEN" Scene, the Shore of the Lake of Gomo HELEN Come hither, my sweet Eosalind. 'T is long since thou and I have met ; And yet methinks it were unkind Those moments to forget. Come sit by me. I see thee stand By this lone lake, in this far land. Thy loose hair in the light wind flying, Thy sweet voice to each tone of even United, and thine eyes replying To the hues of yon fair heaven. Come, gentle friend : wilt sit by me ? [10] 4 ■^ -* Si- <= te^ 3 1 Od 1. 1 OS % •^fc 00 s ^ 1 §■ g O o 5 t ■^ I& 1 ^ » s' V s Si. THE YEAR 1818 And be as thou wert wont to be Ere "vre were disunited ? None doth behold us now : the power That led us forth at this lone hour "Will be but ill requited If thou depart in scorn : oh ! come. And talk of our abandoned home. Eemember, this is Italy, And we are exiles. Talk with me Of that our land, whose wilds and floods. Barren and dark although they be, Were dearer than these chestnut woods : Those heathy paths, that inland stream. And the blue mountains, shapes which seem Like wrecks of childhood's sunny dream : Which that we have abandoned now. Weighs on the heart like that remorse Which altered friendship leaves. It was a vast and antique wood. Thro' which they took their way ; And the grey shades of evening O'er that green wilderness did fling Still deeper solitude. Pursuing still the path that wound The vast and knotted trees around Thro' which slow shades were wandering. To a deep lawny dell they came. To a stone seat beside a spring. O'er which the columned wood did frame [11 ] WITH SHELLEY IN ITALY A roofless temple, like the fane Where, ere new creeds could faith obtain, Man's early race once knelt beneath The overhanging deity. O'er this fair fountain hung the sky. Now spangled with rare stars. The snake. The pale snake, that with eager breath Creeps here his noontide thirst to slake. Is beaming with many a mingled hue. Shed from yon dome's eternal blue. When he floats on that dark and lucid flood In the light of his own loveliness ; And the birds that in the fountain dip Their plumes, with fearless fellowship Above and round him wheel and hover. The fitful wind is heard to stir One solitary leaf on high j The chirping of the grasshopper Fills every pause. There is emotion In all that dwells at noontide here : Then, thro' the intricate wild wood, A maze of life and light and motion Is woven. But there is stillness now : Gloom, and the trance of Nature now : The snake is in his cave asleep ; The birds are on the branches dreaming : Only the shadows creep : Only the glow-worm is gleaming : Only the owls and the nightingales Wake in this dell when daylight fails, [12] THE YEAR 1818 And grey shades gather ia the woods : And the owls have all fled far away In a merrier glen to hoot and play, For the moon is veiled and sleeping now. The accustomed nightingale still broods On her accustomed bough. But she is mute ; for her false mate Has fled and left her desolate. Daylight on its last purple cloud Was lingering grey, and soon her strain The nightingale began ; now loud, Climbing in circles the windless sky. Now dying music ; suddenly 'Tis scattered in a thousand notes^ And now to the hushed ear it floats Like field smells known in infancy. Then failing, soothes the air again. TO MRS. SHELLEY (Bagni di Lucca) rLORENCE, August 20, 1818. As we approached Florence, the country became culti- vated to a very high degree, the plain was filled with the most beautiful villas, and, as far as the eye could reach, the mountains were covered with them ; for the plains are bounded on all sides by blue and misty mountains. The vines are here trailed on low trellises of reeds, interwoven [13 J WITH SHELLEY IN ITALY into crosses^ to support them, and the grapes, now almost ripe, are exceedingly abundant. You everywhere meet those teams of beautiful white oxen, which are now labour- ing the little vine-divided fields with their Virgilian ploughs and carts. Florence itself, that is, the Lung' Arno (for I have seen no more), I think is the most beautiful city I have yet seen. It is surrounded with cultivated hills, and from the bridge which crosses the broad channel of the Arno, the view is the most animated and elegant I ever saw. You see three or four bridges, one apparently sup- ported by Corinthian pillars, and the white sails of the boats, relieved by the deep green of the forest, which comes to the water's edge, and the sloping hills covered with bright villas on every side. Domes and steeples rise on all sides, and the cleanliness is remarkably great. On the other side there are the foldings of the Yale of Arno above ; first the hills of olive and vine, then the chestnut woods, and then the blue and misty pine forests, which invest the aerial Apennines, that fade in the distance. I have seldom seen a city so lovely at first sight as I'lorence. PEAGMENT TO MAUT SHBLLBT O Maet dear, that you were here With your brown eyes bright and clear, And your sweet voice, like a bird Singing love to its lone mate In the ivy bower disconsolate ; Voice the sweetest ever heard I [14 J GO 1-3 O D H s s s 5"a 3 a.s "■ a <» » 11 as THE YEAR 1818 And your brow more . . . Than the sky Of this azure Italy. Mary dear, come to me soon, I am not well whilst thou art far ; As sunset to the sphered moon. As twilight to the western star, Thou, belovM, art to me. Mary dear, that you were here ; The Castle echo whispers " Here ! " ^ EsTE, September, 1818. 1 Compare this poem, written to Mary Shelley during the poet's brief absence from her at Este, with her own de- scription of the place, which soon afterward became their home : — " The villa was situated on the very overhanging brow of a low hill at the foot of a range of higher ones. ... A slight ravine, with a road in its depth, divided the garden from the hill, on which stood the ruins of the ancient castle of Este, whose dark massive wall gave forth an echo, and from whose ruined crevices owls and bats flitted forth at night, as the crescent moon sunk behind the black and heavy battlements." [15] WITH SHELLEY IN ITALY LINES WEITTEN AMONG THE EUGANEAN HILLS ^ OCTOBBE, 1818 Many a green isle needs must be In the deep wide sea of misery, Or the mariner, •worn and wan, Never thus could voyage on Day and night, and night and day. Drifting on his dreary way, "With the solid darkness black Closing round his vessel's track; Whilst above the sunless sky. Big with clouds, hangs heavily. And behind the tempest fleet Hurries on with lightning feet, Eiving sail, and cord, and plank. Till the ship has almost drank Death from the o'er-brimming deep ; And sinks down, down, like that sleep When the dreamer seems to be Weltering through eternity ; And the dim low line before Of a dark and distant shore Still recedes, as ever still, > Written after a day's eicursion among the mountains wbicli sarronnd Arqua — once the retreat and now the sepulchre of Petrarch. — ShelIiBy's NOTB. [16 J THE YEAR 1818 Longing with divided will But no power to seek or shun, He is ever drifted on O'er the unreposing wave To the haven of the grave. What, if there no friends will greet ; What, if there no heart will meet His with love's impatient beat ; Wander wheresoe'er he may. Can he dream before that day To find refuge from distress In friendship's smile, in love's caress ? Then 't will wreak him little woe Whether such there be or no : Senseless is the breast, and cold. Which relenting love would fold j Bloodless are the veins and chill Which the pulse of pain did fill ; Every little living nerve That from bitter words did swerve Bound the tortured lips and brow. Are like sapless leaflets now Frozen upon December's bough. On the beach of a northern sea Which tempests shake eternally, As once the wretch there lay to sleep. Lies a solitary heap. One white skull and seven dry bones. On the margin of the stones, [17 J WITH SHELLEY IN ITALY Where a few grey rushes stand. Boundaries of the sea and land : Nor is heard one voice of wail But the sea-mews, as they sail O'er the billows of the gale ; Or the whirlwind up and down Howling, like a slaughtered town. When a king in glory rides Through the pomp of fratricides : Those unburied bones around There is many a mournful sound ; There is no lament for him, Like a sunless vapour, dim. Who once clothed with life and thought What now moves nor murmurs not. Ay, many flowering islands lie In the waters of wide Agony : To such a one this morn was led My bark, by soft winds piloted : 'Mid the mountains Euganean I stood listening to the paean. With which the legioned rooks did hail The sun's uprise majestical; Gathering round with wings all hoar, Thro' the dewy mist they soar Like grey shades, till the eastern heaven Bursts, and then, as clouds of even, Mecked with fire and azure, lie In the unfathomable sky, [18] THE YEAR 1818 So their plumes of purple grain, Starred with drops of golden rain. Gleam above the sunlight woods. As in silent multitudes On the morning's fitful gale Thro' the broken mist they sail. And. the vapours cloven and gleaming Pollow down the dark steep streaming. Till all is bright, and clear, and still, Bound the solitary hill. Beneath is spread like a green sea The waveless plain of Lombardy, Bounded by the vaporous air. Islanded by cities fair ; Underneath day's azure eyes Ocean's nursling, Yenice lies, A peopled labyrinth of walls, Amphitrite's destined halls. Which her hoary sire now paves With his blue and beaming waves. Lo ! the sun upsprings behind, Broad, red, radiant, half reclined On the level quivering line Of the waters crystalline ; And before that chasm of light. As within a furnace bright. Column, tower, and dome, and spire. Shine like obelisks of fire. Pointing with inconstant motion [19 ] WITH SHELLEY IN ITALY From the altar of dark ocean To the sapphire-tinted skies j As the flames of sacrifice From the marble shrines did rise. As to pierce the dome of gold Where Apollo spoke of old. Sun-girt City, thou hast been Ocean's child, and then his queen; Now is come a darker day. And thou soon must be his prey. If the power that raised thee here HaUow so thy watery bier. A less drear ruin then than now, With thy conquest-branded brow Stooping to the slave of slaves From thy throne, among the waves Wilt thou be, when the sea-mew Flies, as once before it flew. O'er thine isles depopulate. And aU is in its ancient state. Save where many a palace gate With green sea-flowers overgrown Like a rock of ocean's own, Topples ^ o'er the abandoned sea As the tides change sullenly. The fisher on his watery way. Wandering at the close of day, 1 Tliis serious appreTiension of the gradual sinking of Venice tas become more pronounced since the crumbling of the Campanile in 1902. — Ed. [20 ] I 3. a. J- I- 3' 5. «. -5 s THE YEAR 1818 Will spread his sail and seize his oar Till he pass the gloomy shore, Lest thy dead should, from their sleep Bursting o'er the starlight deep. Lead a rapid masque of death O'er the waters of his path. Those who alone thy towers behold Quivering through aerial gold, As I now behold them here. Would imagine not they were Sepulchres, where human forms. Like pollution-nourished worms To the corpse of greatness cling. Murdered, and now mouldering : But if Preedom should awake Li her omnipotence, and shake From the Celtic Anarch's hold All the keys of dungeons cold^ Where a hundred cities lie Chained like thee, ingloriously. Thou and all thy sister band Might adorn this sunny land. Twining memories of old time With new virtues more sublime; If not, perish thou and they. Clouds which stain truth's rising day By her sun consumed away, Earth can spare ye : while like flowers, Li the waste of years and hours, [21 ] WITH SHELLEY IN ITALY From your dust new nations spring With more kindly blossoming. Perish — let there only be Floating o'er thy hearthless sea As the garment of thy sky Clothes the world immortally, One remembrance, more sublime Than the tattered pall of time, Which scarce hides thy visage wan j — That a tempest-cleaving Swan ^ Of the songs of Albion, Driven from his ancestral streams By the might of evil dreams. Found a nest in thee ; and Ocean Welcomed him with such emotion That its joy grew his, and sprung From his lips like music flung O'er a mighty thunder-fit • Chastening terror : — what though yet Poesy's unfailing Eiver, Which thro' Albion winds for ever Lashing with melodious wave Many a sacred Poet's grave. Mourn its latest nursling fled? What though thou with all thy dead Scarce can for this fame repay Aught thine own ? oh, rather say Though thy sins and slaveries foul * Byron, then living in Venice. — Ed. [ 22 ] THE YEAR 1818 Overcloud a sunlite soul ? As the ghost of Homer clings Eound Scamander's wasting springs ; As divinest Shakespere's might Fills Avon and the world with light Like omniscient power which he Imaged 'mid mortality; As the love from Petrarch's urn. Yet amid yon hills doth burn, A quenchless lamp by which the heart Sees things unearthly ; — so thou art Mighty spirit — so shall be The City that did refuge thee. Lo, the sun floats up the sky Like thought-winged Liberty, Till the universal light Seems to level plain and height ; From the sea a mist has spread. And the beams of morn lie dead On the towers of Venice now. Like its glory long ago. By the skirts of that grey cloud Many-domed Padua proud Stands, a peopled solitude, 'Mid the harvest-shining plain, Where the peasant heaps his grain In the garner of his foe. And the milk-white oxen slow "With the purple vintage strain, [ 23 ] WITH SHELLEY IN ITALY Heaped upon the creaking wain. That the brutal Celt may swill Drunken sleep with savage will ; And the sickle to the sword Lies unchanged, though many a lord, Like a weed whose shade is poison. Overgrows this region's foison. Sheaves of whom are ripe to come To destruction's harvest home : Men must reap the things they sow. Force from force must ever flow. Or worse ; but 't is a bitter woe That love or reason cannot change The despot's rage, the slave's revenge. Padua, thou within whose walls Those mute guests at festivals. Son and Mother, Death and Sin, Played at dice for Ezzelin, TOl Death cried, " I win, I win ! " And Sin cursed to lose the wager, But Death promised, to assuage her. That he would petition for Her to be made Vice-Emperor, When the destined years were o'er. Over all between the Po And the eastern Alpine snow, Under the mighty Austrian. Sin smiled so as Sin only can, And since that time, ay, long before, [24] a"* S *^ «= s THE YEAR 1818 Both have ruled from shore to shore. That incestuous pair, who follow Tyrants as the sun the swallow, As Eepentance follows Crime, And as changes follow Time. In thine halls the lamp of learning, Padua, now no more is burning; Like a meteor, whose wild way Is lost over the grave of day. It gleams betrayed and to betray : Once remotest nations came To adore that sacred flame. When it lit not many a hearth On this cold and gloomy earth : Now new fires from antique light Spring beneath the wide world's might ; But their spark lies dead in thee, Trampled out by tyranny. As the Norway woodman quells. In the depths of piny dells. One light flame among the brakes. While the boundless forest shakes. And its mighty trunks are torn By the fire thus lowly born : The spark beneath his feet is dead. He starts to see the flames it fed Howling through the darkened sky With a myriad tongues victoriously. And sinks down in fear : so thou, [25 J WITH SHELLEY IN ITALY Tyranny, beholdest now- Light around thee, and thou hearest The loud flames ascend, and fearest : Grovel on the earth ; ay, hide In the dust thy purple pride ! Noon descends around me now : 'T is the noon of autumn's glow, When a soft and purple mist Like a vaporous amethyst. Or an air-dissolved star Mingling light and fragrance, far From the curved horizon's bound To the point of heaven^'s profound. Fills the overflowing sky; And the plains that silent lie Underneath, the leaves unsodden Where the infant frost has trodden With his morning-winged feet, Whose bright print is gleaming yet; And the red and golden vines. Piercing with their trellised lines The rough, dark-skirted wilderness ; The dun and bladed grass no less. Pointing from this hoary tower In the windless air ; the flower Glimmering at my feet ; the line Of the olive-sandalled Apennine In the south dimly islanded ; And the Alps, whose snows are spread [26 ] THE YEAR 1818 High between the clouds and sun ; And of living things each one ; And my spirit which so long Darkened this swift stream of song, Interpenetrated lie By the glory of the sky : Be it love, lights harmony. Odour, or the soul of all Which from heaven like dew doth fall. Or the mind which feeds this verse Peopling the lone universe. Noon descends, and after noon Autumn's evening meets me soon. Leading the infantine moon. And that one star, which to her Almost seems to minister Half the crimson light she brings From the sunset's radiant springs : And the soft dreams of the morn (Which like winged winds had borne To that silent isle, which lies 'Mid remembered agonies. The frail bark of this lone being) Pass, to other sufferers fleeing. And its ancient pilot. Pain, Sits beside the hehn again. Other flowering isles must be In the sea of life and agony : Other spirits float and flee [27] WITH SHELLEY IN ITALY O'er that gulph : even now, perhaps. On some rock the wild wave wraps. With folded wings they waiting sit For my bark, to pilot it To some calm and blooming cove. Where for me, and those I love. May a windless bower be built. Far from passion, pain, and guilt. In a dell 'raid lawny hills. Which the wild sea-murmur fills. And soft sunshine, and the sound Of old forests echoing round. And the light and smell divine Of all flowers that breathe and shine : We may live so happy there. That the spirits of the air. Envying us, may even entice To our healing paradise The polluting multitude; But their rage would be subdued By that clime divine and calm, And the winds whose wings rain balm On the uplifted soul, and leaves Under which the bright sea heaves j While each breathless interval In their whisperings musical The inspired soul supplies With its own deep melodies. And the love which heals all strife Circling, like the breath of life, [28 ] -§■ = s-f a, THE YEAR 1818 All things in that sweet abode With its own mild brotherhood : Thejj not it would change; and soon Every sprite beneath the moon Would repent its envy vain, And the earth grow young again. MAEENGHI ^ I Let those who pine in pride or in revenge, Or think that ill for ill should be repaid. Or barter wrong for wrong, until the exchange Euins the merchants of such thriftless trade, Yisit the tower of Vado, and unlearn Such bitter faith beside Marenghi^s urn. II A massy tower yet overhangs the town, A scattered group of ruined dwellings now. Ill Another scene ere wise Etruria knew Its second ruin through internal strife. And tyrants through the breach of discord threw The chain which binds and kills. As death to life, As winter to fair flowers (though some be poison) So Monarchy succeeds to Freedom's foison. * This fragment refers to an event told in Sismondi's Histoire des "Re- publiques Italimnes, wMch occurred during the war when Florence finally subdued Pisa, and reduced it to a province. — Mes. Sheilet. [29] WITH SHELLEY IN ITALY IV In Pisa's church a cup of sculptured gold "Was brimming with the blood of feuds forsworn At sacrament : more holy ne'er of old Etrurians mingled with the shades forlorn Of moon-illumined forests. And reconciling factions wet their lips With that dread wine, and swear to keep each spirit Undarkened by their country's last eclipse. VI Was Florence the liberticide ? that band Of free and glorious brothers who had planted. Like a green isle 'mid ^Ethiopian sand, A nation amid slaveries, disenchanted Of many impious faiths — wise, just — do they. Does Florence, gorge the sated tyrants' prey ? VII foster-nurse of man's abandoned glory. Since Athens, its great mother, sunk in splendour ; Thou shadowest forth that mighty shape in story, As ocean its wrecked fanes, severe yet tender : — The light-invested angel Poesy Was drawn from the dim world to welcome thee. [30] THE YEAR 1818 vni And thou in painting didst transcribe all taught By loftiest meditations ; marble knew The sculptor's fearless soul — and as he wroughtj The grace of his own power and freedom grew. And more than all, heroic, just, sublime. Thou wert among the false — was this thy crime ? IX Yes ; and on Pisa's marble walls the twine Of direst weeds hangs garlanded — the snake Inhabits its wrecked palaces ; — in thine A beast of subtler venom now doth make Its lair, and sits amid their glories overthrown. And thus thy victim's fate is as thine own. • X The sweetest flowers are ever frail and rare. And love and freedom blossom but to wither ; And good and ill like vines entangled are. So that their grapes may oft be plucked together ; ■ Divide the vintage ere thou drink, then make Thy heart rejoice for dead Marenghi's sake. XI No record of his crime remains in story. But if the morning bright as evening shone. It was some high and holy deed, by glory Pursued into forgetfulness, which won From the blind crowd he made secure and free The patriot's meed, toil, death, and infamy. [31 ] WITH SHELLEY IN ITALY XII Eor when by sound of trumpet was declared A price upon his life, and there was set A penalty of blood on all who shared So much of water with him as might wet His lips, which speech divided not — he went Alone, as you may guess, to banishment. xni Amid the mountains, like a hunted beast, He hid himself, and hunger, toil, and cold, Month after month endured ; it was a feast Whene'er he found those globes of deep-red gold Which in the woods the strawberry-tree doth bear. Suspended in their emerald atmosphere. XIV - And in the roofless huts of vast morasses. Deserted by the fever-stricken serf. All overgrown with reeds and long rank grasses. And hillocks heaped of moss-inwoven turf. And where the huge and speckled aloe made. Booted in stones, a broad and pointed shade, XV He housed himself. There is a point of strand Near Yado's tower and town ; and on one side The treacherous marsh divides it from the land. Shadowed by pine and ilex forests wide. And on the other creeps eternally. Through muddy weeds, the shallow sullen sea. [ 82 ] 8 S o a o THE YEAR 1818 XVI Here the earth's breath is pestilence, and few But things whose nature is at war with life — Snakes and ill worms — endure its mortal dew. The trophies of the clime's victorious strife — White bonesj and locks of dun and yellow hair, And ringM horns which buffaloes did wear — • •••■• XVII And at the utmost point . . . stood there The relics of a weed- inwoven cot. Thatched with broad flags. An outlawed murderer Had lived seven days there : the pursuit was hot When he was cold. The birds that were his grave Fell dead upon their feast in Vado's wave. XVIII There must have lived within Marenghi's heart That fire, more warm and bright than life or hope, (Which to the martyr makes his dungeon . . . More joyous than the heaven's majestic cope To his oppressor), warring with decay, — Or he could ne'er have lived years, day by day. XIX Nor was his state so lone as you might think. He had tamed every newt and snake and toad. And every seagull which sailed down to drink -Those ... ere the death-mist went abroad. 3 [ 83 ] WITH SHELLEY IN ITALY And each one^ with peculiar talk and play, Wiled, not untaught, his silent time away. XX And the marsh-meteorSj like tame beasts, at night Came licking with blue tongues his veined feet ; And he would watch them, as, like spirits bright. In many entangled figures quaint and sweet To some enchanted music they would dance — Until they vanished at the first moon-glance. XXI He mocked the stars by grouping on each weed The summer dewdrops in the golden dawn ; And, ere the hoar-frost vanished, he could read Its pictured footprints, as on spots of lawn Its delicate brief touch in silence weaves The likeness of the wood's remembered leaves. XXII And many a fresh Spring-morn would he awaken — While yet the unrisen sun made glow, like iron Quivering in crimson fire, the peaks unshaken Of mountains and blue isles which did environ With air-clad crags that plain of land and sea, - — And feel liberty. XXIII And in the moonless nights, when the dim ocean Heaved underneath the heaven, . . . Starting from dreams . . . Communed with the immeasurable world; [34] THE YEAR 1818 And felt his life beyond his limbs dilated^ Till his mind grew lite that it contemplated. XXIV His food was the wild fig and strawberry ; The milky pine-nuts which the autumnal blast Shakes into the tall grass ; and such small fry As from the sea by winter-storms are cast ; And the coarse bulbs of iris-flowers he found Knotted in clumps under the spongy ground. XXV And so were kindled powers and thoughts which made His solitude less dark. When memory came (For years gone by leave each a deepening shade), His spirit basked in its internal flame, — Asj when the black storm hurries round at night. The fisher basks beside his red fire-light. XXVI Yet human hopes and cares and faiths and errors, Like billows unawakened by the wind. Slept in Marenghi still ; but that all terrors. Weakness, and doubt, had withered in his mind. His couch . . . • ■.••• xxvn And, when he saw beneath the sunset's planet A black ship walk over the crimson ocean, — Its pennons streaming on the blasts that fan it, Its sails and ropes all tense and without motion, [35] WITH SHELLEY IN ITALY Like the dart ghost of the unburied even Striding across the orange-coloured heaven^ — XXVIII The thought of his own kind who made the soul Which sped that winged shape through night and day,— The thought of his own country . . . JULIAN AND MADDALQi A CONVERSATION PEEPACE The meadows witl fresh streams, the bees with thyme. The goats with the green leaves of budding Spring, Are saturated not — nor Love with tears. ViEOiii's GaUus. CoTTNT Maddalo is a Venetian nobleman of ancient family and of great fortune, who, without mixing much in the society of his countrymen, resides chiefly at his mag- nificent palace in that city. He is a person of the most consummate genius, and capable, if he would direct his energies to such an end, of becoming the redeemer of his degraded country. But it is his weakness to be proud : he derives, from a comparison of his own extraordinary mind with the dwarfish intellects that surround him, an 1 Julian is the idealized portrait of Shelley himself; Maddalo is Lord Byron. The poem was not published until after Shelley's death, although written during his first year in Italy. He had in mind to write three other poems as companions to this Venice poem, whose scenes were to be laid respectively in Rome, Florence, and Naples. But this scheme was never carried out. — Ed. [86] ^5 ■^ § ="'s- •*« II ig S • *;. s I- i H 3 THE YEAR 1818 And instruments of music — you may guess A stranger could do little more or less For one so gentle and unfortunate : And those are his sweet strains which charm the weight Erom madmen's chains, and make this Hell appear A heaven of sacred silence, hushed to hear." — " Nay, this was kind of you — he had no claim, As the world says " — " None — but the very same Which 1 on all mankind were I as he Fallen to such deep reverse ; — his melody Is interrupted — now we hear the din Of madmen, shriek on shriek again begin; Let us now visit himj after this strain He ever communes with himself again. And sees nor hears not any." Having said These words we called the keeper, and he led To an apartment opening on the sea — There the poor wretch was sitting mournfully Near a piano, his pale fingers twined One with the other, and the ooze and wind Eushed through an open casement, and did sway His hair, and starred it with the brackish spray; His head was leaning on a music book. And he was muttering, and his lean limbs shook; His lips were pressed against a folded leaf In hue too beautiful for health, and grief Smiled in their motions as they lay apart — As one who wrought from his own fervid heart The eloquence of passion, soon he raised His sad meek face and eyes lustrous and glazed [47] WITH SHELLEY IN ITALY And spote — sometimes as one who wrote and thought His words might move some heart that heeded not If sent to distant lands : and then as one Eeproachiug deeds never to he undone With wondering self-compassion j then his speech Wa;s lost in grief, and then his words came each Unmodulated, cold, expressionless, — But that from one jarred accent you might guess It was despair made them so uniform : And all the while the loud and gusty storm Hissed thro^ the window, and we stood behind Stealing his accents from the envious wind Unseen. I yet remember what he said Distinctly : such impression his words made. " Month after month,^' he cried, " to bear this load And as a jade urged by the whip and goad To drag life on, which like a heavy chain Lengthens behind with many a link of pain I — And not to speak my grief — not to dare To give a human voice to my despair. But live and move, and wretched thing ! smile on As if I never went aside to groan, And wear this mask of falsehood even to those Who are most dear — not for my own repose — Alas 1 no scorn or pain or hate could be So heavy as that falsehood is to me — But that I cannot bear more altered faces Than needs must be, more changed and cold embraces, More misery, disappointment, and mistrust To own me for their father . . . Would the dust [48] THE YEAR 1818 Were covered in upon my body now ! That the life ceased to toil within my brow ! And then these thoughts would at the least be fled j Let us not fear such pain can vex the dead. " What Power delights to torture us ? I know That to myself I do not wholly owe What now I suffer, tho' in part I may. Alas I none strewed sweet flowers upon the way Where wandering heedlessly, I met pale Pain, My shadow, which will leave me not again — K I have erred, there was no joy in error. But pain and insult and unrest and terror j I have not as some do, bought penitence With pleasure, and a dark yet sweet offence. For then, if love and tenderness and truth Had overlived hope's momentary youth. My creed should have redeemed me from repenting ; But loathed scorn and outrage unrelenting. Met love excited by far other seeming Until the end was gained ... as one from dreaming Of sweetest peace, I woke, and found my state Such as it is. " Thou, my spirit's mate Who, for thou art compassionate and wise, Wouldst pity me from thy most gentle eyes If this sad writing thou shouldst ever see — My secret groans must be unheard by thee. Thou wouldst weep tears bitter as blood to know Thy lost friend's incommunicable wo&, " Ye few by whom my nature has been weij 4 [ 49 ] WITH SHELLEY IN ITALY In friendship, let me not that name degrade By placing on your hearts the secret load Which crushes mine to dust. There is one road To peace and that is truth, which follow ye ! Love sometimes leads astray to misery. Yet think not tho' subdued — and I may well Say that I am subdued — that the full Hell Within me would infect the untainted breast Of sacred nature with its own unrest ; As some perverted beings think to find In scorn or hate a medicine for the mind Which scorn or hate hath wounded — how vain I The dagger heals not but may rend again . . . Believe that I am ever still the same In creed as in resolve, and what may tame My heart, must leave the understanding free. Or all would sink in this keen agony — Nor dream that I will join the vulgar cry. Or with my silence sanction tyranny. Or seek a moment's shelter from my pain In any madness which the world calls gain. Ambition or revenge or thoughts as stern As those which make me what I am, or turn To avarice or misanthropy or lust . . . Heap on me soon grave, thy welcome dust ! TiU then the dungeon may demand its prey. And Poverty and Shame may meet and say — Halting beside me on the public way — ' That love-devoted youth is ours — let 's sit Beside him — he may live some six months yet.' [50 J THE YEAR 1818 Or the red scaffoldj as our country bends, May ask some willing victim, or ye, friends. May fall under some sorrow which this heart Or hand may share or vanquish or avert ; I am prepared — in truth with no proud joy — To do or suffer aught, as when a boy I did devote to justice and to love My nature, worthless now ! . . . " I must remove A veil from my pent mind. 'T is torn aside ! 0, pallid as Death's dedicated bride. Thou mockery which art sitting by my side. Am I not wan like thee ? at the gravels caU I haste, invited to thy wedding-ball To greet the ghastly paramour, for whom Thou hast deserted me . . . and made the tomb Thy bridal bed . . . But I beside your feet Will lie and watch ye from my winding sheet — Thus . . . wide awake tho^ dead . . . yet stay, stay! Go not so soon — I know not what I say — Hear but my reasons ... I am mad, I fear, My fancy is o'erwrought . . . thou art not here . . . Pale art thou, ^t is most true . . . but thou art gone. Thy work is finished ... I am left alone ! — " Nay, was it I who wooed thee to this breast Which, like a serpent thou envenomest As in repayment of the warmth it lent ? Didst thou not seek me for thine own content ? [51 ] WITH SHELLEY IN ITALY Did not thy love awaken mine ? I thought That thou wert she who said ' You kiss me not Everj I fear you do not love me now ' — In truth I loved even to my overthrow Her, who would fain forget these words : but they Cling to her mind, and cannot pass away. " You say that I am proud — that when I speak My lip is tortured with the wrongs which break The spirit it expresses . . . Never one Humbled himself before, as I have done ! Even the instinctive worm on which we tread Turns, tho' it wound not — then with prostrate head Sinks in the dusk and writhes like me — and dies ? No : wears a living death of agonies ! As the slow shadows of the pointed grass Mark the eternal periods, his pangs pass Slow, ever-moving, — making moments be As mine seem — each an immortality ! " That you had never seen me — never heard My voice, and more than all had ne'er endured The deep pollution of my loathed embrace — That your eyes ne'er had lied love in my face — That, like some maniac monk, I had torn out The nerves of manhood by their bleeding root With mine own quivering fingers, so that ne'er Our hearts had for a moment mingled there To disunite in horror — these were not With thee, like some suppressed and hideous thought [62] T EANING Towers of Bologna. " You might almost fancy the city is rocked by an earthquake. " — Letter from Bologna, p. G6. THE YEAR 1818 Whicli flits athwart our musings^ but can find No rest within a pure and gentle mind . . . Thou sealedst them with many a bare broad word And searedst my memory o'er them, — for I heard And can forget not . . . they were ministered One after one, those curses. Mix them up Like self-destroying poisons in one cup, And they will make one blessing which thou ne'er Didst imprecate for, on me, — death. " It were A cruel punishment for one most cruel If such can love, to make that love the fuel Of the mind's hell ; hate, scorn, remorse, despair : But me — whose heart a stranger's tear might wear As water-drops the sandy fountain-stone. Who loved and pitied all things, and could moan For woes which others hear not, and could see The absent with the glance of phantasy. And with the poor and trampled sit and weep. Following the captive to his dungeon deep ; Me — who am as a nerve o'er which do creep The else unfelt oppressions of this earth. And was to thee the flame upon thy hearth. When aU beside was cold — that thou on me Shouldst rain these plagues of blistering agony — Such curses are from lips once eloquent With love's too partial praise — let none relent Who intend deeds too dreadful for a name Henceforth, if an example for the same [53 J WITH SHELLEY IN ITALY They seek ... for thou on me lookedst sOj and so — And didst speak thus ... and thus ... I live to show How much men bear and die not ! "Thou wilt tell, "With the grimace of hate how horrible It was to meet my love when thine grew less ; Thou wilt admire how I could e'er address Such features to love's work . . . this taunt, tho' true, (Eor indeed nature nor in form nor hue Bestowed on me her choicest workmanship) Shall not be thy defence ... for since thy lip Met mine first, years long past, since thine eye kindled "With soft fire under mine, I have not dwindled Nor changed in mind or body, or in aught But as love changes what it loveth not After long years and many trials. " How vain Are words ! I thought never to speak again. Not even in secret, — not to my own heart — But from my lips the unwilling accents start. And from my pen the words flow as I write. Dazzling my eyes with scalding tears ... my sight Is dim to see that charactered in vain On this unfeeling leaf which burns the brain And eats into it . . . blotting all things fair And wise and good which time had written there. " Those who inflict must suffer, for they see The work of their own hearts and this must be Our chastisement or recompense — child ! [54] THE YEAR 1818 I would that thine were like to be more mild For both our wretched sakes ... for thine the most "Who feelest already all that thou hast lost Without the power to wish it thine again ; And as slow years pass, a funereal train Each with the ghost of some lost hope or friend Following it like its shadow, wilt thou bend No thought on my dead memory ? " Alas, love ! Fear me not . . . against thee I would not move A finger in despite. Do I not live That thou mayst have less bitter cause to grieve ? I give thee tears for scorn and love for hate ; And that thy lot may be less desolate ' Than his on whom thou tramplest, I refrain From that sweet sleep which medicines all pain. Then, when thou speakest of me, never say ' He could forgive uot.^ Here I cast away All human passions, all revenge, all pride ; I think, speak, act no ill j I do but hide Under these words, like embers, every spark Of that which has consumed me — quick and dark The grave is yawning ... as its roof shall cover My limbs with dust and worms under and over So let Oblivion hide this grief . . . the air Closes upon my accents, as despair Upon my heart — let death upon despair ! " He ceased, and overcome leant back awhile, Then rising, with a melancholy smile [55] WITH SHELLEY IN ITALY Went to a sofa, and lay down, and slept A heavy sleep, and in his dreams he wept And muttered some familiar name, and we Wept without shame in his society. I think I never was impressed so much j The man who were not, must have lacked a touch Of human nature . . . then we lingered not. Although our argument was quite forgot. But calling the attendants, went to dine At Maddalo's ; yet neither cheer nor wine Could give us spirits, for we talked of him And nothing else, till daylight made stars dim j And we agreed his was some dreadful ill Wrought on him boldly, yet unspeakable. By a dear friend ; some deadly change in love Of one vowed deeply which he dreamed not of; For whose sake he, it seemed, had fixed a blot Of falsehood on his mind which flourished not But in the light of all-beholding truth. And having stamped this canker on his youth She had abandoned him — and how much more Might be his woe, we guessed not — he had store Of friends and fortune once, as we could guess From his nice habits and his gentleness ; These were now lost ... it were a grief indeed If he had changed one unsustaining reed For all that such a man might else adorn. The colours of his mind seemed yet unworn; For the wild language of his grief was high, Such as in measure were called poetry, [56] THE YEAR 1818 And I remember one remark which then Maddalo made. He said : " Most wretched men Are cradled into poetry by wrong, They learn in suffering what they teach in song." If I had been an unconnected man I, from this moment, should have formed some plan Never to leave sweet Venice, — for to me It was dehght to ride by the lone sea ; And then the town is silent — one may write Or read in gondolas by day or night, Having the little brazen lamp alight. Unseen, uninterrupted ; boots are there. Pictures, and casts from all those statues fair Which were twin-born with poetry, and all We seek in towns, with little to recall Eegrets for the green country. I might sit In Maddalo's great palace, and his wit And subtle talk would cheer the winter night And make me know myself, and the firelight Would flash upon our faces, till the day Might dawn and make me wonder at my stay : But I had friends in London too : the chief Attraction here, was that I sought relief Prom the deep tenderness that maniac wrought Within me — 't was perhaps an idle thought — But I imagined that if day by day I watched him, and but seldom went away. And studied all the beatings of his heart With zeal, as men study some stubborn art [57 J WITH SHELLEY IN ITALY For their own good, and could by patience find An entrance to the caverns of his mind, I might reclaim him from this dark estate ; In friendships I had been most fortunate — Yet never saw I one whom I would call More willingly my friend ; and this was all Accomplished not ; such dreams of baseless good Oft come and go in crowds or solitude And leave no trace — but what I now designed Made for long years impression on my mind. The following morning urged by my affairs I left bright Yenice. After many years And many changes I returned ; the name Of YenicCj and its aspect, was the same ; But Maddalo was travelling far away Among the mountains of Armenia. His dog was dead. His child had now become A woman ; such as it has been my doom To meet with few, a wonder of this earth Where there is little of transcendant worth. Like one of Shakespeare's women : kindly she, And with a manner beyond courtesy, Eeceived her father's friend ; and when I asked Of the lorn maniac, she her memory tasked And told as she had heard the mournful tale. " That the poor sufferer's health began to fail Two years from my departure, but that then The lady who had left him, came again. Her mien had been imperious, but she now [58 ] s S- «< S" s n <3& § ■^ pj 1 i g td s. 2 tB 5 1, CD " H THE YEAR 1818 Looked meek — perhaps remorse had brought her low. Her coming made him better^ and they stayed Together at my father's — for I played As I remember with the lady's shawl — I might be six years old — but after all She left him " . . . " Why, her heart must have been tough : How did it end ? " " And was not this enough ? They met — they parted " — " Child, is there no more ? " " Something within that interval which bore The stamp of why they parted, how they met : Yet if thine aged eyes disdain to wet Those wrinkled cheeks with youth's remembered tears. Ask me no more, but let the silent years Be closed and cered over their memory As yon mute marble where their corpses lie." I urged and questioned still, she told me how All happened — but the cold world shall not know. TO MES. SHELLEY (Bagni di Lucca). Venice, Sunday morning. August 23, 1818. , My deakest Mary. We arrived here last night at twelve o'clock, and it is now before breakfast the next morning. I can, of course, tell you nothing of the future ; and though I shall not close this letter till post time, yet I do not know exactly when that is. Yet, if you are very [59 ] WITH SHELLEY IN ITALY impatient, look along the letter and you will see another date, when I may have something to relate. I came from Padua hither in a gondola, and the gondo- liere, among other things, without any hint on my part, began talking of Lord Byron. He said he was a giov- inotto Inglese, with a nome stravagante, who lived very luxuriously, and spent great sums of money. This man, it seems, was one of Lord Byron's gondolieri. No sooner had we arrived at the inn, than the waiter began talking about him — said, that he frequented Mrs. H.'s convenor zioni very much. Our journey from Florence to Padua contained nothing which may not be related another time. At Padua, as I said, we took a gondola — and left it at three o'clock. These gondolas are the most beautiful and convenient boats in the world. They are finely carpeted and furnished with black, and painted black. The couches on which you lean are extraordinarily soft, and are so disposed as to be the most comfortable to those who lean or sit. The windows have at will either Venetian plate-glass flowered, or Venetian blinds, or blinds of black cloth to shut out the light. The weather here is extremely cold — indeed, some- times very painfully so, and yesterday it began to rain. We passed the laguna in the middle of the night in a most violent storm of wind, rain, and lightning. It was very curious to observe the elements above in a state of such tremendous convulsions, and the surface of the water almost calm ; for these lagunas, though five miles broad, a space enough in a storm to sink a gondola, are so shallow that the boatmen drive the boat along with a pole. The [60] THE YEAR 1818 sea-water, furiously agitated by the wind, shone with sparkles like stars. Venice, now hidden and now disclosed by the driving rain, shone dimly with its lights. We were all this while safe and comfortable. Well, adieu, dearest : I shall, as Miss Byron says,^ resume the pen in the evening. Sunday Night, S o'clock in the-Morning. Well, I will try to relate everything in its order. At three o'clock I called on Lord Byron : he was delighted to see me. He took me in his gondola across the laguna to a long sandy island, which defends Venice from the Adriatic. When we disembarked, we found his horses waiting for us, and we rode along the sands of the sea, talking. Our conversation consisted in histories of his wounded feelings, and questions as to my affairs, and great professions of friendship and regard for me. He said, that if he had been in England at the time of the Chancery ^ affair, he would have moved heaven and earth to have prevented such a decision. We talked of literary matters, his Fourth Canto,^ which, he says, is very good, and indeed repeated some stanzas of great energy to me. * i.e., Harriet Byron, in Richardson's novel of " Sir Charles Grandi- son." — Ed. ' An allusion to the decision of Chancellor Eldou whereby Shelley's two children by his first marriage were denied to him and placed under the care of their maternal grandfather. 8 0f"ChildeHarold." [61] WITH SHELLEY IN ITALY EsTE, October 8, 1818. We left the Baths of Lucca, I think, the day after I wrote to you — on a visit to Venice — partly for the sake of seeing the city. ... I saw Lord Byron, and really hardly knew him again ; he is changed into the liveliest and happiest-looking man I ever met. He read me the first canto of his " Don Juan " — a thing in the style of Beppo, but infinitely better, and dedicated to Southey, in ten or a dozen stanzas, more like a mixture of wormwood and verdigris than satire. Venice is a wonderfully fine city. The approach to it over the laguna, with its domes and turrets glittering in a long line over the blue waves, is one of the finest architectural delusions in the world. It seems to have — and literally it has — its foundations in the sea. The silent streets are paved with water, and you hear nothing but the dashing of the oars, and the occasional cries of the gondolieri. I heard nothing of Tasso. The gondolas themselves are things of a most romantic and picturesque appearance ; I can only compare them to moths of which a cofiin might have been the chrysalis. They are hung with black, and painted black, and carpeted with grey ; they curl at the prow and stem, and at the former there is a nondescript beak of shining steel, which glitters at the end of its long black mass. The Doge's palace, with its library, is a fine monument of aristocratic power. I saw the dungeons, where these scoundrels used to torment their victims. They are of three kinds — one adjoining the place of trial, where the prisoners destined to immediate execution were kept. I [62] " You forget that it is a picture as you look at it ; and yet it is most unlike any of those things which we call reality. " — Letter from Bologna, p. 64. THE YEAR 1818 could not descend into them, because the day on which I visited it was festa. Another under the leads of the pal- ace, where the sufferers were roasted to death or madness by the ardours of an Italian sun : and others called the Pozzi — or wells, deep underneath, and communicating with those on the roof by secret passages — where the prisoners were confined sometimes half up to their middles in stinting water. When the French came here, they found only one old man in the dungeons, and he could not speak. But Venice, which was once a tyrant, is now the next worse thing, a slave j for in fact it ceased to be free, or worth our regret as a nation, from the moment that the oligarchy usurped the rights of the people. Yet, I do not imagine that it was ever so degraded as it has been since the French, and especially the Austrian yoke. The Austrians take sixty per cent, in taxes, and impose free quarters on the inhabitants. A horde of German soldiers, as vicious and more disgusting than the Venetians themselves, insult these miserable people. I had no conception of the excess to which avarice, cowardice, superstition, ignorance, pas- sionless lust, and all the inexpressible brutalities which de- grade human nature, could be carried, until I had passed a few days at Venice. We have been living this last month near the little town from which I date this letter, in a very pleasant villa which has been lent to us, and we are now on the point of pro- ceedmg to Florence, Eome, and Naples — at which last city we shall spend the winter, and return northwards in the spring. Behind us here are the Euganean hills, not so beautiful as those ,of the Bagni di Lucca, with Arqua, [63] WITH SHELLEY IN ITALY where Petrarch's house and tomb are religiously preserved and visited. At the end of our garden is an extensive Gothic castle, now the habitation of owls and bats, where the Medici family resided before they came to Florence. We see before us the wide flat plains of Lombardy, in which we see the sun and moon rise and set, and the eve- ning star, and all the golden magnificence of autumnal clouds. But I reserve wonder for Naples. I have been writing — and indeed have just finished — the first act of a lyric and classical drama, to be called "Prometheus Unbound." Will you teM me what there is in Cicero about a drama supposed to have been written by jEschylus under this title? Bologna, Monday, Nov. 9, 1818. I have seen a quantity of things here — churches, palaces, statues, fountains, and pictures; and my brain is at this moment like a portfolio of an architect, or a print-shop, or a common-place book. I will try to re- collect something of what I have seen; for, indeed, it requires, if it will obey, an act of volition. Eirst, we went to the cathedral, which contains nothing remarkable, except a kind of shrine, or rather a marble canopy, loaded with sculptures, and supported on four marble columns. We went then to a palace — I am sure I forget the name of it — where we saw a large gallery of pictures. Of course, in a picture gallery you see three hundred pictures you forget, for one you remember. ■ • • « « • We saw besides one picture of Eaphael — St. Cecilia: this is in another and higher style ; you forgot that it is [64] THE YEAR 1818 a picture as you look at it ; and yet it is most unlike any of those things which we call reality. It is of the inspired and ideal kind, and seems to have been conceived and executed in a similar state of feeling to that which pro- duced among the ancients those perfect specimens of poetry and sculpture which are the baffling models of succeeding generations. There is a unity and a perfection in it of an incommunicable kind. The central figure, St. Cecilia, seems rapt in such inspiration as produced- her image in the painter's mind ; her deep, dark, eloquent eyes lifted up ; her chestnut hair flung back from her forehead — she holds an organ in her hands — her countenance, as it were, calmed by the depth of its passion and rapture, and pene- trated throughout with tlie warm and radiant light of life. She is listening to the music of heaven, and, as I imagine, has just ceased to sing, for the four figures that surround her evidently point, by their attitudes, towards her ; par- ticularly St. John, who, with a tender yet impassioned gesture, bends his countenance towards her, languid with the depth of his emotion. At her feet lie various instru- ments of music, broken and unstrung. Of the colouring I do not speak ; it eclipses nature, yet it has all her truth and softness. We saw some pictures of Domenichino, Carracci, Albano, Guercino, Elisabetta Sirani. The two former, remember, I do not pretend to taste — I cannot admire. Of the lat- ter there are some beautiful Madonnas. There are several of Guercino, which they said were very fine. I dare say they were, for the strength and complication of his figures made my head turn round. One, indeed, was certainly s [65 ] WITH SHELLEY IN ITALY powerful. It was the representation of the founder of the Carthusians exercising his austerities in the desert^ with a youth as his attendant, kneeling beside him at an altar : on another altar stood a skull and a crucifix ; and around were the rocks and the trees of the wilderness. I never saw such a figure as this fellow. His face was wrinkled like a dried snake's skin, and drawn in long hard lines : his verj hands were wrinkled. He looked like an animated mummy. He was clothed in a loose dress of death-coloured flannel, such as you might fancy a shroud might be, after it had wrapt a corpse a month or two. It had a yellow, putrefied, ghastly hue, which it cast on all the objects around, so that the hands and face of the Carthusian and his companion were jaundiced by this sepulchral glimmer. Why write hooks against religion, when we may hang up such pictures ? But the world either will not or cannot see. The gloomy efiect of this was softened, and, at the same time, its sublimity diminished, by the figure of the Virgin and Child in the sky, looking down with admiration on the monk, and a beautiful flying figure of an angel. . . . I have just returned from a moonlight walk through Bologna. It is a city of colonnades, and the effect of moonlight is strikingly picturesque. There are two towers here — one four hundred feet high — ugly things built of brick, which lean both different ways j and with the delusion of moonlight shadows, you might almost fancy that the city is rocked by an earthquake. They say they were built so on purpose ; but I observe in all the plain of Lombardy the church towers lean. [66] '/ -- ^ ;ft'«»- Jj^KMK^^^^^i^- 1."%^ 4*1 Kj^r r\ v"^ *m1 "0 P|M|Pp / i- ■■;■ ' A 9 2;;"^^| ■* ^M m^K^ I- -^'"^ yM|F ; r^^^ D^' .^1 ^ :fi^'^'^-~— ^kfe ■^"^-.»^ii^ :!r-^^- -^c..- - See Letter from Bologna, p. G6. THE YEAR 1818 EoME, November 20, 1818. • ••••• I take advantage of this rainy evening, and before Eome has effaced all other recollections^ to endeavour to recall the vanished scenes through which we have passed. We left Bologna, I forget on what day, and passing by Rimini, Fano, and Eoligno, along the Yia Flaminia and Terni, have arrived at Eome after ten days' somewhat tedious, but most interesting, journey. The most remarkable things we saw were the Eoman excavations in the rock, and the great waterfall of Terni. Of course you have heard that there are a Eoman bridge and a triumphal arch at Eiminij and in what excellent taste they are buUt. The bridge is not unlike the Strand bridge, but more bold in proportion, and of course infinitely smaller. From Fano we left the coast of the Adriatic, and entered the Apen- nines, following the course of the Metaurus, the banks of which were the scene of defeat of Asdrubal : and it is said (you can refer to the book) that Livy has given a very exact and animated description of it. I forget all about it, but shall look as soon as our boxes are opened. Fol- lowing the river, the vale contracts, the banks of the river become steep and rocky, the forests of oak and ilex which overhang its emerald-coloured stream, cling to their abrupt precipices. About four miles from Fossombrone, the river forces for itself a passage between the walls and top- pling precipices of the loftiest Apennines, which are here rifted to their base, and undermined by the narrow and tumultuous torrent. It was a cloudy morning, and we had no conception of the scene that awaited us. Suddenly [67] WITH SHELLEY IN ITALY the low clouds were struck by the clear north wind, and like curtains of the finest gauze, removed one by one, were drawn from before the mountain, whose heaven- cleaving pinnacles and black crags overhanging one an- other, stood at length defined in the light of day. The road runs parallel to the river, at a considerable height, and is carried through the mountain by a vaulted cavern. The marks of the chisel of the legionaries of the Eoman Consul are yet evident. We passed on day after day, until we came to Spoleto, I think the most romantic city I ever saw. There is here an aqueduct of astonishing elevation, which unites two rocky mountains, — there is the path of a torrent below, whitening the green dell with its broad and barren track of stones, and above there is a castle, apparently of great strength and of tremendous magnitude, which overhangs the city, and whose marble bastions are perpendicular with the precipice. I never saw a more impressive picture; in which the shapes of nature are of the grandest order, but over which the creations of man, sublime from their an- tiquity and greatness, seem to predominate. The castle was built by Belisarius or Narses, I forget which, but was of that epoch. From Spoleto we went to Temi, and saw the cataract of the Velino. The glaciers of Montanvert and the source of the Arveiron is the grandest spectacle I ever saw. This is the second. Imagine a river sixty feet in breadth, with a vast volume of waters, the outlet of a great lake among the higher mountains, falling 300 feet into a sight- less gulf of snow-white vapour, which bursts up for ever [68] WATERFALL at Terni. - See Letter from Rome, p. GS. THE YEAR 1818 and for ever from a circle of black crags, and thence leap- ing downwards, makes five or six other cataracts, each fifty or a hundred feet high, which exhibit, on a smaller scale, and with beautiful and sublime variety, the same appearances. But words — and far less could painting — will not express it. Stand upon the brink of the platform of cliff, which is directly opposite. You see the ever- moving water stream down. It comes in thick and tawny folds, flaking off Kke solid snow gliding down a mountain. It does not seem hollow within, but without it is unequal, like the folding of linen thrown carelessly down ; your eye follows it, and it is lost below ; not in the black rocks which gird it around, but in its own foam and spray, in the cload-like vapours boiling up from below, which is not like rain, nor mist, nor spray, nor foam, but water, in a shape wholly unlike anything I ever saw before. It is as white as snow, but thick and impenetrable to the eye. The very imagination is bewildered in it. A thunder comes up from the abyss wonderful to hear ; for, though it ever sounds, it is never the same, but, modulated by the changing motion, rises and falls intermittingly ; we passed half an hour in one spot looking at it, and thought but a few minutes had gone by. The surrounding scenery is, in its kind, the loveliest and most sublime that can be con- ceived. In our first walk we passed through some olive groves, of large and ancient trees, whose hoary and twisted trunks leaned in all directions. We then crossed a path of orange trees by the river side, laden with their golden fruit, and came to a forest of ilex of a large size, whose evergreen and acorn-bearing boughs were intertwined over [69 ] WITH SHELLEY IN ITALY our winding path. Around, hemming in the narrow vale, were pinnacles of lofty mountains of pyramidical rock clothed with all evergreen plants and trees; the vast pine whose feathery foliage trembled in the blue air, the ilex, that ancestral inhabitant of these mountains, the arbutus with its crimson-coloured fruit and glittering leaves. After an hour's walk, we came beneath the cataract of Terni, within the distance of haK a mile ; nearer you can- not approach, for the Nar, which has here its confluence with the Yelino, bars the passage. We then crossed the river formed by this confluence, over a narrow natural bridge of rock, and saw the cataract from the platform I first mentioned. We think of spending some time next year near this waterfall. The inn is very bad, or we should have stayed there longer. We came from Temi last night to a place called Nepi, and to-day arrived at Eome across the much-belied Cam- pagna di Eoma, a place I confess infinitely to my taste. It is a flattering picture of Bagshot Heath. But then there are the Apennines on one side, and Rome and St. Peter's oil the other, and it is intersected by perpetual dells clothed with arbutus and ilex. Naples, December 23, 1818. Since I last wrote to you, I have seen the ruins of Eome, the Yatican, St. Peter's, and all the miracles of ancient and modem art contained in that majestic city. The impression of it exceeds anything I have ever experi- enced in my travels. We stayed there only a week, intend- ing to return at the end of February, and devote two or [70] "it. R s ^ s i i S 9 9 S a- THE YEAR 1818 three months to its mines of inexhaustible contemplation, to which period I refer you for a minute account of it. We visited the Eorum and the ruins of the Coliseum every day. The Coliseum is unlike any work of human hands I ever saw before. It is of enormous height and circuit, and the arches built of massy stones are piled on one another, and jut into the blue air, shattered into the forms of overhanging rocks. It has been changed by time into the image of an amphitheatre of rocky hills overgrown by the wild olive, the myrtle, and the fig-tree, and threaded by little paths, which wind among its ruined stairs and immeasurable galleries : the copse-wood overshadows you as you wander through its labyrinths, and the wild weeds of this climate of flowers bloom under your feet. The arena is covered with grass, and pierces, like the skirts of a natural plain, the chasms of the broken arches around. But a small part of the exterior circumference remains — it is exquisitely light and beautifulj and the effect of the perfection of its architecture, adorned with ranges of Corinthian pilasters, supporting a bold cornice, is such as to diminish the effect of its greatness. The interior is all ruin. I can scarcely believe that when encrusted with Dorian marble and ornamented by columns of Egyptian granite its effect could have been so sublime and so im- pressive as in its present state. It is open to the sky, and it was the clear and sunny weather of the end of November in this climate when we visited it, day after day. Near it is the Arch of Constantine, or rather the Arch of Trajan ; for the servile and avaricious senate of degraded Eome ordered that the monument of his predecessor should [71 ] WITH SHELLEY IN ITALY be demolished in order to dedicate one to the Christian reptile, who had crept among the blood of his murdered family to the supreme power. It is exquisitely beautiful and perfect. The Eorum is a plain in the midst of Eome, a kind of desert full of heaps of stones and pits, and though so near the habitations of men, is the most desolate place you can conceive. The ruins of temples stand in and around it, shattered columns and ranges of others com- plete, supporting cornices of exquisite workmanship, and vast vaults of shattered domes distinct with regular com- partments, once filled with sculptures of ivory or brass. The temples of Jupiter, and Concord, and Peace, and the Sun, and the Moon, and Vesta, are all within a short dis- tance of this spot. Behold the wrecks of what a great nation once dedicated to the abstractions of the mind ! Eome is a city, as it were, of the dead, or rather of those who cannot die, and who survive the puny generations which inhabit and pass over the spot which they have made sacred to eternity. In Eome, at least in the first enthusi- asm of your recognition of ancient time, you see nothing of the Italians. The nature of the city assists the delusion, for its vast and antique walls describe a circumference of sixteen miles, and thus the population is thinly scattered over this space, nearly as great as London. "Wide wild fields are enclosed within it, and there are grassy lanes and copses winding among the ruins, and a great green hill, lonely and bare, which overhangs the Tiber. The gardens of the modem palaces are like wild woods of cedar, and cypress, and pine, and the neglected walks are overgrown with weeds. The English burying-place is a green slope [72] THE YEAR 1818 near the walls, under the pyramidal tomb of Cestius, and is, I think, the most beautiful and solemn cemetery I ever beheld. To see the sun shining on its bright grass, fresh, when we first visited it, with the autumnal dews, and hear the whispering of the wind among the leaves of the trees which have overgrown the tomb of Cestius, and the soil which is stirring in the sun-warm earth, and to mark the tombs, mostly of women and young people who were buried there, one might, if one were to die, desire the sleep they seem to sleep. Such is the human mind, and so it peoples with its wishes vacancy and oblivion. STANZAS WRITTEN IN DEJECTION, NEAR NAPLES I The sun is warm, the sky is clear. The waves are dancing fast and bright. Blue isles and snowy mountains wear The purple noon's transparent might, The breath of the moist earth is light. Around its unexpanded buds ; Like many a voice of one delight. The winds, the birds, the ocean floods. The City's voice itself is soft like Solitude's. II I see the Deep's untrampled floor With green and purple seaweeds strown ; I see the waves upon the shore. Like light dissolved in star-showers, thrown : [73] WITH SHELLEY IN ITALY I sit upon the sands alonCj The lightning of the noontide ocean Is flashing round me, and a tone Arises from its measured motion. How sweet ! did any heart now share in my emotion. Ill Alas ! I have nor hope nor health, Nor peace within nor calm around. Nor that content surpassing wealth The sage in meditation found. And walked with inward glory crowned — Nor fame, nor power, nor love, nor leisure. Others I see whom these surround — Smiling they live, and call life pleasure ; — To me that cup has been dealt in another measure. IV Yet now despair itself is mild. Even as the winds and waters are ; I could lie down like a tired child. And weep away the life of care Which I have borne and yet must bear, Till death like sleep might steal on me. And I might feel in the warm air My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea Breathe o'er my dying brain its last monotony. [74] g. B 13 a e 13 a t-' g" E) B o THE YEAR 1818 V Some might lament that I were cold. As I, when this sweet day is gone. Which my lost heart, too soon grown old. Insults with this untimely moan ; They might lament — for I am one "Whom men love not, — and yet regret. Unlike this day, which, when the sun Shall on its stainless glory set. Will linger, though enjoyed, like joy in memory yet. December, 1818. Naples, December 22, 1818. External nature in these delightful regions contrasts with and compensates for the deformity and degradation of humanity. We have a lodging divided from the sea by the royal gardens, and from our windows we see perpetually the blue waters of the bay, forever changing, yet forever the same, and encompassed by the mountainous island of Caprese, the lofty peaks which overhang Salerno, and the woody hill of Posilipo, whose promontories hide from us Misenum and the lofty isle Inarime,^ which, with its divided summit, forms the opposite horn of the bay. From the pleasant walks of the garden we see Vesuvius ; a smoke by day and a fire by night is seen upon its summit, and the glassy sea often reflects its light or shadow. The climate is delicious. We sit without a fire, with the windows open, and have almost all the productions of an English summer. The weather is usually like what Wordsworth ' The ancient name of Ischia. — [Note by Mrs. Shelley.] [75 ] WITH SHELLEY IN ITALY calls "the first fine day of March" ; sometimes very much warmer, though perhaps it wants that " each minute sweeter than before," which gives an intoxicating sweetness to the awakening of the earth from its Winter's sleep in England. We have made two excursions, one to Baise and one to Yesuvius, and we propose to visit, successively, the islands, Peestum, Pompeii, and Beneventum. We set off an hour after sunrise one radiant morning in a little boat ; there was not a cloUd in the sky, nor a wave upon the sea, which was so translucent that you could see the hollow caverns clothed with the glaucous sea-moss, and the leaves and branches of those delicate weeds that pave the unequal bottom of the water. As noon approached, the heat, and especially the light, became intense. We passed Posilipo, and came first to the eastern point of the Bay of Pozzuoli, which is within the great Bay of Naples, and which again encloses that of Baise. Here are lofty rocks and craggy islets, with arches and portals of precipice standing in the sea, and enormous caverns, which echoed faintly with the murmur of the languid tide. This is called La Scuola di Virgilio. We then went directly across to the promontory of Misenum, leaving the pre- cipitous island of Nisida on the right. Here we were con- ducted to see the Mare Morto, and the Elysian fields ; the spot on which Virgil places the scenery of the Sixth ^neid. Though extremely beautiful, as a lake, and woody hills, and tliis divine sky must make it, I confess my dis- appointment. The guide showed us an antique cemetery, where the niches used for placing the cinerary urns of the dead yet remain. We then coasted the Bay of Baiae to the [76 J THE YEAR 1818 left, in which we saw many picturesque and interesting ruins ; but I have to remark that we never disembarked but we were disappointed — while from the boat the effect of the scenery was inexpressibly delightful. The colours of the water and the air breathe over all things here the radi- ance of their own beauty. After passing the bay of Baiae, and observing the ruins of its antique grandeur standing like rocks in the transparent sea under our boat, we landed "to visit Lake Avernus. We passed through the cavern of the Sibyl (not Virgil's Sibyl), which pierces one of the hUls which circumscribe the lake, and came to a calm and lovely basin of water, surrounded by dark woody hills, and pro- foundly solitary. Some vast ruins of the temple of Pluto stand on a lawny hill on one side of it, and are reflected in its windless mirror. It is far more beautiful than the Ely- sian fields — but there are all the materials for beauty in the latter, and the Avernus was once a chasm of deadly and pes- tilential vapours. About half a milerfrom Avernus, a high hill, called Monte Nuovo, was thrown up by volcanic fire. Passing onward we came to Pozzuoli, the ancient Dicsearchea, where there are the columns remaining of a temple to Serapis, and the wreck of an enormous amphi- theatre, changed, like the Coliseum, into a natural hill by the overteeming vegetation. Here also is the Solfatara, of which there is a poetical description in the Civil War of Petronius, beginning — " Est locus," ^ and in which the 1 Est locus exciso peuitna demersus Hatu, Parthenopem inter, magnaeque Dicarchidos arva, Cocytia perfusos aqna, nam spiritos, extra Qui furit, effusus fauesto spargitur sestu, &o. Petkohii Aebitei Satyficon. [ TT 1 WITH SHELLEY IN ITALY verses of the poet are infinitely finer than what he describes, for it is not a very curious place. After seeing these things we returned by moonhght to Naples in our boat. What colours there were in the sky, what radiance in the evening star, and how the moon was encompassed by a hght unknown to our regions ! Our next excursion was to Vesuvius. We went to Eesina in a carriage, where Mary and I mounted mules, and C was carried in a chair on the shoulders of four men, much like a member of parliament after he has gained his election, and looking, with less reason, quite as frightened. So we arrived at the hermitage of San Sal- vador, where an old hermit, belted with rope, set forth the plates for our refreshment. Vesuvius is, after the glaciers, the most impressive ex- hibition of the energies of nature I ever saw. It has not the immeasurable greatness, the overpowering magnifi- cence, nor, above all, the radiant beauty of the glaciers ; but it has all their character of tremendous and irresistible strength. From Eesina to the hermitage you wind up the mountain, and cross a vast stream of hardened lava, which is an actual image of the waves of the sea, changed into hard black stone by enchantment. The lines of the boil- ing flood seem to hang in the air, and it is difficult to be- lieve that the billows which seem hurrying down upon you are not actually in motion. This plain was once a sea of liquid fire. Prom the hermitage we crossed another vast stream of lava, and then went on foot up the cone — this is the only part of the ascent in which there is any diffi- culty, and that difficulty has been much exaggerated. It [78] "iW.M^S- U p o t-l t-l O ^ C»t l^ * i. iK^SSSS^i- ,j'fi&t*S»*i"" S.: y • '■ m mtim,. ■ mmm THE YEAR 1818 Is composed of rocks of lava, and declivities of ashes ; by ascending the former and descending the latter, there is very little fatigue. On the summit is a kind of irregular plain, the most horrible chaos that can be imagined ; riven into ghastly chasms, and heaped up with tumuli of great stones and cinders, and enormous rocks blackened and calcined, which had been thrown from the volcano upon one another in terrible confusion. In the midst stands the conical hill from which volumes of smoke, and the fountains of liquid fire, are rolled forth forever. The mountain is at present in a slight state of eruption ; and a thick heavy white smoke is perpetually rolled out, interrupted by enormous columns of an impenetrable black bituminous vapour, which is hurled up, fold after fold, into the sky with a de^p hollow sound, and fiery stones are rained down from its darkness, and a black shower of ashes fell even where we sat. The lava, like the glacier, creeps on perpetually, with a crackling sound as of suppressed fire. There are several springs of lava; and in one place it gushes precipitously over a high crag, rolling down the half-molten rocks and its own overhanging waves; a cataract of quivering fire. We approached the extremity of one of the rivers of lava; it is about twenty feet in breadth and ten in height ; and as the inclined plane was not rapid, its motion was very slow. We saw the masses of its dark exterior surface detach themselves as it moved, and betray the depth of the liquid fiame. In the day the fire is but slightly seen; you only observe a tremulous motion in the air, and streams and fountains of white sulphurous smoke. [79] WITH SHELLEY IN ITALY At length we saw the sun sink between Capreae and Inarimej and, as the darkness increasedj the effect of the fire became more beautiful. We were, as it were, sur- rounded by streams and cataracts of the red and radiant fire; and in the midst, from the column of bituminous smoke shot up into the air, fell the vast masses of rock, white with the light of their intense heat, leaving behind them through the dark vapour trains of splendour. We descended by torch-light, and I should have enjoyed the scenery on my return, but they conducted me, I know not how, to the hermitage in a state of intense bodily suffering, the worst effect of which was spoiling the pleasure of Mary and C . Our guides on the occasion were complete savages. You have no idea of the horrible cries which they suddenly utter, no one knows why, the clamour, the vociferation, the tumult. C in her palanquin suffered most from it; and when I had gone on before, they threatened to leave her in the middle of the road, which they would have done had not my Italian servant promised them a beating, after which they became quiet. Nothing, however, can be more picturesque than the gestures and the physiognomies of these savage people. And when, in the darkness of night, they unexpectedly begin to sing in chorus some fragments of their wild but sweet national music, the effect is exceedingly fine. Naples, February 25, 1819. There was a Greek city, sixty miles to the south of Naples called Posidonia, now Pesto,i where still subsist 1 Pesto iu Italian, Paestum in English Eb. [80 J ■s^ §^« a • IS r Si, ■ a s THE YEAR 1818 three temples of Etrascau ^ architecture, one almost per- fect. From this city we have just returned. The weather was most unfavourable for our expedition. After two months of cloudless serenity, it began raining cats and dogs. The first night we slept at Salerno, a large city situated in the recess of a deep bayj surrounded with stupendous mountains of the same name. A few miles from Torre del Greco we entered on the pass of the mountains, which is a line dividing the isthmus of those enormous piles of rock which compose the southern boun- dary of the Bay of Naples and the northern one of that of Salerno. On one side is a lofty conical hUl, crowned with the turrets of a ruined castle, and cut into platforms for cultivation ; at least every ravine and glen, whose precipi- tous sides admitted of other vegetation than that of the rock-rooted ilex; on the other, the sethereal snowy crags of an immense mountain, whose terrible lineaments were at intervals concealed or disclosed by volumes of dense clouds, rolling under the tempest. Half a mile from this spot, between orange and lemon groves of a lovely village, suspended as it were on an amphitheatral precipice, whose golden globes contrasted with the white walls and dark green leaves which they almost outnumbered, shone the sea. A burst of the declining sunlight illumined it. The road led along the brink of the precipice towards Salerno. Nothing could be more glorious than the scene. The immense mountains covered with the rare and divine vege- tation of this climate, with many-folding vales, and deep dark recesses, which the fancy scarcely could pnetrate, ^ Doric, not Etruscan arcHteoture. — Ed. 6 [81] WITH SHELLEY IN ITALY descended from their snowy summits precipitously to the sea. Before us was Salerno, huilt into a declining plain, between the mountains and the sea. Beyond, the other shore of sky-cleaving mountains, . then dim with the mist of tempest. Underneath, from the base of the precipice where the road conducted, rocky promontories jutted into the sea, covered with olive and ilex woods, or with the ruined battlements of some Norman or Saracen fortress. We slept at Salerno, and the next morning before day- break proceeded to Posidonia. The night had been tem- pestuous, and our way lay by the sea sand. It was utterly dark, except when the long line of wave burst, with a sound like thunder, beneath the starless sky, and cast up a kind of mist of cold white lustre. When morning came, we found ourselves travelling in a wide desert plain, per- petually interrupted by wild irregular glens, and bounded on all sides by the Apennines and the sea. Sometimes it was covered with forest, sometimes dotted with under- wood, or mere tufts of fern and furze, and the wintry dry tendrils of creeping plants. I have never, but in the Alps, seen an amphitheatre of mountains so magnificent. After travelling fifteen miles we came to a river, the bridge of which had been broken, and which was so swollen that the ferry would not take the carriage across. We had, therefore, to walk seven miles of a muddy road, which led to the ancient city across the desolate Maremma. The air was scented with the sweet smell of violets of an extraordinary size and beauty. At length we saw the sublime and massy colonnades, skirting the horizon of the wilderness. We entered by the ancient gate, which is [82] niTY and Bay of Salerno. " Before us was Salerno, huilt into a declining plain between the mountains and the sea. Beyond, the other shore of sky- cleaving mountains, then dim with the mist of tempest. " — Letter from Naples, p. 82. THE YEAR 1818 now no more than a chasm in the rock -like wall. Deeply sunk in the ground beside itj were the ruins of a sepulchre, which the ancients were in the custom of building beside the public way. The first temple, which is the smallest, consists of an outer range of columns, quite perfect, and supporting perfect architrave and two shattered frontis- pieces. The proportions are extremely massy, and the architecture entirely unornamented and simple. These columns do not seem more than forty feet high,* but the perfect proportions diminish the apprehension of their magnitude ; it seems as if inequality and irregularity of form were requisite to force on us the relative idea of greatness. The scene from between the columns of the temple^ consists on one side of the sea, to which the gentle hill on which it is built slopes, and on the other, of the grand amphitheatre of the loftiest Apennines, dark purple mountains, crowned with snow and intercepted there by long bars of hard and leaden-coloured cloud. The effect of the jagged outline of mountains, through groups of enormous columns on one side, and on the other the level horizon of the sea, is inexpressibly grand. The second temple' is much larger, and also more perfect. Beside the outer range of columns, it contains an in- terior range of column above column, and the ruins of a wall which was the screen of the penetralia. With little diversity of ornament, the order of architecture is similar to that of the first temple. The columns in all 1 The colnmns of tlie Temple of Neptune are 29 feet ; of Basilica, 21 feet 6 in. Mgh. 2 Known as Temple of Ceres. • Known as Temple of Neptune. [83 J WITH SHELLEY IN ITALY are fluted and built of a porous volcanic stone which time has dyed with a rich and yellow colour. The columns are one-third larger, and like that of the first, diminish from the base to the capital, so that, but for the chastening effect of their admirable proportions, their magnitude would, from the delusion of perspective, seem greater, not less, than it is ; though perhaps we ought to say not that this symmetry diminishes your apprehension of their mag- nitude, but that it overpowers the idea of relative great- ness, by establishing within itself a system of relations destructire of your idea of its relation with other objects on which our ideas of size depend. The third temple is what they call a Basilica; three columns alone remain of the interior range; the exterior is perfect, but that the cornice and frieze in many places have fallen. This temple covers more ground than either of the others, but its columns are of an intermediate magnitude between those of the second and the first. We only contemplated these sublime monuments for two hours, and of course could only bring away so imper- fect a conception of them as is the shadow of some half- remembered dream. [84] THE YEAR 1819 THE YEAR 1819 ROME; LEGHORN : FLORENCE INTRODUCTORY (^^PnO realize the importance of this year, not only in M the life of Shelley, hut in the history of English poetry, we have only to note that it produced "Pro- metheus Unbound,'''' the most radiant of all Utopian visions ; " The Cenci,'" the greatest of the tragedies since Shakespeare; the " Ode to the West Wind,'''' perhaps the most perfect of English lyrics. That these three poems, each among its own Jcind taking a supreme place, should have been produced by one man and in a single year of his life is one of the marvels of literary biography. The world at the moment was quite unheeding ; but more and mare as the years pass it is coming to see how many- sided a poet Shelley really is, how supreme his gift of expression when strongly moved. He was a social reformer by instinct, a champion for equal opportunities for all men and all women, a "poet of democracy^ before that catching phrase came into being. He foresaw the struggle between classes, and sent poems to England which his friends did not dare to print. The news of the Manchester Massacre reaching him in the solitude of his villa near Leghorn, and in the midst of the composition of " The Cenci,'''' he seizes his pen to [87 j WITH SHELLEY IN ITALY write a poem for the people and to apostrophize freedom, proclaiming that it is not. " . . . as w, A shadow soon to pais away, A superstition and a name Echoing from the cave of Fame. For the labourer thou art bread, '■ And a comely table spread. '• Science, Poetry and Thought Are thy lamps ; they make the lot Of the dwellers in a cot So serene, they curse it not." An ambition to help along the good time coming had inspired his early poems " Queen Mah " amd " Revolt of Isla/m^ but the boyish mind, the crude art had been un- equal to the task it set for itself. Now, though still young in years, having "learned in stLffermg"" he could " tea^h in song^ and turning once more to his favorite theme, he gives utterance to his convictions in " Prome- theus Unbound" with a poetic art which is now fully mated to the lofty ideal. The subject is the redemption of humanity, personified in the character of Prometheus — a redemption accomplished not only through the up- rooting of evil, but through the active force of good. The poem was more than a year in process of composi- tion, and it grew with the authors growth. Begun at Este in the Autumn of 1818, it was resumed the next Spring at Rome, where, according to Mrs. Shelley, " the charm of the Roman climate helped to clothe his thoughts in greater beauty than they had ever worn before."" The [88 J THE YEAR 1819 first three acts were completed and the poem sent to England for publication. But hefore it was in type, it occurred to Shelley that it needed yet one more element — an expression of the joy of man and the universe over the great redemption. Accordingly in the Autumn, at Florence, he wrote a fourth act closing with some lines that sum up the whole matter and that fairly blaze with his " enthusiasm of humanity " — a phrase which, origi- nating with Shelley, has been adopted as peculiarly eapressive of the modem spirit. It is not true to say, as so often is said, that the great distinction of " Prometheus Unbound " is its exquisite imagery and the "purple patches'" of its songs, — in short, that the parts are greater than the whole. Although indeed these alone are feasible in a volume of selections like the present, he who reads the poem as a whole will discover how great is its spiritual unity, and how both form and thought are shaped by the poeCs aspiration for freedom and universal love among men. Such aspirations inspired not only his earliest, but his latest utterances, and perhaps it is on this account that Shelley''s verse has done most good and will be longest remembered. Just before his death, he sings in " Hellas " • " Tie world! s great age begins anew. The golden gears return. And earth doth like a snake renew Her tointer weeds outworn ; Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam lAhe wrecks of a dissolving dream'' Such visions, though vague, help toward the progress of humanity and a belief in a divine ordering of the [89 ] WITH SHELLEY IN ITALY vniverse hy ineans of mercy and lave. They appeal to the minds of ardent youth everywhere, and we have it on the testimony of a distinguished English clergyman ^ that " there are more clergyman and more religious lay- men than we imagine who trace to the emotion Shelley awakened in them when they were young, their wider and better views of God.'''' FEAGMENT: TO ITALY As THE sunrise to the night. As the north wind to the clouds. As the earthquake's fiery flight, Euining mountain solitudes. Everlasting Italy, Be those hopes and fears on thee. FRAGMENT : A EOMAN^S CHAMBER I In the cave which wild weeds cover Wait for thine ethereal lover; For the pallid moon is waning, O'er the spiral cypress hanging And the moon no cloud is staining. * Stopford A. Brooke. [90] p P3 "" a o " 3 2, THE YEAR 1819 n It was once a Eoman's chamber, Where he kept his darkest revelsj And the wild weeds twine and clamber / It was then a chasm for devils. FRAGMENT: EOME AND NATmiB EoME has fallen, ye see it lying Heaped in undistinguished ruin : Nature is alone undying. Rome, March 23, 1819. From Naples we came by slow journeys, with our own horses, to Eome, resting one day at Mola di Gaeta, at the inn called Villa di Cicerone, from being built on the ruins of his Villa, whose immense substructions overhang the sea, and are scattered among the orange-groves. Nothing can be lovelier than the scene from the terraces of the inn. On one side precipitous mountains, whose bases slope into an inclined plane of olive and orange- copses — the latter forming, as it were, an emerald sky of leaves, starred with innumerable globes of their ripening fruit, whose rich splendour contrasted with the deep green foliage ; on the other the sea — bounded on one side by the antique town of Gaeta, and the other by what appears to be an island, the promontory of Circe. From Gaeta to Terracina the whole scenery is of the most sublime character. At Terracina [91 1 WITH SHELLEY IN ITALY precipitous conical crags of immense height shoot into the sky and overhang the sea. At Albano we arrived again in sight of Eome. Arches after arches in unending lines stretching across the uninhabited wildernesSj the blue de- fined line of the mountains seen between them ; masses of nameless ruin standing like rocks out of the plain ; and the ' plain itself, with its billowy and unequal surface, announced the neighbourhood of Eome. And what shall I say to you of Eome? If I speak of the inanimate ruins, the rude stones piled upon stones, which are the sepulchres of the fame of those who once arrayed them with the beauty which has faded, will you believe me insensible to the vital, the almost breathing creations of genius yet subsist- ing in their perfection ? What has become, you will ask, of the Apollo, the Gladiator, the Venus of the Capitol ? What of the Apollo di Belvedere, the Laocoon? What of Eaffaelle and Guido ? These things are best spoken of when the mind has drunk in the spirit of their forms ; and little indeed can I, who must devote no more than a few months to the contemplation of them, hope to know or feel of their profound beauty. I think I told you of the Coliseum, and its impressions on me on my first visit to this city. The next most con- siderable relic of antiquity, considered as a ruin, is the Thermae of Caracalla. These consist of six enormous chambers, above 200 feet in height, and each inclosing a vast space like that of a field. There are, in addition, a number of towers and labyrinthine recesses, hidden and woven over by the wild growth of weeds and ivy. Never was any desolation more sublime and lovely. The per- [92] A CORNER of the Forum "^in Shelley's time. " I walk forth in the purple and golden light of an Italian evening, and return hy star or moonlight. . . . I see the radiant Orion through the mighty columns of the temple of Saturn, and the mellow fading light softens down the modern buildings of the capitol." — Letter from Rome, p. 96. THE YEAR 1819 pendicular wall of ruin is cloven into steep ravines filled up with flowering shrubs, whose thick twisted roots are knot- ted in the rifts of the stones. At every step the aerial pinnacles of shattered stone group into new combinations of effect, and tower above the lofty yet level walls, as the distant mountains change their aspect to one travelling rapidly along the plain. The perpendicular walls resemble nothing more than that cliff of Bisham wood, that is over- grown with wood, and yet is stony and precipitous — you know the one I mean ; not the chalk-pit, but the spot that has the pretty copse of fir-trees and privet-bushes at its base, and where H * * and I scrambled up, and you, to my infinite discontent, would go home. These walls sur- round green and level spaces of lawn, on which some elms have grown, and which are interspersed towards their skirts by masses of the fallen ruin, overtwined with the broad leaves of the creeping weeds. The blue sky canopies it, and is as the everlasting roof of these enormous halls. But the most interesting effect remains. In one of the buttresses, that supports an immense and lofty arch, which "bridges the very winds of heaven," are the crumbling remains of an antique winding staircase, whose sides are open in many places to the precipice. This you ascend, and arrive on the summit of these piles. There grow on every side thick entangled wildernesses of myrtle, and the myrletus, and bay, and the flowering laurustinus, whose white blossoms are just developed, the wild fig, and a thou- sand nameless plants sown by the wandering winds. These woods are intersected on every side by paths, like sheep tracks through the copse- wood of steep mountains, which [93 ] WITH SHELLEY IN ITALY wind to every part of the immense labyrinth. From the midst rise those pinnacles and masses, themselves like mountains, ■which have been seen from below. In one place you wind along a narrow strip of weed-grown ruin ; on one side is the immensity of earth and sky, on the other a narrow chasm, which is bounded by an arch of enormous size, fringed by the many-coloured foliage and blossoms, and supporting a lofty and irregular pyramid, overgrown like itself with the all-prevailing vegetation. Around rise other crags and other peaks, all arrayed, and the deformity of their vast desolation softened down, by the undecaying investiture of nature. Come to Home. It is a scene by which expression is overpowered; which words cannot convey. Still further, winding up one-half of the shat- tered pyramids, by the path through the blooming copse- wood, you come to a little mossy lawn, surrounded by the ■wild shrubs ; it is overgrown with anemones, wall-flowers, and violets, whose stalks pierce the starry moss, and with radiant blue flowers, whose names I know not, and which scatter through the air the divinest odour, which, as you recline under the shade of the ruin, produces sensations of voluptuous faintness, like the combinations of sweet music. The paths still wind on, threading the perplexed windings, other labyrinths, other lawns, and deep dells of wood, and lofty rocks, and terrific chasms. When I tell you that these ruins cover several acres, and that the paths above penetrate at least half their extent, your imagination will fiU up all that I am unable to express of this astonishing scene. I speak of these things not in the order in which I visited [94] THE YEAR 1819 thenij but in that of the impression which they made on me, or perhaps chance directs. The ruins of the ancient Forum are so far fortunate that they have not been walled up in the modern city. They stand in an open, lonesome place, bounded on one side by the modern city, and the other by the Palatine Mount, covered with shapeless masses of ruin. The tourists tell you all about these things, and I am afraid of stumbling on their language when I enumerate what is so well known. There remain eight granite columns of the Ionic order, with their entablature, of the Temple of Con- cord,^ founded by Camillus. I fear that the immense ex- pense demanded by these columns forbids us to hope that they are the remains of any edifice dedicated by that most perfect and virtuous of men. It is supposed to have been repaired under the Eastern Emperors ; alas, what a con- trast of recollections ! Near them stand those Corinthian fluted columns, which supported the angle of a temple ; the architrave and entablature are worked with delicate sculpture. Beyond, to the south, is another solitary column ; and still more distant, three more, supporting the wreck of an entablature. Descending from the Capitol to the Forum, is the triumphal arch of Septimus Severus, less perfect than that of Constantine, though from its propor- tions and magnitude, a most impressive monument. That of Constantine, or rather of Titus ^ (for the relief and sculpture, and even the colossal images of Dacian captives, were torn by a decree of the senate from an arch dedicated ' So-called in Shelley's time. Modem archaeologists agree iu calling this ruin the Temple of Saturn ; of the Temple of Concord lying on the slope of the Capitoline Hill only a few stones remain. — Ed. " Shelley's error ; for Titus read Trajan. [95 J WITH SHELLEY IN ITALY to the latter/ to adorn that of this stupid and wicked mon- ster, Constantine, one of whose chief merits consists in establishing a religion, the destroyer of those arts which would have rendered so base a spoliation unnecessary), is the most perfect. It is an admirable work of art. It is built of the finest marble, and the outline of the reliefs is in many parts as perfect as if just finished: Four Corin- thian fluted columns support, on each side, a bold entabla- ture, whose bases are loaded with reliefs of captives in every attitude of humiUation and slavery. The compart- ments above express in bolder relief the enjoyment of success ; the conqueror on his throne, or in his chariot, or nodding over the crushed multitudes, who writhe under his horses' hoofs, as those below express the torture and abjectness of defeat. There are three arches, whose roofs are panelled with fretwork, and their sides adorned with similar reliefs. The keystone of these arches is supported each by two winged figures of Yictory, whose hair floats on the wind of their own speed, and whose arms are out- stretched, bearing trophies, as if impatient to meet. They look, as it were, borne from the subject extremities of the earth, on the breath which is the exhalation of that battle and desolation, which it is their mission to commemorate. Never were monuments so completely fltted to the purpose for which they were designed, of expressing that mixture of energy and error which is called a triumph. I walk forth in the purple and golden light of an Italian evening, and return by star or moonlight, through 1 Tom not from an arch, but from a iuilding of Trajan, at the entrance to Ms Foriuu. [96] o pa THE YEAR 1819 this scene. The elms are just budding, and the warm Spring winds bring unknown odoursj all sweet, from the country. I see the radiant Orion through the mighty columns of the Temple of Concord,^ and the mellow fading light softens down the modern buildings of the Capitol, the only ones that interfere with the sublime desolation of the scene. On the steps of the Capitol itself, stand two colossal statues of Castor and Pollux, each with his horse, finely executed, though far inferior to those of Monte CavaUo, the cast of one of which you know we saw to- gether in London. This walk is close to our lodging, and this is my evening walk. What shall I say of the modem city? Eome is yet the capital of the world. It is a city of palaces and temples, more glorious than those which any other city contains, and of ruins more glorious than they. Seen from any of the eminences that surround it, it exhibits domes beyond domes, and palaces, and colonnades inT terminably, even to the horizon ; interspersed with patches of desert, and mighty ruins which stand girt by their own desolation, in the midst of the fanes of living religions and the habitations of living men, in sublime loneliness. St. Peter's is, as you have heard, the loftiest building in Europe. Externally it is inferior in architectural beauty to St. Paul's, though not wholly devoid of it; internally it exhibits littleness on a large scale, and is in every respect opposed to antique taste. You know my pro- pensity to admire ; and I tried to persuade myself out of this opinion — in vain ; the more I see of the interior of 1 Saturn. T [97] WITH SHELLEY IN ITALY St. Peter's, the less impression as a whole does it produce on me. I cannot even think it lofty, though its dome is considerably higher than any hiU within fifty miles of Lon- don ; and when one reflects, it is an astonishing monument of the daring energy of man. Its colonnade is wonder- fully fine, and there are two fountains, which rise in spire- like columns of water to an immense height in the sky, and falling on the porphyry vases from which they spring, fill the whole air with a radiant mist, which at noon is thronged with innumerable rainbows. In the midst stands an obelisk. In front is the palace-like faqade of St. Peter's, certainly magnificent; and there is produced, on the whole, an architectural combination unequalled in the world. But the dome of the temple is concealed, except at a very great distance, by the facade and the inferior part of the building, and that diabolical contrivance they call an attic. The effect of the Pantheon is totally the reverse of that of St. Peter's. Though not a fourth part of the size, it is, as it were, the visible image of the universe ; in the per- fection of its proportions, as when you regard the unmeas- ured dome of heaven, the idea of magnitude is swallowed up and lost. It is open to the sky, and its wide dome is lighted by the ever-changing illumination of the air. The clouds of noon fly over it, and at night the keen stars are seen through the azure darkness, hanging immoveably, or driving after the driving moon among the clouds. We visited it by moonhght ; it is supported by sixteen columns, fluted and Corinthian, of a certain rare and beautiful yeUow marble, exquisitely polished, caUed here giallo [98] Titits crowned by Victory. Sculptured relief inside Arch of Titus. Triumphal Procession, a sculpture on inside Arch of Titus. — Shelley's Roman Note-Book, pp. 101, 102. THE YEAR 1819 antico. Above these are the niches for the statues of the twelve gods. This is the only defect of this sublime temple; there ought to have been no interval between the commencement of the dome and the cornice, supported by the columns. Thus there would have been no diversion from the magnificent simplicity of its form. This improvement is alone wanting to have completed the unity of the idea. The fountains of Eome are, in themselves, magnificent combinations of art, such as alone it were worth coming to see. That in the Piazza Navona, a large square, is com- posed of enormous fragments of rock, piled on each other, and penetrated, as by caverns. This mass supports an Egyptian obelisk of immense height. On the four corners of the rock recline, in different attitudes, colossal figures representing the four divisions of the globe. The water bursts from the crevices beneath them. They are sculp- tured with great spirit ; one impatiently tearing a veil from his eyes; another with his hands stretched upwards. The Fontana di Trevi is the most celebrated, and is rather a waterfall than a fountain; gushing out from masses of rock, with a gigantic figure of Neptune; and below are two river gods, checking two winged horses, straggling up from among the rocks and waters. The whole is not ill- conceived nor executed ; but you know not how delicate the imagination becomes by dieting with antiquity day after day. The only things that sustain the comparison are Raphael, Guido, and Salvator Eosa. The fountain on the Quirinal, or rather the group formed by the statues, obelisk, and the fountain, is, how- ever, the most admirable of all. From the Piazza Quiri- [99 J WITH SHELLEY IN ITALY nale, or rather Monte CslysIIo, you see the boundless ocean of domes, spires, and columns, which is the City, Eome. On a pedestal of white marble rises an obelisk of red granite, piercing the blue sty. Before it is a vast basin of porphyry, in the midst of which rises a column of the purest water, which collects into itseK all the overhang- ing colours of the sky, and breaks them into a thousand prismatic hues and graduated shadows — they fall together with its dashing water-drops into the outer basin. The elevated situation of this fountain produces, I imagine, this effect of colour. On each side, on an elevated pedes- tal, stand the statues of Castor and Pollux, each in the act of taming his horse, which are said, but I believe wholly without authority, to be the work of Phidias and Praxite- les. These figures combine the irresistible energy with the sublime and perfect loveliness supposed to have be- longed to their divine nature. The reins no longer exist, but the position of their hands and the sustained and calm command of their regard, seem to require no mechanical aid to enforce obedience. The countenances at so great a height are scarcely visible, and I have a better idea of that of which we saw a cast together in London, than of the other. But the sublime and living majesty of their limbs and mien, the nervous and fiery animation of the horses they restrain, seen in the blue sky of Italy, and overlook- ing the city of Eome, surrounded by the light and the music of that crystalline fountain, no cast can communicate. These figures were found at the Baths of Constantine, but, of course, are of remote antiquity. I do not acquiesce, however, in the practice of attributing to Phidias, or Prax- [100] THE YEAR 1819 iteles, or Scopas, or some great master^ any admirable work that may be found. We find little of what remainedj and perhaps the works of these were such as greatly sur- passed all that we conceive of most perfect and admirable in what little has escaped the deluge. If I am too jealous of the honour of the Greeks^ our masters, and creators, the gods whom we should worship, — pardon me. I have said what I feel without entering into any critical discussions of the ruins of Eome, and the mere outside of this inexhaustible mine of thought and feeling. Hobhousej Eustace, and Forsyth, will tell all the shew-knowledge about it — " the common stuff of the earth." By-the-bye, Eorsyth is worth reading, as I judge from a chapter or two I have seen. I cannot get the book here. I ought to have observed that the central arch of the triumphal Arch of Titus ^ yet subsists, more perfect in its 1 Endenfly, Slelley here was writing from a confusion of memories re- garding tlie two arches of Constantine and of Titus, since portions of this paragraph apply to the one and portions to the other — a confusion that has been left uncorrected by all his editors. The figures of Victory are on the Arch of Constantine ; the true description of the Arch of Titus occurs in his Roman Note-Book, as follows : — AKCH OF TITUS. 'From Shelley's Boman Note-Booh. On the inner compartment of the Arch of Titus, is sculptured in deep re- lief, the desolation of a city. On one side, the walls of the Temple, split by the fury of conflagration, hang tottering in the act of ruin. The accompani- ments of a town taken by assault, matrons and virgins and children and old men gathered into groups, and the rapine and licence of a barbarous and enraged soldiery, arc imaged in the distance. The foreground is occupied by a procession of the yictors, bearing in their profane hands the holy candlesticks and the tables of shewbread, and the sacred instruments of the eternal worship of the Jews. On the opposite side, the reverse of this sad [101 ] WITH SHELLEY IN ITALY proportions^ they say, than any of a later date. This I did not remark. The figures of Victory, with unfolded wings, and each spurning back a globe with outstretched feet, are, perhaps, more beautiful than those on either of the others. Their lips are parted : a delicate mode of in- dicating the fervour of their desire to arrive at the destined resting-place, and to express the eager respiration of their speed. Indeed, so essential to beauty were the forms ex- pressive of the exercise of the imagination and the affections considered by Greek artists, that no ideal figure of an- tiquity, not destined to some representation directly exclu- sive of such a character, is to be found with closed lips. Within this arch are two panelled alto relievos, one repre- senting a train of people bearing in procession the instru- ments of Jewish worship, among which is the holy candlestick with seven branches; on the other, Titus standing in a quadriga, with a winged Victory. The grouping of the horses, and the beauty, correctness, and energy of their delineation, is remarkable, though they are much destroyed. picture, Titus is represented standing in a cHariot drawn by four horses, crowned with laurel, and surrounded by the tumultuous numbers of his triumphant army, and the magistrates, and priests, and generals, and philos- ophers, dragged in chains beside his wheels. Behind him stands a Victory eagle-winged. The arch is now mouldering into ruins, and the imagery almost erased by the lapse of fifty generations. Beyond this obscure monument of Hebrew desolation, is seen the tomb of the Destroyer's family, now a mountain of ruins. The Flavian amphitheatre has become a habitation for owls and di'agons. The power, of whose possession it was once the type, and of whose departure it is now the emblem, is become a dream and a memory. Rome is no more than Jerusalem. [ 102 ] T HE Coliseum seen through the Arch of Titus. " The Flavian amphitheatre has become a liabitatwn for owls and dragons. The power, of whose possession it was once the type, . . . is become a dream, and a memory. " — Shelley's Roman Note-Book, p. 102. THE YEAR 1819 PEOMETHEUS UNBOUND A Lyrical Deama in Eoue Acts ATJDISNE HiEC AMPHIARAE, SUB TBRKAM ABDITE ? PREFACE The Greek tragic writers^ in selecting as their subject any portion of their national history or mythology, em- ployed in their treatment of it a certain arbitrary discretion. They by no means conceived themselves bound to adhere to the common iuterpretation or to imitate in story as in title their rivals and predecessors. Such a system would have amounted to a resignation of those claims to prefer- ence over their competitors which incited the composition. The Agamemnonian story was exhibited on the Athenian theatre with as many variations as dramas. I have presumed to employ a similar licence. The " Prometheus Unbound " of ^schylus supposed the recon- ciliation of Jupiter with his victim as the price of the dis- closure of the danger threatened to his empire by the consummation of his marriage with Thetis. Thetis, ac- cording to this view of the subject, was given in marriage to Peleus, and Prometheus, by the permission of Jupiter, delivered from his captivity by Hercules. Had I framed my story on this model, I should have done no more than have attempted to restore the lost drama of ^schylus ; an ambition which, if my preference to this mode of treating the subject had incited me to cherish, the recollection of the high comparison such an attempt would challenge might [ 103 ] WITH SHELLEY IN ITALY well abate. But^ in truth, I was averse from a catastrophe so feeble as that of reconciling the Champion with the Op- pressor of mankind. The moral interest of the fable, which is so powerfully sustained by the sufferings and endurance of Prometheus, would be annihilated if we could conceive of him as unsaying his high language and quailing before his successful and perfidious adversary. The only im- aginary being resembling in any degree Prometheus, is Satan ; and Prometheus is, in my judgment, a more poeti- cal character than Satan, because, in addition to courage, and majesty, and firm and patient opposition to omnipotent force, he is susceptible of being described as exempt from the taints of ambition, envy, revenge, and a desire for per- sonal aggrandisement, which, in the Hero of Paradise Lost, interfere with the interest. The character of Satan engen- ders in the mind a pernicious casuistry which leads us to weigh his faults with his wrongs, and to excuse the former because the latter exceed all measure. In the minds of those who consider that magnificent fiction with a rehgious feeling it engenders something worse. But Prometheus is, as it were, the type of the highest perfection of moral and intellectual nature, impelled by the purest and the truest motives to the best and noblest ends. This Poem was chiefly written upon the mountainous ruins of the Baths of CaracaUa, among the flowery glades and thickets of odoriferous blossoming trees, which are ex- tended in ever winding labyrinths upon its immense plat- forms and dizzy arches suspended in the air. The bright blue sky of Rome, and the effect of the vigorous awaken- ing Spring in that divinest climate, and the new life with [ 104 j THE YEAR 1819 which it drenches the spirits even to intoxication, were the inspiration of this drama. Let this opportunity be conceded to me of acknowledging that I have, what a Scotch philosopher characteristically termsj " a passion for reforming the world " : what passion incited him to write and publish his bookj he omits to explain. For my part I had rather be damned with Plato and Lord Bacon, than go to Heaven with Paley and Mal- thus. But it is a mistake to suppose that I dedicate my poetical compositions solely to the direct enforcement of reform, or that I consider them in any degree as contain- ing a reasoned system on the theory of human life. Didac- tic poetry is my abhorrence ; nothing can be equally well expressed in prose that is not tedious and supererogatory in verse. My purpose has hitherto been simply to familiarise the highly refined imagination of the more select classes of poetical readers with beautiful idealisms of moral excel- lence; aware that until the mind can love, and admire, and trust, and hope, and endure, reasoned principles of moral conduct are seeds cast upon the highway of life which the unconscious passenger tramples into dust, although they would bear the harvest of his happiness. Should I live to accomplish what I purpose, that is, produce a systematical history of what appear to me to be the genuine elements of human society, let not the advocates of injustice and super- stition flatter themselves that I should take ^schylus rather than Plato as my model. . . . [ 105 ] WITH SHELLEY IN ITALY FROM ACT I OF "PROMETHEUS UNBOUND" Scene. — Prometheus is discovered bound to a precipice of icy rooks in the Indian Caucasus. lone and Panthea (sister-spirits of Hope and of Paith) seek to soothe his stern agony. The chorus of Furies having been repulsed by Prometheus, a chorus of benign spirits appear and sing that all evil is the occasion for higher good.^ Chorus of Spirits From unremembered ages we Gentle guides and guardians be Of heaven-oppressed mortality j And we breatbej and sicken not^ The atmosphere of human thought : Be it dim^ and dank, and grey. Like a storm-extinguished day. Travelled o'er by dying gleams ; Be it bright as all between Cloudless skies and windless streams, Silent, liquid, and serene ; As the birds, within the wind. As the fish within the wave. As the thoughts of man's own mind Float thro' all above the grave ; We make there our liquid lair. Voyaging cloudlike and unpent Thro' the boundless element : 1 The world in whicli the action is sapposed to move rings with spirit- voices ; and what these spirits sing is more purged of mortal dross than any other poet's ear has caught, while listening to his own heart's song, or to the rhythms of the world. — Stmonds. [106 J THE YEAR 1819 Thence we bear the prophecy "Which begins and ends in thee ! lone. More yet comej one by one : the air around them Looks radiant as the air around a star. Mrst Spirit. On a battle-trumpet's blast I fled hither^ fast, fast, fast, 'Mid the darkness upward cast. From the dust of creeds outworn. From the tyrant's banner torn. Gathering 'round me^ onward borne. There was mingled many a cry — Freedom ! Hope ! Death ! Yictory ! Till they faded thro' the sky; And one sound, above, around. One sound beneath, around, above. Was moving ; 't was the soul of love ; 'Twas the hope, the prophecy, "Which begins and ends in thee. Second Spirit. A rainbow's arch stood on the sea. Which rocked beneath, immovably ; And the triumphant storm did flee. Like a conqueror, swift and proud. Between, with many a captive cloud, A shapeless, dark and rapid crowd, [107 ] WITH SHELLEY IN ITALY Each by lightning riven in half : I hear the thunder hoarsely laugh : Mighty fleets were strewn like chaff And spread beneath a hell of death O'er the white waters. I alit On a great ship lightning-split, And speeded hither on the sigh Of one who gave an enemy His plank, then plunged aside to die. Third Spirit. I sate beside a sage's bed, And the lamp was burning red Near the book where he had fed, When a Dream with plumes of flame. To his pillow hovering came. And I knew it was the same Which had kindled long ago Pity, eloquence, and woe ; And the world awhile below Wore the shade its lustre made. It has borne me here as fleet As Desire's lightning feet : I must ride it back ere morrow. Or the sage will wake in sorrow. Fowth Spirit. On a poet's lips I slept Dreaming like a love-adept In the sound his breathing kept; [ 108 ] THE YEAR 1819 Nor seeks nor finds he mortal blisses. But feeds on the aerial kisses Of shapes that haunt thought's wildernesses. He will watch from dawn to gloom The lake-reflected sun illume The yellow bees in the ivy-bloom. Nor heed nor see, what things they be ; But from these create he can Forms more real than living man. Nurslings of immortality I One of these awakened me. And I sped to succour thee. lone. Behold'st thou not two shapes from the east and west Come, as two doves to one beloved nest. Twin nurslings of the all-sustaining air On swift still wings glide down the atmosphere ? And, hark ! their sweet, sad voices ! 't is despair Mingled with love and then dissolved in sound. Fanthea, Canst thou speak, sister ? all my words are drowned. lone. Their beauty gives me voice. See how they float. On their sustaining wings of skiey grain. Orange and azure deepening into gold : Their soft smiles light the air like a star's fire. Chorus of Spirits. Hast thou beheld the form of Love ? [109 ] WITH SHELLEY IN ITALY Fifth Spirit. As over wide dominions I sped, like some swift cloud that wings the wide air's wildernesses, That planet-crested shape swept by on lightning-braided pinions. Scattering the liquid joy of life from his ambrosial tresses : His footsteps paved the world with ligEt; but as I past 't was fading, And hollow Euin yawned behind : great sages bound in madness. And headless patriots, and pale youths who perished, un- upbraiding, Gleamed in the night. I wandered o'er, till thou, King of sadness. Turned by thy smile the worst I saw to recollected gladness. Ah, sister ! Desolation is a delicate thing : It walks not on the earth, it floats not on the air. But treads with killing footstep, and fans with silent wing The tender hopes which in their hearts the best and- gentlest bear; Who, soothed to false repose by the fanning plumes above And the music-stirring motion of its soft and busy feet. Dream visions of aerial joy, and call the monster. Love, And wake, and find the shadow Pain, as he whom now we greet. [110 J THE YEAR 1819 Chorus. Tho' Ruiu now Love's shadow be. Following him, destroyingly, On Death's white and winged steed, "Which the fleetest cannot flee, Trampling down both flower and weed Man and beast, and foul and fair. Like a tempest thro' the air ; Thou shalt quell this horseman grim, Woundless though in heart or limb. Prometheus. Spirits I how know ye this shall be ? Chor'us. In the atmosphere we breathe. As buds grow red when the snow-storms flee. Prom Spring gathering up beneath, Whose mild winds shake the elder brake. And the wandering herdsmen know That the white-thorn soon will blow : Wisdom, Justice, Love, and Peace, When they struggle to increase. Are to us as soft winds be To shepherd boys, the prophecy Which begins and ends in thee. lone. Where are the spirits fled ? [Ill J WITH SHELLEY IN ITALY PantJiea. Only a sense Remains of them, like the omnipotence Of musiCj when the inspired voice and lute Languish, ere yet the responses are mute, Which thro^ the deep and labyrinthine soul. Like echoes thro^ long caverns, wind and roll. Prometheus. How fair these air-born shapes ! and yet I feel Most vain all hope but love ; and thou art far, Asia ! who, when my being overflowed, Wert like a golden chalice to bright wine Which else had sunk into the thirsty dust. All things are still : alas ! how heavily This quiet morning weighs upon my heart; Tho^ I should dream I could even sleep with grief If slumber were denied not. I would fain Be what it is my destiny to be. The saviour and the strength of suffering man. Or sink into the original gulf of things : There is no agony, and no solace left ; Earth can console. Heaven can torment no more. PaniJiea. Hast thou forgotten one who watches thee The cold dark night, and never sleeps but when The shadow of thy spirit falls on her? [ 112 1 THE YEAR 1819 Prometheus. I said all hope was vain but love : thou lovest. Deeply in truth ; but the eastern star looks white. And Asia waits in that far Indian vale The scene of her sad exile; rugged once And desolate and frozen, like this ravine ; But now invested with fair flowers and herbs, And haunted by sweet airs and sounds, which flow Among the woods and waters, from the ether Of her transforming presence, which would fade If it were mingled not with thine. Farewell ! END OF THE FIRST ACT. IROM ACT II, SC. 5 OP "PROMETHEUS UNBOUND" In the second act, the interest centres round Asia, the beloved of Prometheus, who first awaits him afar in sorrow, and afterward un- dertakes a pilgrimage for his redemption. The act closes with a Voice (the voice of the unseen Prometheus) singing to her a wor- shipful lyric, followed by her response to it. Panthea {to Asia). How thou art changed ! I dare not look on thee ; I feel but see thee not. I scarce endure The radiance of thy beauty. Some good change Is working in the elements, which suffer Thy presence thus unveiled. The Nereids tell That on the day when the clear hyaline 8 [ lis J WITH SHELLEY IN ITALY Was cloven at thy uprise, and thou didst stand Within a veined shell, which floated on Over the calm floor of the crystal sea. Among the iSgean isles, and by the shores Which bear thy name ; love, like the atmosphere Of the sun^s flre filling the living world. Burst from thee, and illumined earth and heaven And the deep ocean and the sunless caves And all that dwells within them ; till grief cast Eclipse upon the soul from which it came : Such art thou now ; nor is it I alone. Thy sister, thy companion, thine own chosen one. But the whole world which seets thy sympathy. Hearest thou not sounds i' the air which speak the love Of all articulate beings ? Feelest thou not The' inanimate winds enamoured of thee ? List ! (Music.) Thy words are sweeter than aught else but his Whose echoes they are : yet all love is sweet, Given or returned. Common as light is love. And its familiar voice wearies not ever. Like the wide heaven, the all-sustaining air. It makes the reptile equal to the God : ^ They who inspire it most are fortunate, ^ Compare Browning : — " For the loving worm within its clod Were diviner than a loveless god." Also Shelley again in Epipsychidion : — " The spirit of the worm heneath the sod In love and worship blends itself with God." [ 114 ] THE YEAR 1819 As I am now ; but those who feel it most Are happier stilly after long sufferings. As I shall soon become. PaniAea. List ! Spirits speak Voice in the Air, singing. Life of Life ! thy lips enkindle With their love the breath between them ; And thy smiles before they dwindle Make the cold air fire ; then screen them In those looks, where whoso gazes Eaints, entangled in their mazes. Child of Light ! thy limbs are burning Thro' the vest which seems to hide them ; As the radiant lines of morning Thro' the clouds ere they divide them ; And this atmosphere divinest Shrouds thee wheresoe'er thou shinest. Fair are others ; none beholds thee. But thy voice sounds low and tender Like the fairest, for it folds thee From the sight, that liquid splendour. And aU feel, yet see thee never. As I feel now, lost for ever ! Lamp of Earth ! where'er thou movest Its dim shapes are clad with brightness, [115] WITH SHELLEY IN ITALY And the souls of whom thou loves Walk upon the winds with lightness. Till they failj as I am failings Dizzy, lost, yet unbewailing ! Asia} My soul is an enchanted boat, "Which, like a sleeping swan, doth float Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing ; And thine doth like an angel sit Beside a helm conducting it. Whilst all the winds with melody are ringing. It seems to float ever, for ever. Upon that many-winding river, Between mountains, woods, abysses, A paradise of wildernesses 1 Till, like one in slumber bound. Borne to the ocean, I float down, around. Into a sea profound, of ever-spreading sound. Meanwhile thy spirit lifts its pinions In music's most serene dominions ; Catching the winds that fan that happy heaven. And we sail on, away, afar. Without a course, without a star. But, by the instinct of sweet music driven ; Till through Elysian garden islets By thee, most beautiful of pilots, 1 This has been read by many of U3 scores of times with scarcely a •wish perhaps to trace out its intricate meaning, but with a keen delight in its ideal chanUj its supersensuous meander. — Rossetti. [116] THE YEAR 1819 "Where never mortal pinnace glided, The boat of my desire is guided : Realms where the air we breathe is love, Which in the winds and on the waves doth move. Harmonising this earth with what we feel above. We have pass'd Age's icy caves. And manhood's dark and tossing waves. And Youth's smooth ocean, smiling to betray : Beyond the glassy gulfs we flee Of shadow-peopled Infancy, Through Death and Birth, to a diviner day ; A paradise of vaulted bowers. Lit by downward-gazing flowers. And watery paths that wind between Wildernesses calm and green. Peopled by shapes too bright to see. And rest, having beheld, — somewhat like thee, — Which walk upon the sea, and chant melodiously ! END OF THE SECOND ACT.^ 1 The second act, in wHch the myth of Asia is unfolded, is poetically the most wonderful in the Prometheus Unbound, — that is to say, in the whole cycle of English song. — Vida D. Scuddeb. [117 ] WITH SHELLEY IN ITALY The tHrd act having accomplished the release of Prometheus and his reunion with Asia, Act IV follows with its chorus of rejoicing, in which all powers of earth and air, of the world natural and the world spiritual, unite. PROM ACT IV OF "PROMETHEUS UNBOUND" , Voice of unseen Spirits. The pale stars are gone ! Eor the sun, their swift shepherd. To their folds them compelling. In the depths of the dawn. Hastes, in meteor-eclipsing array, and they flee Beyond his hlue dwelling, As fawns flee the leopard. But where are ye ? A Train of dark Forms