DUKE 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 'Treasure %oom 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2012 with funding from 
 Duke University Libraries 
 
 http://archive.org/details/notebooksofpercy31shel 
 

 FOUR HUNDRED AND SIXTY-FIVE COPIES OF 
 
 THIS WORK HAVE BEEN PRINTED FOR MEMBERS OF 
 
 THE BIBLIOPHILE SOCIETY 
 
NOTE BOOKS 
 
 OF 
 
 PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 
 
 Part III 
 
NOTE BOOKS 
 
 OF 
 
 PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 
 
 FROM THE ORIGINALS IN THE 
 LIBRARY OF W. K. BIXBY 
 
 DECIPHERED, TRANSCRIBED, AND EDITED, 
 WITH A FULL COMMENTARY BY 
 
 H. BUXTON FORMAN, C.B. 
 
 IN THREE VOLUMES 
 
 is 
 
 PRINTED FOR MEMBERS OF 
 
 THE BIBLIOPHILE SOCIETY 
 
 BOSTON, M CM XI 
 
 *H1S3 
 
Copyright, 191 1, by 
 The Bibliophile Society 
 
 A II rights reserved 
 
 •.•* 
 

 CONTENTS OF PART III 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Fragments : "Alas, if I could feign" 4 
 
 "There was a star when Heaven was 
 
 young" 5 
 
 Studies apparently for the choric dialogue in Hel- 
 las, "With the gifts of gladness" 
 First Fragment: "Scatter their ashes" ... 6 
 Second Fragment: "Though thou scatterst 
 
 their ashes" 6 
 
 Draft of A Lament: "Swifter far than summer's 
 
 flight" 9 
 
 Studies probably for "The keen stars are twinkling" 
 First Fragment: "By the music of Heaven" . 17 
 Second Fragment: "A star from Shelleys 
 
 Bower" 17 
 
 Fragments: "Thou vision of abandoned years" . 18 
 Of Charles the First [?] .... 19 
 "When wilt thou come — " ... 19 
 Cyprian: Scenes from Calderon's Play El Magico 
 Prodigioso 
 
 Preliminary Remarks 21 
 
 Scene I (A) : "In the [sweet] solitude of this 
 
 calm place" 26 
 
 Scene 1(B): "Now since I am alone let me 
 
 examine" 37 
 
 
 fl& 
 
PAGE 
 
 Scene I (C) : "Here stop— these toppling 
 
 rocks & tangled boughs" 63 
 
 Scene II: "We are all lost" 75 
 
 Charles the First 
 
 Abstract or Program of Acts I and II . . .103 
 Memoranda of limits of Act II with Sketch of 
 a Tree and Pen Drawing of a Sailing Boat 104 
 
 Heme's Feast : a Fragment 108 
 
 Memoranda 
 
 (1) For First Act of a Play: Modern Timon 126 
 
 (2) Of Titles of French Books 127 
 
 Deleted Fragment : "I love thee not" . . . .127 
 Fragments : "One word has changed the Universe 
 
 for me" 127 
 
 "And have we trodden the same 
 
 paths together" 127 
 
 Draft of the Song "Far far away, o ye" . . .128 
 
 Draft of The World's Wanderers 132 
 
 The Kiss ("We meet not as then we parted") 
 
 Draft 138 
 
 Two Cancelled Passages 138 
 
 Appendix I: Shelley's Unfinished Composition 
 written in Italian Prose and known as Una 
 Favola 
 
 Translation by Richard Garnett 151 
 
 Shelley's Draft in Note Book I 158 
 
 The Text as given in Garnett's Relics of Shelley 159 
 Appendix II: Bibliographical Particulars of the 
 
 three Note Books 173 
 
 cvin 
 1 1 * • 
 
SHELLEY NOTE BOOKS 
 Part III 
 
NOTE BOOK III 
 
 "Alas, if I could feign" : a Fragment 
 
 NOTE BOOK III opens uneventfully enough 
 with a page on which stand the first two 
 items of the Unpublished Matter entered in the 
 Sale Catalogue of the Auctioneers:— 
 
 "i. Four imperfect lines— 'Alas if I would [sic} 
 feign,' etc. 
 
 "2. Below this comes a list of the months, April to 
 September, with nos. such as August 30, Sept r 31,' sug- 
 gesting that Shelley had a lax idea of the numbers of 
 days in months." 
 
 Without attempting to investigate the question 
 whether the admirable memorial poem 
 
 Thirty days hath September, 
 April, June, and November, 
 
 was less dear and helpful to the poet than it has 
 ever been to one of his editors, who shall be name- 
 less, we will pass to that part of our chronicle 
 
which relates to the first item : the four lines are as 
 follows :— 
 
 Alas, if I could feign 
 
 A smile as you a tear — 
 Sunshine to the rain 
 
 Would appear [ . . . 
 
 In this not very promising fragment line 2 was 
 first written 
 
 Smiles as you do tears— 
 
 and in line 4 Would was written twice and can- 
 celled once. It is evident that the alteration of the 
 second line was made before the rhyme-word after 
 the gap was jotted down as a memorandum. There 
 is a certain subtlety of suggestion in the little 
 quatrain, but nothing to indicate whether its 
 heroine was Mary or some one else. The page 
 bears in ink, beside the two items named in the 
 catalogue, some simple arithmetic and a few pen- 
 cilled touches. The verso is blank. On page III 2 r. 
 there is nothing but a tiny drawing in pencil of 
 a tree, and on the recto only two false starts in 
 pencil for something or other, She was and Like, 
 both struck out. 
 
 Page III 3 r.— another one with a blank verso- 
 has the following tentatives:— 
 
 It was 
 The fairest 
 
 Sweet 
 
 C43 
 
There was a star when Heaven was young 
 That twin with Hesper sprung — 
 The music that without a lyre 
 Wandered oer the sea 
 Struck [ • . . 
 
 Of these pencilled tentatives the first three and the 
 line Wandered oer the sea are struck through. Be- 
 tween star and Heaven the word in stands cancelled 
 in favour of when; and in the next line from the was 
 rejected for twin. 
 
 Page III 4 r. is blank; but on pages III 4 v. and 
 5 r. are pencilled what might possibly be tentatives 
 connected with the poem entitled An Ode Written 
 October l8lQ before the Spaniards had recovered 
 their Liberty, published in 1820 among the mis- 
 cellaneous poems accompanying Prometheus Un- 
 bound. I am disposed, however, with Rossetti, to 
 regard the whole contents of Note Book III as 
 very late, probably belonging in the main to 1822 
 and including nothing of an earlier year than 1821. 
 In that case, and considering further the move- 
 ment of the verse in the second set of these uncom- 
 pleted quatrains, I should place them with the 
 fragments belonging to Hellas, and connect them 
 with that sublime Chorus on the struggle for free- 
 dom then going on in Greece, lines 94 to 109. 
 
 m 
 
First Fragment 
 
 Scatter their ashes 
 
 The sparks will burn — 
 Like the death 
 
 Darken their glory— 
 
 Their fame shall be 
 All the brighter 
 
 In song & in story [. 
 
 Second Fragment 
 
 Though thou scatterst their ashes 
 
 The spark will yet burn 
 Like star flashes 
 
 From the urn 
 
 Though thou darken their glory 
 
 Their names will yet be 
 The far lights for story 
 
 To together 
 
 Like stars through the rolling 
 Of clouds [ • • . 
 
 In the first Fragment a fourth line was begun with 
 the letters De, which are cancelled. The line 
 Darken their glory was first written as Darken 
 their memory ; and after Their fame shall be a line 
 was begun with All the brighter. In the second 
 Fragment the first line was originally written 
 
 Though thou tramplest their ashes [ ; 
 
 C 6 3 
 
and, between the cancelled tramplest and the pecu- 
 liar form scatterst substituted for it, the words ashes 
 and the are written. The second quatrain of the 
 second Fragment was started with Though their 
 memory shine; it is probable that an adverb was to 
 have completed the line; in the second line fame 
 stands cancelled in favour of names. In the un- 
 completed fourth line there is a word struck out 
 after To— it may be race— and together is also 
 struck out. In the final attempt to start another 
 quatrain, volume stands cancelled for rolling, and 
 the words Of clouds are struck out. If there is 
 good ground for my suspicion that Shelley was 
 here feeling his way for that great passage in which 
 the Chorus of Greek Captive Women divide into 
 Semichorus I and Semichorus II, it follows that 
 he had not yet settled the number of feet which 
 were to compose a line; but the movement and the 
 tone seem to me almost unmistakable; and, as the 
 passage is one of the most truly sublime pages in 
 the poetry of the Nineteenth Century, I cannot do 
 better than transcribe it, in order that my readers 
 may sit in judgment on the spot. It will be remem- 
 bered that the scene is a Terrace of the Seraglio at 
 Constantinople, on which the Sultan Mahmud lies 
 asleep. 
 
 Semichorus I 
 
 With the gifts of gladness 
 Greece did thy cradle strew; 
 
 t7l 
 
Semichorus II 
 With the tears of sadness 
 
 Greece did thy shroud bedew ! 
 
 Semichorus I 
 With an orphan's affection 
 
 She followed thy bier through Time ; 
 
 Semichorus II 
 And at thy resurrection 
 
 Re-appeareth, like thou, sublime I 
 
 Semichorus I 
 If Heaven should resume thee, 
 To Heaven shall her spirit ascend; 
 
 Semichorus II 
 If Hell should entomb thee, 
 
 To Hell shall her high hearts bend. 
 
 Semichorus I 
 If annihilation — 
 
 Semichorus II 
 Dust let her glories be I 
 And a name and a nation 
 
 Be forgotten, Freedom, with thee! 
 
 A LAMENT 
 
 On page III 6 r. Shelley began the draft of the 
 poem generally known as A Lament, but in this 
 
 C 8 ] 
 
Note Book unfurnished with a title or heading. 
 On the verso of the page is nothing but a tiny pencil 
 sketch of a tree ; and another drawing of trees is at 
 the head of page III 7 r., where the draft is con- 
 tinued. The verso of this page also has nothing on 
 it relevant to A Lament, which is practically fin- 
 ished on III 9 r., though it was found necessary to 
 accommodate the final line with a place at the foot 
 of the opposite page 8 v. The verso of leaf III 9 
 is blank. This song is drafted in pencil, with a few 
 revisions in ink. The following text is the final 
 outcome of the drafting; and, for the purposes of 
 the ensuing comment, we will call it the Cyprian 
 text— Cyprian being the name inscribed by the poet 
 on the parchment cover of Note Book III. 
 
 1] Swifter far than summer's flight 
 Swifter far than happy night 
 Swifter too than youths delight 
 
 Art thou come & gone 
 As the wood when leaves are shed 
 As the heart when joy is dead 
 As the night when sleep is fled 
 I am left lone, alone— 
 
 11] The swallow summer comes again 
 The owlet night resumes her reign- 
 But the wild swan Youth, is fain 
 To fly with thee, false as thou. — 
 
 C93 
 
My heart each day desires the morrow 
 Sleep itself is turned to sorrow 
 Vainly w d my winter borrow 
 Sunny leaves from any bough 
 
 in] Lilies for a bridal bed 
 
 Roses for a matrons head; 
 Violets for a maiden dead 
 
 Pansies let my flowers be ; 
 On the living grave I bear 
 Scatter them without a tear — 
 Let no friend, however dear 
 
 Waste one hope one fear for me [. 
 
 The pages devoted to this poem are among the 
 most fascinating in the note-book called Cyprian, 
 in respect of the glimpses they give us into the mind 
 of the poet as he composed it. The text has long 
 been practically established without a single flaw 
 to amend; but of the way in which it gradually 
 shaped itself in Shelley's mind we knew but little. 
 Mary Shelley first published it as A Lament in 
 1824 among the Posthumous Poems. Mr. Rossetti 
 had access to a copy headed Remembrance sent by 
 Shelley to Jane Williams; and he adhered in the 
 main to that copy in 1870. In 1877 I printed it in 
 my library edition from a much better holograph 
 in the late Lord Houghton's copy of Adonais. 
 This version is a distinct advance on the 1824 text, 
 excellent as that is, and superior as it is to the 
 "Jane" text. Than the Cyprian text as finally left 
 
 Don 
 
by Shelley and as set out above, we should not have 
 desired anything more exquisite had it not been 
 our good fortune to find one or two unquestionable 
 and authoritative emendations. The "Jane" copy, 
 followed in 1870, has the first three lines in this 
 order; but in the texts of 1824 and 1877 lines 2 and 
 3 change places. In the 1824 and 1870 texts lines 5 
 to 7 read thus : — 
 
 As the earth when leaves are dead, 
 As the night when sleep is sped, 
 As the heart when joy is fled, 
 
 but the wording of the Houghton text of those lines 
 (1877) is identical with Cyprian's, only the order 
 of lines 6 and 7 is inverted, advantageously. 
 
 In line 5 of the second stanza, the "Jane" copy 
 reads 
 
 My heart today desires tomorrow, 
 
 which the Cyprian copy expressly rejects in favour 
 of the reading of 1824 and 1877. In the third 
 stanza the "Jane" copy has the following as lines 4 
 and 8- 
 
 Sadder flowers find for me ; 
 and 
 
 Waste a hope, a fear for me— 
 
 instead of the properly rhyming lines of Cyprian, 
 1824, and 1877. The only striking flaw in the 
 Cyprian text is the word too in the third line of 
 
 En] 
 
stanza I; and Shelley amended that flaw when 
 writing the poem in the Houghton Adonais. 
 
 Passing from the Cyprian text to the successive 
 trial lines and readings from which it has to be dis- 
 entangled, we find in the first place that, when 
 Shelley took this Note Book and a pencil in hand, 
 to harvest the thoughts with which his brain was on 
 this occasion teeming, he had not even settled the 
 metre of the song, and made a start indicating that 
 the whole eight lines of the stanza would be of uni- 
 form length— three beats of time in each. The 
 opening as first written down stands thus (lines 3, 
 4, and 5 being cancelled) :— 
 
 Swifter than summers flight 
 
 Swifter than youth's delight 
 
 Swifter than dreamless 
 
 Or sleep in dreamless night 
 
 Thou 
 
 Swifter than dreamless night 
 
 Art thou come and gone [. 
 
 But the true musical form of his thought blossomed 
 as he shaped the next three lines— 
 
 As the earth when leaves are dead 
 
 As the heart when joy is fled 
 
 As the night when sleep is sped [ — 
 
 so he went back and inserted far over Swifter in 
 line r, too over line 2, turned Swifter than dream- 
 
 n«3 
 
less night into Swifter far than happy night, and 
 then drafted line 8 thus :— 
 
 I am now left alone- 
 alone, 
 I am now left lone, alone— 
 
 which he converted into the single line of magic 
 I am left lone, alone. 
 
 It was in some such way, I think, that the faultless 
 movement of the passage from Hellas already 
 dwelt on was evolved. Before leaving stanza I of 
 A Lament, he put the figures I, 3, and 2 against the 
 first three finally revised lines, so as to give them 
 the order shown above. It was probably later that 
 he substituted wood for earth in line 5 and the 
 rhyme-words shed, dead, and fled for dead, fled, 
 and sped, these revisions being the only words writ- 
 ten in ink on the pencilled page, which, by the by, 
 has at the top a little pencil sketch of what might 
 very well be a simple grave in the Protestant Ceme- 
 tery close under one of the towers of the old Roman 
 wall. The page on which the second stanza is pen- 
 cilled also has a little sketch at the top, giving the 
 impression of a glimpse of English park scenery 
 where the nearest trees are just over the brow of a 
 hill and the few lines indicating the slope toward 
 the spectator interfere with lines 1 and 2 of the 
 stanza, in which there is not really a stroke of revi- 
 
 D33 
 
sion. For line 3, however, he wrote what seems to 
 have been first 
 
 But youth's delight is a wild swan [, 
 
 and then a lone wild swan, before he abolished the 
 sententiousness and the poor rhyme with a hard 
 careless stroke of his pencil and attained perfection 
 at a leap with his — 
 
 But the wild swan Youth, is fain 
 To fly with thee [ . . . 
 
 Perfection to the sensitive artistic conscience of 
 Shelley was a far cry; and before the fourth line 
 took shape as 
 
 To fly with thee, false as thou 
 
 he had written 
 
 To fly with thee, like thee for 
 
 & as thou hast done [, 
 
 of which like thee and the last half-line are can- 
 celled. The half-line may be merely a note of the 
 drift of what he wanted to get in. Having got it in, 
 he wrote his rejected line 5,— 
 
 My heart today desires tomorrow 
 
 and substituted the established reading, together 
 with that of line 6. For line 7 he wrote the follow- 
 ing false start and redundant line— 
 
 C43 
 
And my pale 
 
 And in vain my wintry life w d borrow [ — 
 
 finally striking out all but vain my wintry and bor- 
 row, writing by over my, er over ry, and inserting 
 w d my, and leaving me to put the capital V to 
 Vainly. The eighth line seems to have been altered, 
 but only seems, the word Sunny having been writ- 
 ten twice because the first attempt resulted in indis- 
 tinctness. When he returned to the poem with a 
 pen and ink, all he did to this page was to write 
 Youth, very clearly with a comma after it, insert 
 another comma at thee in the next line, put a full- 
 stop and dash at the end of line 4, and touch up the 
 ed in turned. 
 
 It is in the third stanza that the most subtle and 
 infallible command of perfection is shown, as usual 
 after feeling about and trying phrases and so on 
 below the level of the perfect. Here he began with 
 
 Violets for a maidens bier 
 Lilies for a bride's [. . . 
 
 Then he substituted grave for bier; but the simple 
 loveliness of the established reading must have 
 flashed on him almost at once, because the next 
 change brings in the bridal bed and of necessity the 
 maiden dead, the 
 
 Roses for a matron's head 
 Ci53 
 
blooming without visible effort. Then comes the 
 perception of absolute propriety in a changed order 
 of the lines, recorded by the insertion of the figures 
 3, i, and 2 against the lines as composed. The 
 fourth line as first written is peculiarly lovely, 
 lovelier than that of the "Jane" copy and set aside 
 partly for the same reason. It is 
 
 Cypress, pansies, rue— for me. 
 
 This was not given up at once: the drafting pro- 
 ceeded thus:— 
 
 For me 
 
 My soul when the living 
 
 Weep for one who 
 
 Let the grave be deep 
 
 Forme 
 
 Let no dear 
 
 Let the living grave I bear [ . . . 
 
 Then six of the seven lines are condemned and Let 
 in the seventh is altered to On to make the estab- 
 lished reading of line 5, corresponding with 6 and 
 7, which remain unaltered from the first draft. 
 Then the word Waste was written and cancelled ; 
 and the true and final line 8 at once written on 
 the opposite page, after some lines unconnected 
 with this poem. Thus so far as the pencil writing 
 is concerned, he finished with the rhyme me and 
 me\ but when he came back with the pen he in- 
 serted in ink the true, the immortal line as it now 
 
 C.16J. 
 
stands, put a semicolon at the end of line 2, put in 
 the important initial On in line 5, already there in 
 pencil, did the same service to Scatter them, put a 
 dash after tear, sketched a tiny tree-top in the upper 
 margin, and closed the book on one of the saddest, 
 sweetest, and most perfect songs in our language. 
 On page III 7 v. are the words (in pencil) 
 
 By the music of Heaven 
 A star out of 
 
 and on page III 8 v. (also in pencil) are the rest 
 of a floating series of thoughts, each rejected as it 
 occurred, tending in the direction of The keen stars 
 are twinkling. 
 
 By night 
 
 A star from Shelleys Bower 
 
 A star came out of the deep 
 
 Heaven & music enkind 
 
 Soothes to its sleep of silence & light 
 
 By Heavens love 
 And bow with its ascendent 
 
 the world [ . . . 
 
 The second group consists wholly of lines and 
 words which the poet struck out or meant to strike 
 out. The first group was rejected simply by pass- 
 ing on from page 7 v. to page 8 v., but was not 
 struck out, though a bit of a word of uncertain 
 identity is cancelled after Heaven. This is one of 
 the very rare occasions on which Shelley has intro- 
 
 Ci73 
 
duced his own family name into a poem or verse. 
 The only published case I recall at the moment is 
 in another composition with which Jane Williams 
 is associated — To Jane: The Recollection, which 
 ends with the singular statement— 
 
 Though thou art ever fair and kind, 
 
 The forests ever green, 
 Less oft is peace in Shelley's mind, 
 
 Than calm in waters seen. 
 
 Page III 8 r. has a painful fragment pencilled on 
 it, whereof every word is cancelled or meant to be 
 cancelled. 
 
 Thou vision of abandoned years 
 
 Let the wounded deer go moan 
 
 Let the \ . , I deer go weep 
 (stricken J 6 r 
 
 Such 
 
 Take no shape 
 
 Any shape but 's wear 
 
 Vision of a fatal year 
 
 Tempt me not to hope or fear 
 
 Any shape but [ . . . 
 
 The movement here, and the circumstance that a 
 triplet in the prevailing measure of A Lament is 
 almost completed, point to the possibility that 
 these hints at a personal grief— say the suicide of 
 Harriett Shelley or that of "Fanny Godwin" 
 (Frances Wollstonecraft, the half-sister of Mary 
 
 Ci8l] 
 
Shelley) — written between the pages of the Lament 
 were really connected with that composition and 
 abandoned as unsuitable. 
 
 The lines and words somewhat confusedly writ- 
 ten with a pencil on page III 10 r. are not suffi- 
 ciently articulate to be of much interest. In the 
 order in which they stand they are as follows: — 
 
 thee to tell 
 Will not dedicate my spirit, 
 I envy 
 
 The trum[pet] 
 
 And if I dedicate thee not to fill 
 With 
 
 The trumpest of Prospterity [sic] 
 With [ . . . 
 
 It may be assumed that the first curiosity in the last 
 line but one is meant for trumpet; but whether the 
 other curiosity is Prosperity or Posterity, I am not 
 clever enough to say with any confidence. The 
 fragment might possibly belong to the unfinished 
 drama Charles the First, especially as there is a 
 strong likelihood that the next three pages in the 
 book, III 10 v., n r., and u v., belong to that 
 work, being probably a part of a speech in which 
 Henrietta addresses Death. The passage seems to 
 me to work out as follows: — 
 
 When wilt thou come — 
 
 that coy shadow 
 Of whom thou speakest 
 
 [I9J" 
 
He who flies far from grief but ever comes 
 
 Too soon for joy, who like the guest prosperity 
 
 Deserts the couch of sickness and despair, 
 
 Never comes near to close the eyes that weep, 
 
 And is too delicate to kiss the lips 
 
 Of ice-lipped poverty, too worldly-wise 
 
 To lighten with his touch the fallen glory 
 
 Or consort with abandoned majesty • • 
 
 O wintry libertine, whose love makes pure 
 
 The virgin promise of the spring of life 
 
 Would that I were as sinless fair and young 
 
 As innocent of sorrow & of shame 
 
 As those who in thy cold embraces sleep 
 
 Ere misery has made my living corpse 
 
 Too bitter food for thee— o that one hope 
 
 Remained to make me sweet to thee. 
 
 The allocation of these lines to Charles the First is 
 of course somewhat speculative; and it must be 
 borne in mind that the passage is one of those in- 
 cluded under the head of Unpublished Matter in 
 Note Book III entered as item "3, several lines 
 beginning: 'When wilt thou come?' obscurely 
 written, but partly decipherable." They certainly 
 provided a troublesome piece of reading; but I do 
 not think there is much more to find out about their 
 purport, though a few blurred and rubbed cancel- 
 lings might doubtless be deciphered, if they were 
 likely to prove worth the labour of bringing the 
 heavy artillery of lime-light and magic lantern to 
 bear upon the pages. 
 
 C203 
 
CYPRIAN 
 
 Scenes from Calderon's Play "El Magico 
 Prodigioso" 
 
 Pages III 12 r. to 13 v. are the four pages of two 
 blank leaves. Page 14 r. is also blank; but the 
 verso, 14 v., is used as a chapel of ease to 15 r., on 
 which the drafting of what Shelley calls Cyprian 
 is begun. There are no fewer than forty-one pages 
 devoted to the rendering in English of two of those 
 three scenes from Calderon's play El Magico Pro- 
 digioso which Shelley translated to form part of 
 the basis of a projected essay in The Liberal. The 
 three Scenes in question are taken from all three 
 Acts of El Magico. Shelley's Scene I is from the 
 opening of the original play, and corresponds with 
 somewhat less than half of Act I. Scene II repre- 
 sents a still smaller proportion of the Second Act 
 in the Spanish; and Scene III is taken from the 
 Third Act, of which it renders about a quarter. 
 The choice was thoroughly admirable for the many 
 aspects of Calderon's genius which the translation 
 thus exemplifies. In Scene I we get a delightfully 
 fresh and fragrant woodland scene in a mountainous 
 
 C«3 
 
quarter near Antioch, in which the dignified and 
 studious Cyprian, occupied with high questions of 
 theology, dismisses for a holiday two comic char- 
 acters, Clarin and Moscon, entertains the disguised 
 Devil and overcomes him in argument, separates 
 and pacifies Lelio and Floro, two aspirants to the 
 love of the heroine Justina (a Christian) who 
 stumble upon his solitude to "fight it out," and 
 induces them to refer their quarrel to him, — by 
 doing which they put him in communication with 
 Justina. 
 
 Scene II depicts Cyprian himself over head and 
 ears in love with Justina, and includes the magnifi- 
 cent sham storm and shipwreck "staged" by the 
 Devil to avenge his discomfiture in the encounter 
 of wits set before us in Scene I, and places him in 
 the position of a Magian with power to grant any 
 request of Cyprian's, — a power which he uses in an 
 endeavour to ruin the souls of Cyprian and Justina. 
 
 Scene III gives us a beautiful view of the char- 
 acter of Justina, and is a fine specimen of Calde- 
 ron's delicacy of perception and splendour of 
 imagination. 
 
 Shelley did not put the last touches on the whole 
 of any one of the three scenes; and there is some 
 little doubt as to the amount of work Mary Shelley 
 did to fit them for publication in the Posthumous 
 Poems of 1824. The unity and beauty of the style 
 forbids the suspicion that she found it needful to 
 interfere materially with the text or in any way 
 
 C223 
 
damage the texture of the verse save by those acci- 
 dents to which she and all subsequent editors of her 
 husband's remains have been liable through the 
 extraordinary dangers of misreading, or of missing 
 the way through "intricate wild wildernesses" of 
 words,— to use an expression in the opening of 
 Scene I. I would give much to find the means of 
 setting the second line in that scene to rights. An 
 "intricate wild wilderness" is so much more charm- 
 ing and expressive than correct that one has never 
 felt absolutely at one's ease in starting on the 
 perusal of these beautiful pages of the work of 
 Shelley's last year, — hoping, however, against hope 
 for the occurrence of some note or jotting which 
 might support just one change in the text of the 
 first three lovely lines, where Shelley over-informs 
 with luxurious appeal to the senses the words of his 
 author. Calderon's play opens with the words- 
 En la amena soledad 
 de aquesta apacible estancia, 
 bellissimo laberinto 
 de arboles, flores, y plantas, 
 podeis dexarme, dexando 
 conmigo, que ellos me bastan, 
 por compania, los libros 
 que os mande sacar de casa : 
 
 Shelley's rendering as published opens thus: — 
 
 In the sweet solitude of this calm place, 
 This intricate wild wilderness of trees 
 
 [23 3 
 
And flowers and undergrowth of odorous plants, 
 Leave me ; the books you brought out of the house 
 To me are ever best society. 
 
 The passage seems to have appealed so strongly to 
 the sympathies of the woodland-loving and wood- 
 land-reading Shelley as to make him endow Calde- 
 ron's under-scrub with odours extraneous to the 
 Spaniard's intent; but we have here a model of 
 poetic transfusion, apart from the pleonastic "wild 
 wilderness," and are accordingly pleased to take, 
 as a test question, the evidence of the book which is 
 called Cyprian on that point. The evidence is that 
 Shelley left a gap between intricate and wilderness 
 in the first instance, and wrote, at some other time 
 in all probability, a word above the gap very mi- 
 nutely and indistinctly— of which word, though not 
 positively certain that it is wild, I can make noth- 
 ing likelier, and have to be content with the justi- 
 fiable inference that it was but on its trial and had 
 not satisfied Shelley. 
 
 So far as the evidence of this Note Book goes, 
 the poet did not begin at the beginning of the 
 work, but came back to it after sketching-in his 
 Scene II. Even there he did not begin at the be- 
 ginning, as we shall see presently; but when he got 
 to the end of his Scene II— or nearly to the end- 
 he turned over and began Scene I at the back of the 
 last page of the draft of Scene II ; and it is to that 
 verso page that we have just been having recourse. 
 Of his Scene III there is no trace in this Note 
 
Book, so that we have but the two scenes to deal 
 with. These are so nearly a complete and articu- 
 late thing that it is indispensable to print them here 
 in their right order. 
 
 It must be recorded at starting that, in this 
 highly characteristic draft, Shelley was almost as 
 irregular as possible in the matter of indicating the 
 speakers of the various passages. Sometimes he 
 put the names in full, sometimes the names abbre- 
 viated, sometimes mere initials, sometimes wrong 
 names or wrong initials, and sometimes nothing at 
 all. This matter I have ventured to regularize 
 throughout by placing the name of the speaker cen- 
 trally over each speech without the customary 
 sprinkling of hooks, as I have little doubt Mary 
 Shelley had to do. I am inclined to the belief that, 
 with the Spanish before her, she supplied most of 
 the English stage directions ; and these I have given 
 with the customary hooks, unless they chance to be 
 supplied by Shelley. Mary's beautifully written 
 copy of this Scene I, indeed, was until recently 
 the only known manuscript authority for certain 
 changes in the text of the work made in 1877 m m Y 
 first library edition. Later editors have been 
 pleased to call this the Leigh Hunt manuscript; 
 but, although found among the Hunt papers ac- 
 quired by Ralph Townshend Mayer, it was in 
 1877, and still is, in my Shelley collection. You 
 need not mention this outside, friends of the Biblio- 
 phile Society; but, between ourselves, I think it is 
 high time that, after thirty-three years' possession, 
 
the manuscript should be known as the Buxton 
 Forman manuscript. Mr. Bixby's and it are still, 
 I believe, the only ones publicly known to exist; 
 and Mr. Bixby's has, up to the present time, not 
 been drawn on for emendations. To save a foot- 
 note at starting on our Scene I, I may mention that 
 Mary supplies the word sweet before solitude 
 in line i, and that her manuscript reads, rather 
 richly,— 
 
 Leave me. The books you brought me out of the 
 house [ . . . 
 
 I do not suspect her of introducing the second me 
 on her own authority: probably she had some note 
 or other source for it apart from Note Book III ; 
 for that some such source existed is clear from the 
 explanation given to me in 1877 by Garnett in re- 
 gard to one emendation of Scene II and one of 
 Scene III provided in his Relics of Shelley. 
 These, said Garnett, were "from some note or frag- 
 ment of draft." As Scene I has virtually three 
 scenic divisions, these may usefully be distinguished 
 as Scene I (A), Scene I (B), and Scene I (C). 
 Here follows 
 
 Scene I (A) 
 
 [Enter Cyprian, dressed as a Student; Clarin and 
 Moscon as poor Scholars, with books.] 
 
 In the [sweet] solitude of this calm place 
 This intricate wild wilderness of trees 
 
 1^1 
 
And flowers & undergrowth of odorous plants 3 
 
 Leave me ; the books you brought out of the house 
 
 To me are ever best society — 
 
 And whilst with joyous festival & song 6 
 
 Antioch now celebrates the consecration 
 
 Of its proud temple to great Jupiter 
 
 And bears his image in loud jubilee 9 
 
 To its new shrine, I would consume what still 
 
 Lives of the dying day in studious thought 
 
 Far from the throng & tumult — you my friends 12 
 
 Go & enjoy the festival ; it will 
 
 Be worth your [labour], & return for me 
 
 When the sun seeks its grave among the billows 15 
 
 Which among dim grey clouds on the horizon 
 
 Dance like white plumes upon a hearse; and here 
 
 I shall expect you— 
 
 Moscon. 
 
 I cannot bring my mind is 
 
 Great as my haste to see the festival 
 Certainly is, to leave you Sir, without 
 Just saying some 3 or 4000 words. 21 
 
 How is it possible that on a day 
 Of such festivity, you can bring your mind 
 To come forth to a solitary country 24 
 
 With three or four old books, & turn your back 
 On all this mirth. 
 
 Clarin. 
 
 My master's in the right 
 There is not anything more tiresome 27 
 
 C27] 
 
Than a procession day, with [troops and priests] 
 And dances & all that. 
 
 Moscon. 
 From first to last 
 Clarin, you are a temporizing flatterer — 30 
 
 You praise not what you feel, but what he does 
 Toadeater — 
 
 Clarin. 
 You lie — under a mistake 
 For that is the most civil sort of lie 33 
 
 That can be given to a man's face— I now 
 Say what I think . . 
 
 Cyprian. 
 
 Enough you foolish fellows 
 Puffed up with y£ own ignorance & envy se 
 
 You always take two sides of the same question. 
 Now go, & as I said, return for me 
 When night falls, veiling in its shadows wide 39 
 
 This glorious fabric of the universe. 
 
 Moscon. 
 How happens it, although you can maintain 
 The folly of enjoying festivals 42 
 
 That yet you go there ? 
 
 Clarin. 
 Nay the consequence 
 Is clear. Who ever did what he advises 
 Others to do ? 
 
 C283 
 
Moscon. 
 
 Would that my feet were wings 45 
 
 So would I fly to Livia 
 
 Exit 
 
 Clarin. 
 
 To speak truth 
 Livia [is she who has surprised my heart; 
 But he is more than half way there. — Soho ! 48 
 
 Livia, I come; good sport, Livia, Soho !] 
 
 exit [. 
 
 On the close of Scene I (A) upon the retreating 
 forms of Moscon and Clarin, let us take the oppor- 
 tunity of examining the evidence for and against 
 the authenticity of lines 47, 48, and 49, which I 
 have supplied between hooks from the current text 
 in place of the two words Livia stings at which 
 Shelley broke off, leaving a gap big enough to take 
 the three lines of blank verse which he presumably 
 considered an adequate allowance for the render- 
 ing of the rest of Clarin's brief parting speech. 
 That speech is in six of Calderon's short lines, 
 which read as follows:— 
 
 Clar. Aunque, si digo verdad, 
 
 Libia es la que me arrebata 
 
 los sentidos : pues ya tienes 
 
 mas de la mitad andada 
 
 del camino ; llega, Libia, 
 
 al na, y se, Libia, liviana. Vas. 
 
 L>93 
 
Below the gap which follows Livia stings Shelley 
 duly wrote the word exit. Mary's written copy 
 also has the gap, but following the words 
 
 Clar. To speak the truth 
 Livia [ . . . 
 
 without the word stings. Hence, we have not, at 
 present, any external evidence that Shelley ever 
 finished the passage at all. I am inclined to the 
 view that he did; but it is impossible to contend 
 that the quality of the verse in these three lines is 
 such that none but Shelley could have produced 
 them. Indeed, a person of Mary's capacity might 
 have written them; and I do not think that in 1824 
 she could have been much blamed for doing so, in 
 view of her general admission that the Scenes were 
 not "to be considered as having received the au- 
 thor's ultimate corrections." Having broken thus 
 far into the solitude of Cyprian, we may as well 
 note the rest of the textual points connected with 
 the first forty-nine lines before leaving him to his 
 brilliant encounter of wits with the Devil. Line 1 
 was first written thus— 
 
 In this solitude of this still place [ ; 
 
 but, though as already noted the word sweet was 
 not here supplied, this was altered to the and still 
 struck out in favour of calm. Line 6 has a false 
 
 C3o3 
 
start, Whilst, cancelled, and was next written with 
 a blank— 
 
 And whilst with festival & song [ — 
 
 which blank was first inadequately filled by the in- 
 sertion of loud, merely to be struck out in favour of 
 joyous. Line 8 has, though not very clearly writ- 
 ten, three rejected openings, Of a new, Of the new, 
 and Of its new. The line of our text— 
 
 Of its proud temple to great Jupiter 
 
 is a little stronger than the old text, for which Mary 
 had selected a in preference to its, perhaps because 
 of the its in line 10, where, by the by, there is a 
 cancelled concluding phrase; that phrase is either 
 far from the rest, or far from, for I am not sure 
 whether the rest does not belong to would consume 
 in that line — / would consume the rest / of the 
 dying day — and far from is at all events only an 
 anticipation of the opening of line 12. Line 12 has 
 a cancelled ending, you two for you my friends, 
 which is followed by a rejected reading for line 13, 
 May go to Antioch, and. Line 14 was left thus in 
 Cyprian — 
 
 Be worth your , & return for me [, 
 
 the intention being, no doubt, to insert a word of 
 two syllables — say trouble or labour. But Mary 
 gave a different line in her manuscript, — 
 
 Be worth your pains. You may return for me [ — 
 
 C3I3 
 
and that reading I adopted in 1877 as against the 
 reading current up to that time, — 
 
 Be worth the labour, and return for me. 
 
 With the book Cyprian before me I might have 
 chosen differently; but the point is one of complete 
 uncertainty, as we do not know where Mary found 
 either her printed reading of 1824 or her manu- 
 script reading. Here, however, we come upon a 
 much more interesting point in the draft: Shelley 
 has cancelled a reading of a notable inspiration for 
 line 17— 
 
 Are heaped over its golden corpse [ . . . 
 
 and when he had written the line 
 
 Nod, like white plumes upon a hearse; 
 
 he struck out Nod and substituted the Dance of our 
 text, which is the established reading. The case is 
 one in which, although the poet cannot with truth 
 be said to out-Omar Omar Fitzgerald in supplying 
 imagery to an alien poet, he certainly went far in 
 anticipating Fitz's methods. Calderon wrote— 
 
 Quando el Sol cayendo vaya 
 a sepultarse en las ondas, 
 que entre obscuras nubes pardas, 
 al gran cadaver de oro, 
 son monumentos de plata, 
 
but Shelley, while remaining faithful to the fune- 
 real drift of the imagery, does not seem to have 
 been able to face the mechanical-flamboyant style 
 of the metaphor of waves as silver monuments over 
 the sunken sun as a corpse of gold. And really, 
 looking at the imagery as a compromise between 
 the art of the poet and the craft of the undertaker, 
 the Englishman seems to me to have got out of the 
 Spaniard's over-strained gorgeousness with real 
 and vivid splendour. But how perilously near he 
 came to floundering into the same mess, the really 
 good four fifths of a line which he struck out show. 
 In line 18 Moscon's / cannot bring my mind 
 supersedes the words Tis impossible ; line 24 
 shows the rejected opening To come out into; and 
 in line 26 the opening Upon the and the word 
 pleasure are struck out in favour of On all this 
 mirth. In the same line Clarin's My master's in 
 the right is substituted for the lamer My master is 
 quite right. As an opening for line 36 You stands 
 cancelled, and the next line was first written 
 
 You always take the two sides of one question. 
 
 Here Shelley substituted the same for one but for- 
 got to strike out the before two, and left Mary an 
 excuse for preferring the less robust reading, the 
 two sides of one question, which has subsisted till 
 today. In Moscon's next speech there is a can- 
 celled reading for line 42— 
 
 That it is sheer at festivals 
 
 C33H 
 
and after that line a false start which looks like 
 If you cannot is struck out. 
 
 Returning now to Cyprian in his supposed soli- 
 tude in the bosom of which his Satanic Majesty 
 the Demon is concealed, we encounter at the out- 
 set a textual question affecting seriously the au- 
 thority of the established version of the work in 
 matters of detail. The renowned passage about 
 Pliny's definition of God is extremely fine in the 
 original:— 
 
 Cyp. Ya estoy solo, ya podre, 
 si tanto mi ingenio alcanza, 
 estudiar esta question 
 que me trae suspensa el alma, 
 desde que in Plinio lei, 
 con mysteriosas palabras 
 la definicion de Dios ; 
 porque mi ingenio no halla 
 esse Dios en quien convengan 
 mysterios, ni senas tantas : 
 esta verdad escondidida 
 he de apurar. 
 
 Having written without correction the three iambic 
 lines representing the first five short lines in the 
 foregoing extract, Shelley at once found himself in 
 comparatively troubled water: he wrote and re- 
 jected 
 
 ( i ) The definition 
 
 ( 2 ) The mystic definition of a 
 
(3) Those words of mystic import & deep sense 
 The definition of God — 
 
 and finally arrived at— 
 
 The words of mystic import & deep sense 
 In which he defines God — my intellect 
 Can find no God with whom these [ — 
 
 and here, having filled page III 23 v., he had to 
 turn over before he could finish his line of blank 
 verse, which, to record with exactness, he did at the 
 top of page III 24 r., writing 
 
 marks & mysterious 
 Fitly agree . . it is a hidden truth 
 Which I must fathom— 
 
 and Mary's careful transcript seems to me to have 
 been made from this passage in the Cyprian Book, 
 with slight variation of pointing and capitalling 
 and one verbal change: she wrote mysteries where 
 Shelley had written mysterious, he having possibly 
 been led mechanically astray by the sound of the 
 Spanish mysterios which he of course knew meant 
 mysteries not mysterious; and she on her side, hav- 
 ing perchance known when she made that copy 
 that Shelley meant mysteries, did not adhere to the 
 impossible line 
 
 Can find no God with whom these marks & mysterious [ . 
 
 C353 
 
When she prepared the copy for the printer to set 
 up the relative pages of the Posthumous Poems, she 
 closed the line with marks and signs, perhaps hav- 
 ing found that reading in some note. of Shelley's, 
 but quite conceivably having chosen that method 
 of remedying the faulty line by giving two equiva- 
 lents for the Spanish senas and none for mysterios. 
 In 1877, when Cyprian had become an unknown 
 book, I gave the preference to Mary's printed ver- 
 sion and merely recorded her written version as a 
 foot-note: now, weighing the Spanish text, the 
 faulty line in Shelley's own writing, and Mary's 
 two readings, I should prefer to assume that Shel- 
 ley made one of two possible slips;— either, with 
 the sonorous phrase of Calderon and his own finely 
 turned Fletcherian triple-ended blank verse both 
 seething together in his brain, he mechanically 
 wrote mysterious for mysteries, or else he decided 
 on compounding the sense of the two nouns mys- 
 teries and marks or signs (mysterios and senas) by 
 means of a noun fortified with the cognate adjec- 
 tive mysterious, and forgot to strike out the wicked 
 little ampersand which, if taken as the final inten- 
 tion, forbids any reading but that of Mary's manu- 
 script. As it is but a rough draft that we are now 
 treating, we will, with this explanation, print as a 
 part of that draft, the passage 
 
 my intellect 
 
 Can find no God with whom these marks mysterious 
 
 Fitly agree . . 
 
 C363 
 
in which our troublesome line comes out, so far as 
 metre is concerned, as a rather noble compromise 
 between the occasional triple-ended iambic line of 
 Fletcher and the recognized double-ended iambic 
 line of any other poet of repute. Now for Cyp- 
 rian's word-combat with Satan in 
 
 Scene I (B) 
 Cyprian. 
 
 Now since I am alone let me examine so 
 
 The question which has long disturbed my mind 
 
 With doubt, since first I read in Plinius, 
 
 Those words of mystic import & deep sense 53 
 
 In which he defines God— my intellect 
 
 Can find no God with whom these marks mysterious 
 
 Fitly agree . . it is a hidden truth se 
 
 Which I must fathom.— [Reads] 
 
 [Enter the Devil, as a fine Gentleman.] 
 
 Demon. 
 
 Search even as thou wilt 
 But thou shalt never find what I can hide 
 
 Cyprian. 
 
 What noise is that among the boughs— who goes there 59 
 What art thou 
 
 Demon. 
 
 Tis a foreign gentleman 
 Even from this morning I have lost my way 
 
 C373 
 
In this wild place, & my poor horse at last 62 
 
 Quite overcome, has stretched himself upon 
 
 The enamelled tapestry of this mossy mountain 
 
 And feeds & rests at the same time. I was 65 
 
 Upon my way to Antioch upon business 
 
 Of some importance, but wrapt up in cares, 
 
 Who is exempt from this [inheritance] ? as 
 
 I parted from my company & lost 
 
 My way, & lost my servants & my comrades. 
 
 Cyprian. 
 
 'Tis singular that even within the sight 71 
 
 Of the high towers of Antioch you thus lost 
 
 Your way . . Of all the avenues & green vallies 
 
 Of this wild wood there is not one but leads ^i 
 
 As to its centre to the walls of Antioch 
 
 Take which you will you cannot miss your road 
 
 Demon. 
 
 And such is ignorance, even in the sight 77 
 
 Of knowledge it can draw no profit from it. 
 
 But as it still is early, & as I 
 
 Have no acquaintances in Antioch so 
 
 Being a stranger there, I will even wait 
 
 The few surviving hours of the day 
 
 Until the night shall conquer it— I see 83 
 
 Both by your dress & by the books in which 
 
 You find delight & company, that you 
 
 Are a great student ; I feel «6 
 
 Much sympathy with such pursuits ; 
 
 C383 
 
Cyprian. 
 
 Have you 
 Studied much. 
 
 Demon. 
 
 No, & yet I know enough 
 Not to be wholly ignorant. 
 
 Cyprian. 
 What science may you know. 
 
 Demon. 
 
 Pray Sir 89 
 
 Many 
 
 Cyprian. 
 
 Alas 
 Much time must we expend on one alone 
 And even then attain it not— but you 92 
 
 Have the presumption to assert that you 
 Know many without study 
 
 Demon. 
 
 And with truth, 
 For in the country whence I come, the sciences 95 
 
 Require no teaching they are known— 
 
 Cyprian. 
 
 O would 
 I were of that bright country : for in this 
 The more we study, we the more discover »s 
 
 Our ignorance.— 
 
Demon. 
 
 It is so true, that I 
 Had so much arrogance as to oppose 
 The chair of the most high Professorship 101 
 
 And thought to carry it, and might have done 
 For I had many votes, & though I lost 
 The attempt was still more glorious, than the failure 
 Could be dishonourable . . if you believe not 105 
 
 Let us refer it to dispute respecting 
 That which you know the best, & although I 107 
 
 Know not the opinion you maintain & though 
 It be the true one, I will take the contrary 
 
 Cyprian. 
 
 The offer gives me pleasure — I am now no 
 
 Debating with myself upon a passage 
 
 Of Plinius, & my mind is racked with doubt 
 
 To understand & know who is the God 113 
 
 Of whom he speaks 
 
 Demon. 
 
 It is a passage, if 
 I recollect it right, couched in these words — 
 God is one supreme goodness one pure essence ue 
 
 One substance ; & one sense ; all sight, all hands. 
 
 Cyprian. 
 Tis true 
 
 Demon. 
 
 What difficulty find you here ? 
 
 C403 
 
Cyprian. 
 
 I do not recognize among the Gods iia 
 
 The God defined by Plinius ; if he must 
 
 Be supreme goodness— even Jupiter 
 
 Is not supremely good, because we see 122 
 
 His deeds are evil, & his attributes 
 
 Tainted with mortal weakness; in what manner 
 
 Can supreme goodness be consistent with 125 
 
 The passions of humanity? 
 
 Demon. 
 
 The wisdom 
 Of the old world masked under names of Gods, 
 
 The attributes of nature & of man 128 
 
 A sort of popular philosophy.— 
 
 Cyprian. 
 
 This reply will not satisfy me, for 
 
 Such awe is due to the high name of God 131 
 
 That ill should never be imputed — then 
 
 Examining the question with more strictness 
 
 It follows, that the Gods would always will 134 
 
 That which is best, were they supremely good. 
 
 How then does one will one thing one another? 
 
 And [that] you may not say that I alleadge [sic] 137 
 
 Poetical or philosophic learning 
 
 Consider the ambiguous responses 
 
 Of their oracular statues ; from two shrines 140 
 
 Two armies shall obtain the assurance of 
 
 One victory? is it not indisputable 
 
 That two contending wills can never lead 143 
 
 [41] 
 
To the same end? and being opposite 
 
 If one be good is not the other evil? 
 
 Evil in God is inconceivable ; we 
 
 But supreme goodness fails among the Gods 
 
 Without their union 
 
 Demon. 
 
 I deny yr major. 
 These responses are means towards some end 1*9 
 
 Unfathomed by our intellectual beam. 
 They are the work of providence, & more 
 The battles loss may profit those who lose 152 
 
 Than victory advantage those who win 
 
 Cyprian. 
 
 That I admit ; & yet that God ought not 
 
 Falshood is incompatible with Deity 135 
 
 Assure the victory ; it w? be enough 
 
 To have permitted the defeat — if God 
 
 Be all sight, God who had beheld the truth iss 
 
 Would not have given assurance of an end 
 
 Never to be accomplished, thus although 
 
 The Deity may according to its attributes iei 
 
 Be well distinguished into persons— yet 
 
 Even in the minutest circumstance 
 
 His essence must be one. — 
 
 Demon. 
 
 To attain the end W4 
 
 The affections of the actors in the scene 
 Must have been thus influenced by his voice. 
 
Cyprian. 
 
 But for a purpose thus subordinate m 
 
 He might have employed Genii, good or evil 
 
 A sort of spirits called so by the learned 
 
 Who roam about inspiring good or evil wo 
 
 And from whose influence & existence we 
 
 May well infer our immortality . . . 
 
 Thus God might easily, without descent its 
 
 To a gross falshood in his proper person 
 
 Have moved the affections by their mediation 
 
 To the just point . . . 
 
 Demon. 
 
 These trifling contradictions i7« 
 Do not suffice to impugn the unity 
 Of the high Gods: in things of great importance 
 They still appear unanimous; consider 179 
 
 That glorious fabric man— his workmanship 
 Is stamped with one conception— 
 
 Cyprian. 
 
 He who made man 
 Must have methinks the advantage of the others : 182 
 If they are equal might not they have risen 
 In opposition to the work & being 
 
 All hands, according to our author here, 185 
 
 Have still destroyed even as the other made 
 And if equal in power, if only unequal 
 In opportunity, which of the two iss 
 
 Will remain conqueror? 
 
 US! 
 
Demon. 
 
 On impossible 
 And false hypotheses, there can be built 
 No argument ; say, what do you infer 
 From this ? 
 
 Cyprian. 
 
 That there must be a mighty God 
 Of supreme goodness & of highest grace 
 All sight all hands all truth, infallible 
 Without an equal & without a rival 
 The cause of all things, the effect of nothing 
 One power one will one substance & one essence 
 And in whatever persons, one or two 
 His attributes may be distinguished, one 
 Sovereign power, one solitary essence, 
 One cause of all cause. 
 
 [They rise.] 
 
 Demon. 
 
 How can I impugn 
 So clear a consequence. 
 
 Cyprian. 
 
 Do you regret 
 My victory— 
 
 Demon. 
 
 Who but regrets a check 
 In rivalry of wit? I could reply 
 And urge new difficulties, but will now 
 
 C443 
 
Depart, for I hear steps of men approaching =oe 
 
 And it is time that I should now pursue 
 My journey to the city 
 
 Cyprian. 
 Go in peace. 
 
 Demon. 
 
 Remain in peace— [Aside] Since thus it profits him 209 
 To study, I will wrap his senses up 
 In sweet oblivion of all thought, but of 
 A piece of excellent beauty; & as I 212 
 
 Have power given me to wage enmity 
 Against Justina's soul, I will extract 
 From one effect two vengeances. 
 
 (exit) 
 
 Cyprian. 
 
 I never 215 
 
 Met a more learned person— let me now 
 Revolve this doubt again with careful mind. 
 
 [He reads] 
 
 Leaving the urbane and intellectual Cyprian to 
 the brief enjoyment of his victory over the Devil, 
 before the World and the Flesh break in upon his 
 solitude in the shape of those two turbulent gentle- 
 men Floro and Lelio, we will go on with our record 
 of textual variations. In line 62 two unimportant 
 openings, And and Upon this, are cancelled. As 
 the last word in line 67 thought stands cancelled in 
 
favour of cares; in line 69 left for lost; and in line 
 71 curious for singular. In line 72 Mary's tran- 
 script reads thus have lost, and her editions could 
 lose, while in line 73 the transcript reads avenues 
 and vallies, the editions avenues and green paths. 
 In line 75 the transcript has town of Antioch for 
 walls of Antioch. After line 78 Shelley wrote at 
 first— 
 
 But as it now is late, I will enter 
 
 In a strange city, where I have no friends 
 
 Until [ . . . 
 
 Seeing that this did not give his author's sense, he 
 did not think it worth while, just to please us in- 
 quisitors, to supply the word not before enter, de- 
 manded by metre and sense alike, but just crossed 
 the lines through and passed on. At the close of 
 line 84 books with which gives place to books in 
 which. In line 86 the metre was left defective in 
 Cyprian : Mary made it good in her transcript by 
 inserting and in truth before I feel ; but she printed 
 for my part, I feel; while in the next line, where 
 Shelley uses the school-girls' phrase sympathy with 
 such pursuits, she wrote in in the transcript but 
 printed with. Line 92 in Cyprian shows the can- 
 celled reading And even then know so little. Line 
 95 shows the cancelled opening/ come out of; and 
 it ends clearly with the sciences, as it does in Mary's 
 transcript, though in the printed editions up to 1877 
 the the was omitted, as it still is by editors who mis- 
 
 U63 
 
understand Shelley's metre. This is really another 
 of the Fletcherian triple endings which contribute 
 to the freedom and variety of Shelley's blank verse 
 in this work. He had written this fine piece of 
 Satan's bombast thus— 
 
 For in the country whence I come, the sciences 
 Are known without study [, 
 
 meaning, no doubt, to find some such word as pre- 
 liminary to insert in the gap; but finally he struck 
 the imperfect line out, tried Require no doctrine, 
 and then substituted teaching for doctrine. Mary, 
 whose transcript substitutes learning, had merely, I 
 think, misread Shelley's teaching, the t of which is 
 not crossed, though the word is written well enough 
 otherwise. In the original, Calderon makes the 
 Demon say- 
 Si, que de una patria soy, 
 donde las ciencias mas altas, 
 sin estudiarse, se saben. 
 
 The word learning still stands in the English text; 
 but I should lean to the substitution of teaching. 
 It is to be noted that Shelley's translation is at the 
 furthest imaginable point from slavish; and in the 
 very next speech of the Demon he omits the reiter- 
 ated boast that it was without study (sin estudios) 
 that he contested the Professorial Chair, a speech 
 in which I should find it necessary to restore to any 
 
 U7l 
 
text I might be editing an additional line which I 
 have found in Cyprian. It is line 102 in our pres- 
 ent numeration and makes subsequent lines fail of 
 numerical correspondence with the printed edi- 
 tions. Here we read 
 
 And thought to carry it, and might have done 
 For I had many votes 
 
 and in Mary's transcript we have 
 
 The chair of the most high Professor there 
 And thought to carry it 
 For I had many votes [. 
 
 There is a cross against the short line, doubtless to 
 indicate some difficulty which she experienced in 
 dealing with the passage: curiously enough, Shel- 
 ley drew his pen through And thought to carry it, 
 which renders admirably Calderon's y pense lle- 
 varla, but left uncancelled the somewhat colloquial 
 might have done,, which has no literal equivalent in 
 Calderon. Mary printed 
 
 The chair of the most high Professorship, 
 And obtained many votes [ ; 
 
 and so the text remains till today. Professor there 
 was clearly a mere misreading, for the syllable 
 ship, though really unquestionable in Cyprian, is 
 not well written; and damage is done to the texture 
 of the verse by And obtained. The Spanish is 
 porque tuve muchos votos, where even the question 
 
 C483 
 
between porque and and is of more consequence to 
 the sense than that between tuve and had. After 
 line 105 Shelley cancelled two openings 
 
 Say what thou knowest 
 and 
 
 Respect [ing?] 
 
 and then wrote 
 
 Let us refer it to dispute respecting 
 That which thou knowest best 
 
 wherein he struck out thou knowest and wrote 
 under the line you know the best. Mary copied 
 that correctly; but she printed you know best with- 
 out the essential the } which was not restored till 
 1877, when her transcript swam up to the surface 
 of Time's whirlpool. Probably no one will ven- 
 ture to call line 109 an Alexandrine because of its 
 triple ending with the contrary; but if such a 
 prophet should arise let him bethink himself of the 
 original so exactly rendered— 
 
 yo tomare la contraria. 
 
 Shelley was at some pains to do justice to the 
 Devil's portentous recollection of the exact words 
 of Pliny: line 116 was begun at the foot of Page 
 III 26 v. thus— 
 
 God is a supreme excellence [ ; 
 C493 
 
but excellence was struck out and goodness ones 
 written below it : then that was cancelled and the 
 half-line altered to 
 
 God is one supreme goodness 
 
 after which, the page being full, the poet turned 
 over and wrote one pure essence at the top of page 
 III 27 v. Mary's transcript starts this quotation 
 from Pliny with God is highest goodness ; but from 
 what source the verse was thus damaged no evi- 
 dence is before the court: she printed the passage 
 correctly according to Cyprian. Shelley's all 
 hands in line 117 looks at least as much like all 
 hearing', but it is inconceivable that he could have 
 rendered todo manos by all hearing. The passage 
 (lines 1 19-126) in which Cyprian announces his 
 failure to "recognize among the Gods / The God 
 defined by Plinius" is one of admirable freedom as 
 regards the movement of the verse, and shows but 
 little castigation in the draft: Tainted with human 
 weakness (124) gives place to Tainted with mortal 
 weakness, and so avoids the poverty of language 
 which would have been chargeable against the em- 
 ployment of human in line 124 and the cognate 
 noun humanity in the next line but one; and at the 
 close of the speech (lines 125-6) the openings 
 
 Can he be called supremely good 
 
 and the hesitant 
 
 Can it can supreme 
 
 C503 
 
were rejected before the poet reached his 
 
 Can supreme goodness be consistent with 
 The passions of humanity? 
 
 But perhaps the finest thing about the passage in 
 English is quite another kind of freedom than that 
 of the verse's movement. Calderon makes Cyprian 
 
 Say_ No hallar 
 
 el Dios de quien Plinio trata ; 
 que si ha de ser bondad suma, 
 aun a Jupiter le falta 
 suma bondad, pues le vemos, 
 que es pecaminoso en tantas 
 ocasiones; Danae hable 
 rendida, Europa robada; 
 pues como en suma bondad, 
 cuyas acciones sagradas 
 avian de ser divinas, 
 caben passiones humanas? 
 
 The firm hand with which Shelley drops the par- 
 ticular fables of Danae and Europa ("Witness the 
 yielding Danae, the ravished Europa!") overboard 
 and generalizes the divine peccadillos under the 
 noble phrase tainted with mortal weakness leaves 
 nothing to desire; and the answer of Satan finds an 
 almost equally bold and noble rendering: Calderon 
 makes the Demon say— 
 
 Essas son falsas historias, 
 en que las letras profanas, 
 
con los nombres de los dioses, 
 entendieron disfrazada 
 la Moral Philosophia. 
 
 Shelley makes him say— 
 
 The wisdom 
 
 Of the old world masked under names of Gods, 
 
 The attributes of nature & of man 
 
 A sort of popular philosophy.— 
 
 Strictly speaking this admirable reading is not to 
 
 be found in Cyprian; and yet, strictly speaking 
 
 from another point of view, it is ; and it is a reading 
 
 which I am keen to see taking its place in the text 
 
 instead of what I cannot but think is unauthorized 
 
 save by Calderon, to wit masked with the names of 
 
 Gods. What happened was this : Shelley wrote in 
 
 Cyprian— . 
 
 1 he wisdom 
 
 Of the old world, under the names of Gods, 
 
 The attributes of nature & of man 
 
 A sort of popular philosophy.— 
 
 His writing, as usual in this book, sloped very 
 much down to the right, and was rather large. On 
 a verso page, awkwardly rounded on the right-hand 
 side— the page is III 27 v.— a line like this will not 
 come into the width of the page unbroken; and 
 he wrote this line thus— 
 
 Of the old world, under 
 
 the 
 
 names 
 
 of Gods, 
 
and, arriving at the end of the speech two lines 
 further on, he discovered that the sense was uncom- 
 pleted, the verb, intended to have come further on, 
 having been left out. So he went back and wrote 
 masked over the first bit of his fine line, meaning to 
 strike out the and leave it a fine line; but by sheer 
 misadventure he struck out, as he did scores of 
 times, the wrong word, under, and left the line 
 reading 
 
 Of the old world, masked the names of God, 
 
 which is as imperfect metrically as the sentence is 
 grammatically. It is inconceivable that his sec- 
 ond journey over that little speech was thus wasted : 
 of course he may have meant to insert with after 
 masked; but if something is to be assumed, why not 
 choose the best something? Mary's transcript 
 opens with the rejected reading 
 
 The wisdom 
 Of the old world under the names of Gods 
 The attributes [. 
 
 Then she struck out The attributes, put one of her 
 cautionary crosses against Gods, and left a blank. 
 When she prepared the copy used by the printer of 
 the Posthumous Poems, she put masked with names 
 of Gods, having perhaps turned to the original and 
 observed Calderon's 
 
 con los nombres de los Dioses, 
 
 C533 
 
and so the text has remained, up to the present day, 
 less excellent than I am morally certain Shelley 
 meant to have it in Cyprian. Is that your answer, 
 Mary Shelley? If so, I say— with your husband 
 and Cyprian— 
 
 This reply will not satisfy me. 
 
 In the next speech, which begins with those six ap- 
 posite words, Shelley was, though not by that line, 
 somewhat exercised, for before arriving at lines 
 1 31-2— 
 
 Such awe is due to the high name of God 
 That ill should never be imputed— then [, 
 
 he had written and struck out 
 
 Such is the reveren[ce] 
 
 Such reverence ought the name of God to ask 
 
 In those who 
 
 who, utter, that crimes 
 Ought never though false 
 
 and then had ended his ultimate couplet with an 
 
 and to be struck out- 
 Such awe is due to the high name of God 
 That ill should never be imputed— and [ . . . 
 
 Here again I must qualify the literality of the term 
 "written and struck out" by adding "or intended to 
 be struck out;" for strictly speaking several words 
 
in the first group stand boldly out uncancelled and 
 equally unmeaning. The last and, however, was 
 struck out in favour of then. That parenthetic 
 though false had, of course, to be rejected for the 
 sake of consistency, for he had not rendered the 
 Devil's magniloquent phrase 
 
 Essas son falsas historias, 
 
 as we have already seen. In line 133 we find an- 
 other case for a change in the established text— not 
 an urgent case, it is true. Shelley wrote— 
 
 Examining the question strictlier 
 
 and then altered strictlier to with more strictness. 
 The word strictness is not very plain; but I see no 
 doubt about it. Mary, however, both wrote and 
 printed with more care; and that has been the read- 
 ing ever since. In line 134, the first reading in 
 Cyprian was the Gods should, which Shelley al- 
 tered to would. Mary put would in the transcript, 
 but printed should, which disfigured the text from 
 1824 till 1877. In line 135 he wrote being su- 
 premely good, and judiciously altered being to 
 were they; and in line 136 would stands cancelled 
 in favour of does. The lack of the word that in 
 line 137 was Shelley's fault, and disfigured the 
 work till Rossetti put the word in in 1870. The 
 never in line 143 is plainly written; and the substi- 
 
tution of ever in Mary's transcript must have been 
 a mere slip. For line 145 Shelley was going to 
 write 
 
 Must not the one be good, the other evil ? 
 
 But seeing the inconsequence of the reasoning, — 
 which does not exist in the original Spanish,— he 
 stopped when he got as far as good, and very prop- 
 erly wrote 
 
 If one be good is not the other evil ? 
 
 Before line 147 came out rightly, he made two false 
 starts, And among the Gods and For su (the second 
 being, I presume, the record of an intention to 
 write For supreme etc. ) . In the Demon's denial of 
 Cyprian's "major" there, the fine line (150) 
 
 Unfathomed by our intellectual beam 
 
 has a fine variant, rejected, perhaps, because of the 
 difficulty of reading the line otherwise than as an 
 Alexandrine — 
 
 Impenetrable by our intellectual beam. 
 
 The next line ( 151 ) has a false start, // th\_ey~\, and 
 lines 152 and 153 show a cancelled reading- 
 more 
 
 The loss of victory may profit those 
 
 Who lose; than their success [. 
 
 In Cyprian's rejoinder the parenthetic line (the 
 parentheses by the by are not given) — 
 
 CS63 
 
Falshood is incompatible with Deity 
 has two forerunners — 
 
 For direct falshood suits not Deity 
 and 
 
 For direct falshood becomes not Deity [ ; 
 
 and in the second half of line 156, which reads it 
 would be enough (like the transcript and the estab- 
 lished text) , there are two trials, though he mi[ght] 
 and it should be enough. Cyprian confirms the 
 reading which I got from Mary's copy in 1877 for 
 
 line 1 c8 — 
 
 if God 
 
 Be all sight, God who had beheld the truth, 
 perfecting the line, imperfect till then in print, 
 Be all sight, God who beheld the truth, 
 
 but, before getting the line right, Shelley had re- 
 jected the opening Indee[d] and had sketched the 
 line thus— 
 
 Be all sight, God must have beheld the end 
 
 and altered must to who, have to had, and end to 
 truth. It looks likely— for the word The stands in 
 solitary disfigurement by two strokes immediately 
 below— that he meant the lines to run thus at first— 
 
 if God 
 
 Indeed be all truth, God must have beheld 
 The end &c. 
 
 C573 
 
Before writing line 159 — 
 
 Would not have given assurance of an end 
 he wrote and rejected 
 
 And ) . ,>not have ass Tured]. 
 ( would ) 
 
 There is no trace of Mary's manuscript reading, re- 
 ward for an end : she printed an end. 
 
 In the Fletcherian triple-ended line 161, 
 
 The Deity may according to its attributes [, 
 
 not contented with the handsome allowance of thir- 
 teen syllables, he put an extra letter into Deity, 
 spelling it for once Deiety. The word its is per- 
 fectly plain; and, had I in 1877 had it from Cyprian 
 directly instead of through the transcript of Mary, 
 I should have adopted it in preference to the estab- 
 lished his, even though His is used lower down, in 
 line 164. In Cyprian's speech about the Genii, at 
 the end of line 173, Shelley wrote his word so badly 
 on the round of the back margin (it is a verso page, 
 III 29 v.) that I cannot state positively whether he 
 meant to alter descent into descending or descend- 
 ing into descent. Up to 1877 the passage read 
 thus— 
 
 Thus God might easily, without descending 
 To a gross falsehood in his proper person, 
 
 C583 
 
but finding descent in Mary's manuscript, and 
 thinking it the better reading, I adopted it. Con- 
 firmed by Shelley's own authority, I should cer- 
 tainly maintain it in the absence of a better, a 
 maturer, holograph. In line 175 Shelley scrawled 
 another word on the round of the same page (III 
 29 v.) in such a way as to leave a doubt. The line 
 has stood up to the present time thus — 
 
 Have moved the affections by this mediation [. 
 
 Shelley's doubtful word is the penultimate, which 
 is certainly more like their than this, but might be 
 read for either the one or the other. On the mere 
 evidence of handwriting my decision was decidedly 
 in favour of their] then it seemed to me reasonable 
 that their mediation was meant to refer us directly 
 and concretely to the "sort of spirits" called Genii, 
 and that this mediation would have been thinner 
 and less direct. Mary's copy makes this of it; but 
 I notice now for the first time that, whereas Shelley 
 wrote medition and struck it out to put mediation 
 in due form and very plainly, Mary, with but little 
 excuse so far as the Note Book is concerned, wrote 
 mediator. Hence it seems to me that Calderon had 
 better have the casting vote ; and, as the whole small 
 speech is a peculiarly delicate and interesting piece 
 of work, I transcribe it. 
 
 1 
 
 Cypr. Quando importara 
 el moverlos, nenios ay, 
 
que buenos, y malos llaman 
 todos los Doctos, que son 
 unos espiritus, que andan 
 entre nosotros, dictando 
 las obras buenas, y malas, 
 argumento que assegura 
 la immortalitad del alma, 
 y bien pudiera esse Dios 
 con ellos, sin que llegara 
 a mostrar que mentir sabe, 
 mover afectos. 
 
 The position of con ellos is conclusive. In line 177 
 the word not is unintentionally repeated; and the 
 absence of a division in line 178 is also of course 
 accidental; Mary properly transcribed the line 
 with a semicolon at Gods, so as to link the 
 unanimity of the Gods with things of great im- 
 portance, as Calderon did and as Shelley clearly 
 meant to do. Here there is in Cyprian a rejected 
 variant, heavenly natures for the high Gods. At 
 the break in line 181, between the Demon's part of 
 the dialogue and Cyprian's, Shelley wrote with a 
 different pen and ink what seems to be a note, and 
 has no textual pretensions whatever— 
 
 If this were the work of one of many [ ; 
 
 but Mary in her transcript introduces (with a dif- 
 ference) this jotting for the sense of 
 
 Luego si este fue un solo, 
 C6o3 
 
and makes Cyprian open on the Demon with 
 
 If this be the work of one, Man's maker 
 
 Must have methinks the advantage of the others. 
 
 Our text, the Cyprian text, is quite satisfactory at 
 this point— He who made man does very well; but 
 Mary printed Who made man (without the He), 
 which is stronger both for style and for metre ; one 
 would like, however, to know her authority both 
 for this good reading of 1824 (the established read- 
 ing) and for the clumsy reading of the transcript. 
 Nevertheless, I would not disturb the current ver- 
 sion at this point on the sole authority of Cyprian. 
 In line 183 Cyprian and Mary's copy agree in 
 transposing they and not, but the printed texts read 
 they not. Cyprian's reading of lines 187 to 189 is 
 plain enough in its result; but 187 is distinctly in- 
 ferior to either of the printed texts; and the whole 
 passage gave Shelley a little trouble. He wrote 
 two openings for 187, And who and And if these, 
 and then, without properly cancelling either, wrote 
 and left standing equal in power, if only unequal. 
 He began line 188 with In the occasion of and 
 line 189 with Will not at last, and then struck out 
 the occasion of for opportunity, which of the two 
 and not at last for remain conqueror} Mary's 
 transcript reads 
 
 If equal in their power, unequal only 
 
and her printed text 
 
 If equal in their power, and only unequal 
 In opportunity, 
 
 and in 1877 I gave the preference to her written 
 text, which has remained in vogue till now. In 
 line 190 Cyprian reads hypotheses, which is clearly 
 more correct than the established hypothesis (due 
 to Mary), and should take its place in the text. 
 In line 192 Cyprian shows two rejected variants, 
 
 That there must be \ * 
 
 (a mos 
 
 most high God $ . 
 
 The substitution of power for goodness in line 193 
 in Mary's transcript must have been accidental. 
 She printed goodness; and the Spanish is suma 
 bondad. In line 200 there are two unimportant 
 flaws, Sovereign being written Soveigne and soli- 
 tary figuring as solintary. Line 201 shows the 
 variants A single cause of and One cause of all 
 things, both rejected. Mary's copy follows the in- 
 ferior rejected reading things, but she printed One 
 cause of all cause, though the second cause is not 
 very nicely written in Cyprian. In the comple- 
 ment of line 201 in the Demon's reply there is a 
 cancelled alternative, reply for impugn : in 202 feel 
 is struck out for regret, and in 203 defeat for a 
 check. In 204-5 tne variant and although still / 
 Something is rejected; and in the Demon's aside, 
 line 210, by is twice cancelled after study, and 
 
 C623 
 
wrapt corrected to wrap. We now arrive at the 
 interrupted and interrupting duel of Lelio and 
 Floro. 
 
 Scene I (C) 
 
 [Enter Lelio and Floro.] 
 
 Lelio. 
 
 Here stop— these toppling rocks & tangled boughs 21s 
 Impenetrable by the noonday beam 
 Shall be sole witnesses of what we — 
 
 Floro. 
 
 Draw — 
 
 If there were words, here is the place for deeds 221 
 
 Lelio. 
 
 Thou needest not instruct me, — well I know 
 That in the field, the silent tongue of steel 
 Speaks thus. — 
 
 Cyprian. 
 
 Ha what is this. Lelio Floro 224 
 
 Be it enough that Cyprian stands between you 
 Although unarmed — 
 
 Lelio. 
 
 Whence comest thou to stand 
 Between me & my vengeance? 
 
 Floro. 
 
 From what rocks 227 
 And desart cells? — 
 
 C633 
 
Enter M[oscon] & C[larin.] 
 
 Moscon. 
 
 Run, run, for where we left my master I 
 Now hear the clash of swords. 
 
 Clarin. 
 
 I never 229 
 
 Run to approach things of this sort, but only 
 To avoid them — Sir. Sir— 
 
 Cyprian. 
 
 Be silent fellows — What two friends who are 232 
 
 In blood & fame the eyes & hope of Antioch 
 
 One of the noble race of the Colalti 
 
 The other son o' the Governor, adventure 235 
 
 And cast away, on some slight cause no doubt 
 
 Two lives, the honour of their country. 
 
 Lelio. 
 
 Cyprian 
 Although my high respect towards yl person 23s 
 
 Holds now my sword suspended, thou canst not 
 Restore it to the slumber of the scabbard. 
 Thou knowest more of science than the duel 241 
 
 For when two men of honour take the field 
 No [counsel] or respect can make them friends 
 But one must die in the dispute. 
 
 Floro. 
 
 I pray 244 
 
 That you depart hence with yl people and 
 
 C643 
 
Leave us to finish what we have begun 
 Without advantage — 
 
 Cyprian. 
 
 Though you may imagine 247 
 
 That I know little of the laws of duel 
 What vanity & valour instituted; 
 
 You are in error; by my birth, I am 250 
 
 Held no less than yourselves to know the limits 
 Of honour & of infamy; nor has study 
 Quenched the free spirit which [first ordered] them 253 
 And thus to me as to one well experienced 
 In the false quicksands of the sea of honour 
 You may entrust the merits of the case 25a 
 
 And if I should perceive in your relation 
 That either has the right to satisfaction 
 From the other, I give you my word of honour 259 
 
 To leave you. — 
 
 Lelio. 
 
 Under this condition then 
 [I will relate the cause and you will cede 
 And must] confess the impossibility 262 
 
 Of compromise— for the same lady is 
 Beloved by Floro & myself — 
 
 Floro. 
 
 It seems 
 Much to me that the light of day should look 265 
 
 Upon the idol of my heart— but he- 
 Leave us to fight according to thy word. 
 
Cyprian. 
 
 Permit one question further; is the lady 268 
 
 Impossible to hope or not? 
 
 Lelio. 
 
 She is 
 So excellent that if the light of day 
 Should excite Floro's jealousy, it were 271 
 
 Without just cause, for even the light of day 
 Trembles to gaze on her — 
 
 
 Cyprian. 
 
 , marry her - 
 
 Would you for your 
 
 
 Floro. 
 
 
 Such is my confidence 
 
 
 Cyprian. 
 
 you . . 
 
 Lelio. 
 
 274 
 
 Oh would that I could lift my hope 
 So high, for though she is extremely poor 
 Her virtue is her dowry. 
 
 Cyprian. 
 
 And if you both 277 
 
 Would marry her, is [it] not weak & vain 
 Culpable & unworthy thus beforehand 
 To slur her honour — What will the world say [ ? 280 
 
 C663 
 
In this section of Scene I the texture of the verse 
 is less firm than in the previous parts, and it is more 
 obvious than elsewhere that Mary was right in 
 saying it had not received the author's final correc- 
 tions. The number of unemphatic words coming 
 at the ends of lines would certainly have struck 
 Shelley on going over the sketch; and so would 
 other laxities. The cancellings, too, are not gen- 
 erally of much interest. In line 218 these rocks 
 preceded these toppling rocks. The word here in 
 line 221 supports the established reading against 
 the this of Mary's copy. That copy has a slightly 
 different reading from that of Cyprian for the re- 
 turn of Moscon and Clarin: 
 
 Mosc. Run ! run ! for where I left my master, I 
 Now hear the clash of swords. 
 
 Clar. I never 
 Run to approach things of this sort, 
 But only to avoid them 
 
 Clar. & Mosc. Sir! 
 
 This joint utterance of one word by Clarin and 
 Moscon follows Calderon, save that he has a note 
 of interrogation instead of a note of exclamation: 
 
 Mosc. y Clar. Sefior? 
 
 The / left for we left Mary set to rights in printing 
 the work; but then she also altered / now hear to 
 We hear, reading, detrimentally to sense and 
 metre— 
 
 CM 
 
Run, run ! for where we left my master, 
 We hear the clash of swords. 
 
 Shelley himself wrote Run, for and then struck out 
 for in favour of another run ; but he left the passage 
 quite clearly written, as he did the little noblesse 
 oblige sermon of Cyprian to the combatants. He 
 certainly wrote race of the Colalti, and son o' the 
 Governor; and Mary copied those words correctly, 
 although I thought in 1877, as I do not in 19 10, 
 that Colalti in her copy might be read for Colatti ; 
 ■ hence I cannot offer any explanation worth having 
 of her printed reading- 
 One of the noble men of the Colatti, 
 The other son of the Governor, 
 
 '.for Shelley's rejected reading in the first of those 
 'two lines (line 234), One son of, does not give us 
 the least help. In line 238 there is another rejected 
 reading, Although my deep respect for. In trans- 
 lating the following passage, Shelley left a blank in 
 
 . Cyprian: 
 
 y no alcanza, 
 
 que a dos nobles en el campo, 
 
 no ay respeto que les haga 
 
 amigos, pues solo es medio 
 
 morir uno en la demanda. 
 
 He wrote 
 
 For when two men of honour take the field 
 No or respect can make them friends 
 
 But one must die in the dispute. 
 
 C68] 
 
Mary copied this speech exactly, filling the blank 
 with the word reasoning. In the Posthumous 
 Poems she followed Cyprian even in leaving the 
 blank space, and read No [ ] or, but printed 
 
 pursuit as the last word of the speech. In later 
 editions she read No counsel nor. It was not till 
 1877 that the right word, dispute, in line 244 was 
 given from the transcript. In Cyprian's next 
 speech (line 247) there is a cancelled reading in 
 the Note Book, Though it may appear for Though 
 you may imagine ; and in line 249 the initial word 
 is unquestionably though indefensibly What in- 
 stead of the Which of the established text. In line 
 253 the second word is doubtful, because it is not 
 obvious whether in writing one word over another 
 Shelley meant the or my to have the upper hand— 
 whether, in fact, he meant 
 
 Quenched the free spirit which them 
 
 or 
 
 Quenched my free spirit which them [ . . . 
 
 Mary's transcript reads thus — 
 
 nor has study 
 Quenched my free spirit which loves both books & arms 
 And thus to me, as one who will expound 
 In the false 
 You may intrust the merits of the case [. 
 
 The words first ordered which I have inserted be- 
 tween hooks are from the established text, as are 
 
the bracketed lines in the next speech of Lelio 
 (lines 261 and 262) . For line 258 Cyprian has the 
 cancelled opening That one has. Where Shelley 
 has left a blank, Mary also reads imperfectly in the 
 transcript, but thus— 
 
 I will relate the cause of our 
 
 And you'll confess th' impossibility 
 
 Of compromise [. 
 
 In line 267 Lelio ends with thy word; but he was 
 to have said word of honour, the word Of being 
 written as the beginning of another line and struck 
 out. In line 268 more is struck out in favour of 
 further, and in line 270 even in favour of if. In 
 271 Florio stands (accidentally, no doubt,) in place 
 of Floro; and in the part of line 273 belonging to 
 Cyprian And is cancelled to give place to Would. 
 In line 279 the opening Unworthy & disho is re- 
 jected; and in 280 To slur is quite plain, though 
 Mary's copy, ending abruptly at the same point as 
 Cyprian, reads stain for slur. In the established 
 text there are two more lines — 
 
 If one should slay the other, and if she 
 Should afterwards espouse the murderer? 
 
 There is also the following epitome of the sequel : — 
 
 The rivals agree to refer their quarrel to CYP- 
 RIAN; who in consequence visits JUSTINA, and be- 
 comes enamoured of her: she disdains him, and he 
 retires to a solitary sea-shore. 
 
 OH 
 
The second of the scenes from El Magico as 
 published opens with sixty-one lines depicting the 
 sudden passion of Cyprian for Justina, his offer of 
 his soul to the Infernal Powers in exchange for the 
 possession of his innamorata, the Demon's accept- 
 ance of the offer, and the delusion of Cyprian by 
 means of a storm and shipwreck raised by the 
 Demon's magic power. In Note Book III the 
 drafting of the translation opens at a later point 
 than the sixty-one lines in question, with the cry of 
 the imaginary shipwrecked people, 
 
 We are all lost [ I — 
 
 and much labour was expended upon the irregular 
 rhymed metre in which Cyprian describes what he 
 sees after the phantom ship has gone down. Shel- 
 ley began on page III 15 r. by writing and striking 
 out the word and. Then he wrote All with a kind 
 of flourish, and below it We are all lost; and the 
 speech of "the Demon (within)" immediately fol- 
 lowing was translated, but not assigned to the 
 Demon, thus: — 
 
 Upon this plank will I 
 Save myself on the shore & there accomplish [ . . . 
 
 This he struck out and wrote centrally below the 
 line the word and again, only to cancel it again, and 
 retranslate the Demon's speech thus:— 
 
 Now from this plank will I 
 Pass to the land & thus fulfil my purpose [. 
 
 C70 
 
It is here that Shelley's fastidious craftsmanship 
 shows itself notably in one of these admirable 
 examples of restless strife after perfection that we 
 so often encounter in these Note Books, as else- 
 where in his drafts, whether of original or of trans- 
 lated work. The first speech of Cyprian on this 
 apparition of his "ghostly enemy" was originally 
 begun as follows : 
 
 Cyprian. 
 
 As in contempt of the fierce elements 
 
 A man comes forth in safety, while the vessel [ . . . 
 
 Before he had bethought himself of the verb to 
 which vessel was to be the nominative other ideas 
 came flooding in : first he substituted for fierce ele- 
 ments the expression resounding storm, and next 
 struck that out in favour of elemental rage, at the 
 same time abandoning his nominative vessel for a 
 possessive ship's, to follow it up with the lines 
 
 Great form is, in its watery eclipse 
 Obliterated from the Ocean's light 
 
 and then altering its to a and cancelling light in 
 favour, successively, of bosom, forehead, and page, 
 so as to complete a duly rhymed quatrain. The 
 next two splendid lines have a very spontaneous 
 look; but with the line after he got stranded for 
 want of something to fill a gap, and we read to the 
 end of the tiny rhymed speech thus— 
 
 C72 3 
 
And round its wreck the huge sea monsters sit 
 In horrid conclave, & the whisking wave 
 Is to its spoils a grave. 
 
 Of this not very promising last line he evidently 
 despaired of making much, and so abandoned it 
 and ended triumphantly with 
 
 Is heaped over its carcase like a grave. 
 
 Thus he had produced with some slight verbal ex- 
 ceptions the text published by Mary Shelley in 
 1824 in the Posthumous Poems] and it was not very 
 surprising that she was satisfied with so admirable 
 a result, although it should have been a matter for 
 suspicion to her that the rhyme-word sit had no 
 fellow. Such a suspicion would perhaps have in- 
 duced her to examine scrupulously the scribblings 
 on the opposite page of the Note Book, III 14 v.; 
 which would have revealed that the rhymelessness 
 of the huge sea monsters had not satisfied Shelley 
 if it did her. To recapitulate, this is what she 
 found:— 
 
 Cyprian. 
 
 As in contempt of the elemental rage 
 
 A man comes forth in safety, while the ship's 
 
 Great form is, in a watery eclipse 
 
 Obliterated from the Oceans page 
 
 And round its wreck the huge sea monsters sit 
 
 In horrid conclave, & the whisking wave 
 
 Is heaped over its carcase like a grave. 
 
 1721 
 
In printing this passage Mary misread the rather 
 badly written initial word of the sixth line and also, 
 in my opinion, the penultimate, further substituting 
 Are for Is in the seventh line, and printed the two 
 lines thus— 
 
 A horrid conclave, and the whistling wave 
 Are heaped over its carcase, like a grave. 
 
 It is possible that she had another manuscript, espe- 
 cially as she reads scheme for purpose at the end of 
 the Demon's little speech ; but I do not think Shel- 
 ley would have been likely, in making another 
 manuscript, to abandon the fruits of his labour con- 
 tinued on the page probably regarded by Mary as 
 a mere jumble of abandoned draftings, which it 
 looks uncommonly like. Having discovered that 
 he had no rhyme to sit, and probably also mislik- 
 ing the undramatic opening As in contempt, he 
 began on page III 14 v. thus— 
 
 From terrors greater than the [ ] Sea 
 
 A man as in contempt of it[, 
 
 of which he struck out the first line, including some 
 obscurely written word in the gap which I have 
 left; and he also cancelled A man, writing over the 
 first of the two lines 
 
 I see in midst of the elemental rage 
 
 turning the small a in as into a capital A, altering 
 comes to come on the opposite page, and thus mak- 
 ing the opening 
 
 174-1 
 
I see in midst of the elemental rage 
 
 As in contempt of it 
 
 A man come forth in safety [ . . . 
 
 Above this little bit of work there are two portions 
 of words cancelled : they look like Hu and Sta, and 
 are followed by the words raging elements may 
 stand, which I take to be a memorandum rather 
 than a reading, and which is underlined rather than 
 struck out. The phrase— or rather line- 
 But that the elemental rage 
 
 whereof all but rage is struck out, comes next and 
 completes the contents of that page, which, before 
 it was half dry, our springy-backed Note Book III 
 had been allowed to clap against page 15 r. and 
 damage its own appearance as well as its neigh- 
 bour's. 
 
 I have deemed it advisable to enter with more 
 than usual particularity on the drafting of this pas- 
 sage and the relation of the final outcome to the 
 current texts because I consider this eight-line ver- 
 sion of Cyprian's speech, with its verbal variations 
 from the older versions, as emphatically worthy of 
 adoption henceforth. 
 
 Scene II 
 [All exclaim (within) ] 
 We are all lost 
 
 C75J" 
 
[Demon (within)]. 
 Now from this plank will I 
 Pass to the land and thus fulfil my purpose 
 
 Cyprian. 
 I see in midst of the elemental rage 3 
 
 As in contempt of it 
 A man come forth in safety, while the ship's 
 Great form is, in a watery eclipse e 
 
 Obliterated from the Ocean's page 
 
 And round its wreck the huge sea monsters sit 
 In horrid conclave, & the whisking wave 9 
 
 Is heaped over its carcase like a grave. 
 
 [The Demon enters, as escaped from the sea.] 
 
 [Demon (aside)]. 
 It was essential to my purposes 
 
 To wake this tumult on the sapphire Ocean 12 
 
 That in this unknown form, I might at length 
 Wipe out the blot of the discomfiture 
 Sustained upon the mountain, & assail 15 
 
 With a new war the soul of Cyprian 
 Forging the instruments of his destruction 
 Even from his love & from his wisdom — 
 
 Oh is 
 
 Beloved earth, dear mother in thy bosom 
 I seek a refuge from the monster which 
 Precipitates itself upon me. 
 
 Cyprian. 
 
 Friend 21 
 
 Collect thyself; and be the memory 
 
 C763 
 
Of thy late suffering, & thy greatest sorrow 
 
 But as a shadow of the past— for nothing 24 
 
 Beneath the circle of the moon, but flows 
 
 And changes, & can never know repose. 
 
 Demon. 
 
 Who art [thou] at whose feet my fortune now =? 
 
 Has prostrated me? 
 
 Cyprian. 
 
 One who moved with pity 
 Would soothe its stings. 
 
 Demon. 
 
 Oh that can never be 
 No solace can my lasting sorrows find 30 
 
 wtu c Cyprian. 
 
 Wherefore— 
 
 Demon. 
 
 Because my happiness is lost 
 Yet I lament what has long ceased to be 
 The object of desire or memory 33 
 
 And my life is not life. — 
 
 Cyprian. 
 
 Now since the fury 
 Of this earthquaking hurricane is still 
 And the crystalline Heaven has reassumed 38 
 
 Its windless calm so quickly, that it seems 
 As if its heavy wrath had been awakened 
 
 1771 
 
Only to overwhelm thy vessel— speak — 
 Who art thou? & whence comest thou? 
 
 Demon. 
 
 Far more 
 
 My coming hither cost than thou hast witnessed 
 
 Or I can tell. . .among my misadventures 
 
 This shipwreck is the least. Wilt thou hear? — 
 
 Cyprian. 
 
 Demon. 
 
 Speak. 
 
 Since thou desirest I will then unviel [sic} 
 
 Myself to thee. . .for in myself I am 
 
 A world of happiness & misery 
 
 This I have lost, & that I must lament 
 
 Forever. In my attributes I stood 
 
 So high and so heroically great 
 
 In lineage so supreme, & with a genius 
 
 Which penetrated with a glance the world 
 
 Beneath my feet, that pleased with his own [ 
 
 A King— whom I may call the King of Kings 
 
 Because all others tremble in their pride 
 
 Before the terrors of his countenance 
 
 In his high palace roofed with priceless gems 
 
 Of living light. . .call them the stars of Heaven 
 
 Named me his Counsellor, — but the high praise 
 
 Stung me with pride & envy, & I rose 
 
 In mighty competition to ascend 
 
 His seat & place my foot triumphantly 
 
 Upon his subject thrones. .Chastised, I know 
 
 The depth to which ambition falls. . .too mad 
 
 C78] 
 
 45 
 
 48 
 
 64 
 
Was the attempt, & yet more mad were now 
 Repentance of the irrevocable deed — 
 Therefore I chose this ruin with the glory ee 
 
 Of not to be subdued, before the shame 
 Of reconciling me with him who reigns 
 By coward cession, .nor was I alone es 
 
 Nor am I now nor shall I be alone 
 And there was hope & there may still be hope 
 For many suffrages among his vassals 72 
 
 Hailed me their lord, & king, & many still 
 Are mine, & many more perchance shall be. — 
 Thus vanquished though in part victorious 75 
 
 I left his seat of empire, from mine eye 
 Shooting forth poisonous lightning — & my words 
 Like inauspicious thunderings shook Heaven 78 
 
 Proclaiming vengeance public as my wrong 
 And leaving to his weak slaves anarchy 
 Rapine & Death & outrage— thus I sped si 
 
 Over the mighty frame of the world 
 A pirate ambushed in its pathless sands 
 A lynx couched watchfully among its caverns 84 
 
 And craggy shores ; and I have wandered over 
 The expanse of these wide glassy wildernesses 
 In this great Ship, whose bulk is now dissolved 87 
 
 In the light breathings of the invisible wind 
 And which the sea bas- 
 in dustless ruin; seeking ever 90 
 A mountain, through whose caverns & whose forests 
 I seek a man, whom I must now compel 
 To keep his word with me ; I came arrayed »3 
 In tempest; & although my power could lightly 
 Bridle the fiercest winds in their career 
 
 C79J" 
 
For other causes, I forebore to soothe «e 
 
 Their fury to Favonian gentleness 
 I could & would not — (thus I wake in him 
 A love of magic art- 
 let not this tempest »9 
 Nor the succeeding calm excite thy wonder 
 For by my art the sun would turn as pale 
 As his weak sister with unwonted fear 102 
 And in my wisdom are the orbs of Heaven 
 Written as in a record; I have pierced 
 The flaming circles of their [wondrous] spheres, 105 
 And know them as thou knowest any corner 
 Of this dim spot ; let it not seem to thee 
 That I boast vainly . . would [st] thou that the 
 
 forest 108 
 
 This Babylon of crags & aged trees 
 
 L* ***** * 
 
 I am the friendless guest 
 Of these wild oaks & pines & as from thee m 
 
 I have received the hospitality 
 Of this rude place ; I offer thee the fruit 
 Of years of toil in recompense ; whatever 114 
 
 Thy wildest dream presented to thy thought 
 The object of desire— that shall be thine 
 And thenceforth shall so firm an amity 117 
 
 Twixt thee & me be, that neither Fortune — 
 The monstrous phantom which pursues success 
 That careful miser that free prodigal 120 
 
 Who ever alternates with unshaken hand 
 Evil & good, reproach & fame ; nor Time 
 That load star of the ages, to whose beam 123 
 
The winged years speed oer the interval 
 
 Of their unequal revolutions, nor 
 
 Heaven itself whose beautiful bright stars iae 
 
 Rule & adorn the world, can ever make 
 
 The least division between thee & me, 
 
 Since now I find a refuge in thy favour. 129 
 
 And this is with [ . . . 
 
 Here, with almost unmannerly abruptness, ends 
 our courtly Spanish Demon masking in his Eng- 
 lish dress, that glorious compound of Miltonic 
 dignity and Calderonic ease, which Shelley had 
 achieved with what to him appeared but moderate 
 pains; for he wrote to John Gisborne on the 10th 
 of April 1822 of his Scenes from Calderon and 
 Goethe— "I am well content with those from Cal- 
 deron, which in fact gave me very little trouble" 
 —a passage affording us grounds to hope for 
 undiscovered sources of further improvement to 
 the text. At present we have but to end our exam- 
 ination of the "very little trouble" so far as it stands 
 on record in the forty-one pages devoted to Cyprian 
 in Note Book III. Returning to the opening of 
 Scene II, we see that the aside of the Prodigious 
 Magician Satan claiming the authorship of the 
 storm and shipwreck, and also avowing his object 
 therein, shows several readings and revisions, but 
 comes out at last almost identically as in the estab- 
 lished text. The first drafting of lines n to 14 
 appears to have been as follows:— 
 
 C8O 
 
It was essential to my purposes 
 To strew this tempest oer the sapphire fields 
 Of Ocean ; and thus in unaccustomed form 
 Wipe out the blot of the discomfiture &c. 
 
 In the second of these four lines what looks like 
 move was substituted for strew and then wake was 
 written above the line : tempest was afterwards can- 
 celled with a pencil in favour of tumult, oer was 
 altered in ink to on, and fields to waters; and after- 
 wards, when the third line was rejected, the word 
 Ocean was transferred to the second line and a 
 new third written— 
 
 And in this unknown form I might now 
 
 which was reduced to order by cancelling And for 
 That and now for at length. Line 16 was written 
 with a blank space, thus— 
 
 With a new war the one Cyprian [ ; 
 
 and then one was struck out and soul of written 
 above the line. The next line was originally to 
 have begun with Availing myself of ; but he struck 
 that opening out and began again with Steal. This, 
 of course, indicates Stealing; but that was aban- 
 doned for the Forging of the text. In line 13 
 
 Even from his love & from his wisdom 
 
 is written plainly all except the word love, which 
 is far more like lore than love and may some day 
 
 on 
 
tempt some adventurous young editor desirous of 
 discrediting the work of his elders to substitute lore 
 for love in the text and defend it on the ground of 
 Tennyson's fine distinction between knowledge and 
 wisdom, the one "earthly of the mind," the other 
 "heavenly of the soul." It is useless to shut the 
 stable-door after the horse is stolen ; so let us at once 
 take Calderon to witness that Shelley could not 
 have so misunderstood him as to put lore in this 
 place and anticipate Tennyson, inasmuch as the 
 Spanish reads 
 
 Valiendome assi mejor 
 
 de su ingenio, y de su amor. 
 
 Crede experto! I was that young adventurous 
 editor myself some thirty-five years ago; and with 
 an obstinate enthusiasm of text-protection attacked 
 my seniors and betters right and left if they wanted 
 to alter Shelley for the sake of grammar or con- 
 sistency. Chickens of this sort come home to roost 
 sooner or later; and here in the next line but one is 
 one of mine. After cancelling Dear mother as a 
 commencement of line 19 Shelley wrote, as we 
 have seen, 
 
 Beloved earth, dear mother in thy bosom 
 I seek a refuge from the monster which 
 Precipitates itself upon me. 
 
 The word which is as bad a piece of pencraft as 
 you would meet in a day's march ; but it is beyond 
 
 C8 3 3 
 
all question which and not who. The established 
 text here is horrid — 
 
 I seek a refuge from the monster who 
 Precipitates itself upon me. 
 
 Rossetti had the courage in 1870 to substitute him- 
 self for itself] and in 1877 I had the assurance to 
 reject the emendation with the pert remark that if 
 change were admissible, I should think it safer to 
 substitute which for who. Apart from the princi- 
 ple I was advocating, that such changes should not 
 be made con jectu rally, I do not see that there is 
 much to choose between the Rossetti text and the 
 Cyprian text; and I certainly claim no weird fore- 
 sight as to what the poet himself would say in the 
 fulness of time. However, he has spoken now; and 
 I am quite certain that Rossetti will be as glad as 
 the rest of us to have the text grammatical with the 
 poet's sanction. 
 
 In line 22 there is a rejected reading, thy before 
 an unfinished and illegible word; and for the 
 penultimate of line 26 find is cancelled in favour 
 of know. Line 27 was first written thus— 
 
 And who art at whose feet my fortune now [ ; 
 
 but And is struck out: Shelley, however, forgot to 
 supply the thou of the established text, which reads 
 
 And who art thou, before whose feet my fate 
 Has prostrated me? 
 
 XM 
 
In line 29 Yet stands cancelled for Oh, and in line 
 31 all for my, while the next line shows the re- 
 jected reading that which I do not know for what 
 has long ceased to be. At the end of line 35 the last 
 word, still, supersedes calmed; and in the next line 
 but one quiet gives place to calm. Lines 37 to 39, 
 indeed, are much revised. They were originally 
 written 
 
 Its windless quiet so soon that it seems 
 Its heavy anger was awakened only 
 To overwhelm thy vessel — speak — 
 
 but as finally left they correspond with the estab- 
 lished text save that the word thy before vessel gave 
 place to that, which is perhaps a better reading than 
 the Cyprian reading, though not so faithful to the 
 Spanish, tu nave. Line 41 was originally identical 
 with the line of the established text, ending with 
 seen', but Shelley deliberately struck seen out in 
 Cyprian and substituted witnessed. In line 42 he 
 originally wrote 
 
 Or I can tell . . . and if my 
 
 substituting among my misadventures after the 
 "one-em leader." Then he showed a little fastid- 
 iousness as to the division of speeches, writing first 
 
 This shipwreck is the least . . . but wilt thou hear?— 
 
 Cyp. 
 Speak— 
 
 [85J- 
 
D 
 
 Since thou desirest I will then unviel 
 
 and so on, but striking out the one-em leader (...) 
 and but and transferring Speak to the other side of 
 the page so as to make it the complement of line 43 
 instead of the opening of line 44. This Speak rep- 
 resents merely Si in the Spanish and, though more 
 suitable in itself than Yes, Shelley would probably, 
 with more life at his disposal, have noticed the de- 
 sirableness of getting rid either of Speak here, or 
 the speak at the end of line 39. But "the moving 
 finger writes," sometimes more swiftly than the 
 divine poet. Nothing could exceed the magnifi- 
 cence of the language in which he has rendered 
 this astonishing "unveiling" speech of Satan's; and 
 every one of his numerous cancellings from this 
 point onward has its distinct weight. Take the 
 lines 
 
 This I have lost, & that I must lament 
 
 Forever; in all attributes I stood 
 
 So famous, so heroically great 
 
 In rank [ . . . 
 
 here every change— look back to the text and note 
 carefully— down to the full-stop at Forever and 
 the capital / given to in, contributes to the potency 
 of the Prodigious Magician's magic of utterance. 
 Again, after line 55, 
 
 Before the terrors of his countenance 
 
Cyprian shows the cancelled reading 
 
 Who in his palace roofed with diamonds 
 
 And carbuncles. . .call them the stars of Heaven 
 
 and then 
 
 ( high 
 In his I bright \ palace roofed with priceless gems 
 
 /great 
 Of living light 
 
 but nowhere here appears the reading of the estab- 
 lished text, brightest gems. The generalization of 
 Calderon's diamonds and carbuncles (diamantes, y 
 pyropos) into gems of living light adds dignity to 
 the passage. Line 60 was first written thus— 
 
 In competition of the throne to ascend 
 
 and the was altered to his before the reading of the 
 Cyprian text, identical here with the published 
 text, was adopted. In line 62 he seems to have in- 
 tended to write— 
 
 Upon his subject thrones, .too late I know 
 
 but he got no further than too before he abandoned 
 that form for the much finer reading Chastised, I 
 know, which is obviously more faithful to the orig- 
 inal, castigado lo conozco. The drafting pro- 
 ceeded thus 
 
Chastised, I know 
 The madness thought 
 The horror of the 
 
 depth to which ambition | , .. i. . . For others 
 
 too mad 
 
 w 
 
 Was the attempt, [ . . . 
 
 Shelley did not here, more than elsewhere, attain 
 to exactness in striking out precisely what he re- 
 jected; but no other text is deducible than that 
 given as lines 62-4 (which is the established text) . 
 Once more, in dealing with Calderon's 
 
 mas quiero en mi obstinacion, 
 con mis alientos briosos, 
 despenarme de bizarro, 
 que rendirme de medroso : 
 
 Shelley did not reach at one bound his almost sub- 
 Therefore I chose this ruin with the glory 
 Of not to be subdued, before the shame 
 Of reconciling me with him who reigns 
 By coward cession . . 
 
 Cyprian reads successively 
 
 And I have chosen to despair 
 And I choose rather to per[sist?] 
 I choose ruin despair & ruin 
 
 and then, the first two lines being cancelled, but not 
 the third, curiously enough, comes 
 
Therefore I chose this ruin with the glory 
 Of not to be subdued before the shame 
 Of purchasing [ . . . 
 
 Here he halted again, struck out purchasing, and 
 wrote 
 
 reconciling me with him who reigns 
 By shameful cession . . 
 
 Then, shameful having given place to coward, that 
 piece of drafting was done. 
 
 In line 70 he began with Nor am I now alone but 
 struck out alone to make the reading of our text; 
 and in line 72 vassals, names, votes, and were had 
 been cancelled before the line became what it is 
 both in Cyprian and the published text. Line 73 
 was at first a foot short- 
 Hailed me their lord, & many still 
 and the noble line (75) 
 
 Thus vanquished though in part victorious 
 
 which has never yet been correctly printed, but 
 stands to this day disfigured by a misreading of part 
 for fact, has three forms here, though not written 
 completely three times- 
 Vanquished although in part victorious 
 Vanquished though thus in part victorious 
 Thus vanquished though in part victorious [. 
 
 C893 
 
The word part is only written once and is in Shel- 
 ley's boldest and plainest manner. As to fact, I 
 know of no defence for it save usage: certainly 
 Calderon gives it no support — 
 
 vencido, 
 aunque in parte victorioso, 
 
 and on the whole the emendation afforded by 
 Cyprian is a distinctly important one. 
 
 In line JJ it is probable that Shelley meant to 
 supersede while my words by & my words', but this 
 is not certain as both the word while and the 
 ampersand are uncancelled. I think while was 
 written first, from its position. There is no doubt 
 about Like being the first word of line 78, not With 
 as in the established text. I mistrust With. The 
 reading of line 80 is not quite secure, for the word 
 which I take to be anarchy has some "blind" 
 strokes in the middle: an and chy look plain 
 enough. It is not absolutely clear in what order 
 he wrote the alternative words here; but I think 
 they came thus — And on his leaving an ; then weak- 
 lings inserted over his leaving, as a word left out by 
 accident; and anarchy, which should have been 
 written there, stopped in mid career on account of 
 the omission of weaklings', then he seems to have 
 misliked weaklings, struck out on his leaving and 
 tried to strike out weaklings ; next, below this, came 
 leaving to his slaves great; and finally, omitting to 
 strike out the an which I take for the beginning of 
 
 C9o3 
 
anarchy in the middle of the line, he crossed 
 through great which was probably meant to have 
 some trisyllable other than anarchy after it, and, 
 writing iveak slaves above the line, he made the 
 unsuccessful attempt already described to write 
 anarchy at the end of the line. I do not doubt that 
 the passage he meant to leave was this — 
 
 And leaving to his weak slaves anarchy 
 
 Rapine & death & outrage- 
 but even before he wrote Rapine & death & out- 
 rage, he had tried and abandoned Death outrage cC\ 
 
 Line 81 ends with thus I < *\ >, neither final 
 
 ( ruled ) 
 
 word being decidedly cancelled, though I think a 
 line separating them was meant to go through 
 ruled. Line 82 gives no trace of fabric (the ortho- 
 dox reading) ; but frame, though plain enough, is 
 not very nicely written, and does not suit the metre. 
 What particular beast of prey Shelley meant at first 
 to place at the Demon's disposal for his abundant 
 imagery, we may never know— it may have been an 
 ounce— at all events he began line 83 with An, then 
 struck out the n and wrote lynx, and next, cancel- 
 ling lynx, he wrote hellish lynx couched in the 
 caverns', then, as the metre was short, he substi- 
 tuted hollow shores for caverns and read flowingly 
 enough 
 
 A hellish lynx couched in the hollow shores [ ; 
 
 C9O 
 
but hellish seems to have struck him as a poor ad- 
 jective for the Devil to employ in regard to a lynx; 
 so he struck it out and made of his lynx a plain 
 lynx— 
 
 A lynx couched watchfully among the caverns 
 
 And craggy shores 
 
 finally altering the caverns to its caverns, and there 
 an end of it, — for although caverns was written no 
 fewer than three times, there was no trace of the 
 caves of the orthodox text. Line 86 has a false 
 start, Every, struck out, and after that was first 
 written thus — 
 
 The expanse of these glassy wildernesses 
 
 as if the second word were to be accented on the 
 first syllable ; but that no such intention was delib- 
 erately formed is evident from the fact that the poet 
 did not leave the line thus : having adopted the un- 
 usual course of putting an accent with his pen on 
 the second syllable and thus made it clear that The 
 expanse was to count for two syllables only, as if 
 written Th'expanse, he wrote the extra adjective 
 vast over the line, cancelled it in favour of wide, 
 and left us a line which will establish a "record" of 
 luminous conjectural criticism for Rossetti, 
 
 The expanse of these wide glassy wildernesses. 
 
 Up till 1870 the line was printed as 
 
 The expanse of these wide wildernesses [ ; 
 
 1*1 
 
but Rossetti, seeing that Calderon's line 
 essas campanas de vidrio 
 
 was not fully rendered and that some such word as 
 glassy was wanted in the combined interests of sense 
 and metre, inserted glassy. In 1877 I had not the 
 hardihood or perspicacity, say which you will, to 
 follow him, but merely recorded the bold emenda- 
 tion—this time not pertly— and as far as I know 
 Rossetti's editions still enjoy the monopoly of what 
 turns out to be the correct reading. If ever any 
 editorial change in a modern poet's text deserved 
 to be recorded in the Dictionary of National Biog- 
 raphy on a footing of equality with John Coning- 
 ton's "splendid emendation" in the Agamemnon 
 (717), Xebj/Tos hup for \eovra <tiviv } assuredly that 
 meed of honour is due to Rossetti for his forty 
 years' maintenance of the characteristic and beau- 
 tiful line which we others have even failed in our 
 rigorous conservatism to adopt. 
 
 In line 88 there is a cancelled opening, which, if 
 retained, would have made the line 
 
 Into the idle & invisible wind [ ; 
 
 and the next two lines are left imperfect. I am not 
 sure that the established text is above suspicion: it 
 reads thus — 
 
 And which the sea has made a dustless ruin 
 Seeking ever a mountain through whose forests 
 I seek a man whom I must now compel &c. 
 
 C93] 
 
It is fair to conjecture that it was just this jingle of 
 Seeking and I seek which pulled Shelley up short 
 in Cyprian, and that, on returning to the passage, 
 he would have produced something better than the 
 established text to render Calderon's 
 
 oy corria codicioso, 
 
 hasta examinar un monte, 
 
 piedra a piedra, y tronco a tronco; 
 
 porque en el un hombre vive, 
 
 y a buscarle me dispongo, 
 
 a que cumpla una palabra, 
 
 que el me ha dado, y yo le otorgo. 
 
 After A mountain, in line 91, the words which I 
 must as were written and struck out. In the next 
 passage, where the style is at its finest, there are 
 some notable variations : in line 94 he wrote & al- 
 though my wisdom, struck out wisdom and wrote 
 power could well, and then, striking out well in 
 turn, wrote what looks like lightning but might be 
 meant for lightly, which I have adopted with trepi- 
 dation as the text of our draft. For the first word 
 of line 95 he wrote Restrain, and before he went 
 further eclipsed it almost totally by writing Bridle 
 over it — Bridle the fiercest winds. This reading 
 he struck out, substituting Could seize the headlong 
 winds, but rejected that in turn and wrote the line 
 fully with his second reading— thus— 
 
 Bridle the fiercest winds in their career [ — 
 
for of the nonsensical forest winds with which we 
 have had to put up in the established text there is 
 no trace in Cyprian. Between lines 97 and 98 he 
 cancelled the abortive line 
 
 And harmony 
 
 and as the close of line 99 he wrote and rejected 
 Wonder not therefore. In line 100 the words used 
 are, I think, as in the established text, excite thy 
 wonder ; but they might be meant for evoke thy 
 wonder. For line 101 there is the rejected opening 
 My wisdom could. It is unfortunate that the line 
 ( 105) which promised to render so finely 
 
 linea a linea 
 los he discurrido todos; 
 
 remains imperfect in Cyprian ; for Shelley might 
 have chanced on a better word than the wondrous 
 which I have inserted between hooks from the 
 established text. For line 108 the opening words 
 That I boast were struck out and a fresh start was 
 made with 
 
 That I am strong only [ . . . 
 
 to which he probably meant to add in words, but 
 thought better of it and reverted to That I boast — 
 
 That I boast vainly . . would thou that the forest 
 This Babylon of crags & aged trees — 
 
 and then, for the time being, he dropped the thread 
 of his thought, Calderon's thought, and left the gap 
 
 C953 
 
shown by the Cyprian text as already set out. That 
 he returned to the attack is clear from the corre- 
 sponding passage in the established text. Calderon 
 says— and the passage is not as easy as usual — 
 
 y porque no te parezca, 
 que sin ocasion blasono, 
 mira si a este mismo instante 
 quieres que lo inculto, y tosco 
 deste Nembrot de penascos, 
 mas bruto que el Babylonio, 
 te facilite lo horrible, 
 sin que pierda lo frondoso. 
 
 Shelley, according to the established edition, made 
 
 this — 
 
 Let it not seem to thee 
 
 That I boast vainly ; wouldst thou that I work 
 A charm over this waste and savage wood, 
 This Babylon of crags and aged trees, 
 Filling its leafy coverts with a horror 
 Thrilling and strange ? 
 
 For this rendering Mary must have had some 
 manuscript authority other than Cyprian ; for none 
 but Shelley was capable of that piece of transfu- 
 sion. The style is at his richest, freest, and best; 
 and, taken with the fact that the opening sixty-one 
 lines of his Scene II as published by Mary do not 
 occur at all in Cyprian and are in a more forward 
 state than much of the work as represented in 
 Cyprian, I hardly doubt that many pages of the 
 
manuscript are yet to be found, either separately 
 or in another Note Book. 
 
 The half-line numbered no follows in Cyprian 
 a note of interrogation inserted in the blank space 
 where the translation is left incomplete; and the 
 jottings for the passage then commenced stand 
 thus:— 
 
 I am the guest, the outcast 
 Of this intangled wilderness, I ask 
 Its hospitality from thee & as from thee 
 
 Of these wild oaks & pines— I have f , , ,> 
 
 r (demanded) 
 
 Their hospitality from thee, and I 
 
 In compensation 
 
 Offer, as I recompense the [ . . . 
 
 In this group of lines and phrases the word outcast, 
 the first complete line, and the words Its hospitality 
 from thee are crossed through with decision; so 
 are both the word received and the word demanded 
 substituted below it; and all the rest, though with a 
 certain ineffectual impetuosity, was certainly re- 
 jected; but when the poet struck out outcast he 
 wrote the word friendless above the line; and I 
 suspect that, at that particular bout of drafting, not 
 knowing exactly how he was going to deal with 
 what he had left unrendered, he meant to leave two 
 complete lines — thus: — 
 
 I am the friendless guest, & as from thee 
 I have received the hospitality [— 
 
 t97l 
 
not observing either then or afterwards amid his 
 blank verse the accidental weak rhyme of thee and 
 hospitality. In this Cyprian draft he wrote two 
 (for Shelley) almost inconceivably weak and prosy 
 lines after I offer thee the fruit (line 113) — 
 
 Of years of toil in testimony of 
 
 My sense of jl frank courtesy; whatever [ ; 
 
 but happily he substituted recompense thereof for 
 testimony of, and still more happily he struck out 
 my sense of yt frank courtesy and left us in posses- 
 sion of the lines 
 
 Of years of toil in recompense ; whatever 
 Thy wildest dream presented to thy thought 
 The object of desire — that shall be thine [ — 
 
 and here once more is the need for a "strictly 
 speaking," on two grounds; for in the first place 
 he had reached the right-hand bottom corner of 
 page III 20 r. when he recorded the decision to end 
 with thought, and the intractable little book only 
 permitted him to write though ; and in the second 
 place I am not absolutely convinced that he meant 
 to leave us in possession of 
 
 Thy wildest dream presented to thy thought 
 The object of desire— 
 
 for under those four words is a straight line which 
 has a kind of censorious expression about it; and 
 beneath this reading he wrote another— 
 
Whatever thy wildest dreams have made to thee 
 The object of desire that shall be thine — 
 
 wherein his dealings with the word Whatever do 
 not lend any support to the whate'er of the estab- 
 lished text, and wherein the phrase As object of 
 desire gets naught but negative support. However, 
 I keep an open mind on the question whether it is 
 to Shelley or to Mary that we owe the orthodox 
 close of this passage— 
 
 whate'er 
 Thy wildest dream presented to thy thought 
 As object of desire, that shall be thine. 
 
 It is certainly to Shelley that we owe the halting 
 line 1 1 8, 
 
 Twixt thee & me be, that neither Fortune ; 
 
 and I can but hope that, when those other manu- 
 script pages are picked out of the wallet at Time's 
 back in which he keeps his "alms for oblivion," 
 they may authorize the reading which I suggested 
 in 1877 and still believe in as of the highest proba- 
 bility- 
 Be betwixt thee and me, that neither Fortune. . . 
 
 In line 120 of the Cyprian Scene II, Success was at 
 first described as That wrinkled miser; butwrinkled 
 was rejected in favour of careful; and the next two 
 lines were a retrenchment of two and a half — 
 
 C99H 
 
Who ever alternates with unshaken hand 
 Evil & good, reproach & glory, wealth 
 And want, nor Time [ — 
 
 wherein unshaken is absolutely clear and not mis- 
 takable for the changeful of the orthodox text, and 
 the second line becomes 
 
 Evil & good, reproach & fame ; nor Time [. 
 
 Line 123 shows the cancelled variant which at- 
 tracts for to whose beams; line 124 was an Alex- 
 andrine, 
 
 The winged months & years speed oer the interval [ ; 
 
 but Shelley struck out months &\ and in line 125 
 swift revolutions (also on metrical grounds) gives 
 place to unequal revolutions', line 128 originally 
 figured as 
 
 Division between thee & me, since thou [ — 
 
 and line 129 as 
 
 Since thus thou grantest me thy aid [ ; 
 
 but 128 was obviously altered to the reading of the 
 text before 129 was written. Then, having written 
 Since thus, Shelley altered thus to now ; and finally 
 he struck out thou grantest me thy aid and inserted 
 / find a refuge in thy favour. 
 
 It is on page III 34 v. that the unfinished draft 
 of the Floro and Lelio scene ends ; and on the oppo- 
 site page, III 35 r., is a slight pen and ink sketch 
 
of a yawl with a gaff topsail, very inexactly drawn, 
 but I should think meant to represent the "Don 
 Juan." The verso of the leaf bearing this me- 
 
 morial of the poet's approaching end is blank, as 
 are the next four leaves, pages III 36 r. to 39 v. 
 
 Of leaf 40 also the recto is blank; but on the 
 verso is a neat little pen and ink outline sketch of a 
 fountain with a war-horse from which a warrior 
 (say a crusader) has dismounted and is kneeling to 
 drink: the drawing is spoilt by a child's scribble 
 partly over its details. From page 41 to page 78 
 there is nothing of the slightest interest. Every 
 
page of the whole thirty-eight leaves is either left 
 blank or occupied by infantile scribblings. The 
 artist of these pages has not betrayed to which sex 
 we are indebted for the contribution. There is a 
 choice between little Allegra, the daughter of 
 Byron and Claire Clairmont, on the one hand, and 
 the child Percy Florence, afterwards Sir Percy 
 Shelley, the third Baronet, on the other. I think 
 Rossetti leans to the little boy; and he is certainly a 
 better authority on art than I am. 
 
 C 102;] 
 
CHARLES THE FIRST 
 
 At the other end of Note Book III, the second 
 or starred pagination, the first few pages are con- 
 nected with the unfinished drama Charles the First. 
 These form the fourth item set down in the Auc- 
 tioneer's Catalogue under the head of Unpublished 
 Matter, thus:— 
 
 "Abstract of Drama, 'Charles I'— Begins with the 
 words Act I, scene I. The Masque— Bastwick and 
 Citizens,' etc. Scenes set forth for Acts I and II, clos- 
 ing with the words : 'The End, Strafford's Death,' but 
 this probably only indicates end of Act. II." 
 
 Abstract or Program of Acts I and II of 
 Charles the First. 
 
 Acti. 8 ' The Mask 
 
 Scene, i. St Bastwick & citizens— to him 
 
 enter Leighton : & afterwards An old man & a Law 
 Student. 
 
 Scene 2. The interior of Whitehall— The King 
 Wentworth, Laud, L d Keeper Coventry Lord Es- 
 sex Archy to them enter Dr. John, Noy, & the law- 
 yers—circumstances indicative first of the state of 
 
the country & Government, & the demands of the 
 King & Queen, Laud &C. 1 secondly of the methods 
 for securing money & power. 
 
 Scene 3^ Pym Hazlerig Cromwell, young Sir 
 H. Vane, Hampden &=— their character & inten- 
 tions—a pursuivant comes with an order of council 
 to prevent their embarkation— Cromwells speech 
 on that occasion— high commission pursuivants 
 
 Messengers of council 
 The imprisonment of members of Parliament 
 Lauds excessive thirst for gold & blood 2 Williams 
 committed to the Tower to whom 3 Laud owed his 
 first promotion 
 
 Act 2"? Scene 1 
 
 Chiefs of the Popular Party, Hampden's trial & its 
 effects— Reasons of Hampden & his colleag[u]es 
 for resistance— young Sir H. Vane's reasons: The 
 first rational & logical, the Second impetuous & 
 enthusiastic 
 
 Reasonings on Hampden's trial p. 222 
 The King zealous for the Church inheriting this 
 disposition from his father 
 This act to open 4 between the two Scotch Wars 
 
 Easter day 1635 
 
 The reading of the liturgy 
 Lord Traquai 
 
 1 Cancelled reading Laud & Wentw. 
 
 2 Here Shelley has cancelled the words release refused to Jen- 
 nings & bail refused. 
 
 3 Cancelled reading from wh\om\. The next page bears only 
 the word Sadeler uncancelled and Reasonings on Ham cancelled. 
 
 4 Before the word between Shelley cancelled after. 
 
 C 104.;] 
 
The Covenant 
 
 The determined resistance against Charles & 
 the liturgy- 
 Worse than the worst is indecision 
 Mary di Medici the Queen came to England in 
 1638. it was observed that the sword & pestilence 
 followed her wherever she went & that her restless 
 spirit embroiled every thing she approached. 
 
 The King annulled at York 
 
 Many unlawful grants &? in wh [ . . . 
 
 The pages from which this Abstract is tran- 
 scribed are eight in number. The order in which 
 those eight pages have to be read is as follows: 
 III * 1 r. and v., 2 r. and v., 3 r., 4 r., 3 v., 5 r. 
 Of 4 and 5 the versos are blank. On III * 4 r., 
 which is a particularly interesting page, only one 
 word, Wars, completing the phrase between the 
 two Scotch Wars, comes into the abstract or pro- 
 gram proper; but in the upper half of the page 
 there is a boldly pencilled heading repeating in 
 different words the statement that the act takes 
 place between the two Scotch Wars — 
 
 Act 2 
 After the i? 1 Scottish War [— 
 
 and at the bottom of the page are the important 
 words quoted in the Auction Catalogue, again 
 boldly pencilled, 
 
 The End— Straffords death 
 
 D05] 
 
In the centre of the page is a prettily sketched little 
 tree-piece, very English-looking, so English-look- 
 ing that the mind involuntarily passes from Charles 
 to his fugitive son, and one imagines, perhaps a 
 trifle fantastically, that this umbrageous tree might 
 even be the oak which is the hero of the 29th of 
 May— a day which when I was a good little boy at 
 school was known as Royal Oak Day, or, in Devon, 
 Oak- Apple Day,— the tree 
 
 Wherein the younger Charles abode 
 
 Till all the paths were dim, 
 While far below the Roundhead rode 
 
 And humm'd a surly hymn. 
 
 It is not that suggestion of Tennyson's charming 
 fantasy The Talking Oak that gives this page its 
 interest. It is not a light fantastic interest at all, 
 but a profoundly tragic interest. For on this page 
 foreshadowing the death of Strafford as to be 
 figured by Shelley at the close of the Second Act 
 of his ill-starred historic tragedy, we see adum- 
 brated also the death of Shelley himself. Over the 
 pencillings on the page he has drawn very boldly 
 and graphically in ink a yawl spanking through 
 the water; and if her mainsail does not bear any 
 distinguishing mark, and if he has not inscribed his 
 sketch with either of the names whereby we know 
 his fatal pleasure-boat— whether "Ariel" or "Don 
 
J 
 
Juan"— we shall probably never see a better em- 
 bodiment of the soul of that little craft, 
 
 "Built in th' eclipse and rigg'd with curses dark," 
 
 than that which he has himself left among the 
 leaves of his program for the conduct of Charles 
 the First. 
 
 t™7l 
 
HERNE'S FEAST: A FRAGMENT 
 
 The Abstract or Program of Acts I and II of 
 Charles the First is followed by a very curious 
 composition which, at first sight, strikes us as one 
 of Shelley's few attempts at fooling with the sacred 
 art of song, and not a particularly successful at- 
 tempt. The title Heme's Feast has been placed at 
 the head of this piece for reasons which will be 
 obvious to the reader as he goes along. It is the 
 piece entered in the Auctioneer's Catalogue as 
 No. 5 among the items of Unpublished Matter in 
 Note Book III, and is described as 
 
 "A rather long Composition of a bantering Fantasy 
 —Begins: 'Ye devils black and great, ghosts white,' 
 varying metres, some lines being very short, e.g. 'Not 
 a snake / In the brake.' " 
 
 The six pages occupied by Heme's Feast in the 
 Note Book are III * 6 r. and v., 7 r. and v., 8 v., 
 and 10 v. It is written in ink, and probably be- 
 longs, like most of the Book's contents, to the year 
 1822. 
 
 Herne's Feast 
 
 Ye devils black & spectres white 
 Fairies all green, & angels blue 
 
 Through the white mist on Midsummers night 
 Hither come hither over the dew 4 
 
 CI083 
 
Not a snake 
 In the brake 
 Shall awake 
 
 With you— s 
 
 But a snail 
 With his trail 
 Shall you 
 
 Pursue 12 
 
 To the cave 
 And the grave 
 And the wave 
 
 Bid adieu i« 
 
 The bat & the owl like barn-door fowl 
 Are asleep in the tower & hollow tree 
 On a willow doth sit, with a mazed wit— 
 The nightingale nodding drowsily 20 
 
 Only the brook below in the glen 
 Is awake & singing . . . 
 
 halloo haloo 
 Who are these quaint ones? 
 
 The fairies are we 
 Over covert & meadow we tripped all free 24 
 Singing so free across mountain & sea 
 Our sweet & inaudible wanderings — 
 The bees horn 
 
 In the morn 28 
 
 To our scorn 
 
 Made a tune 
 Then was blown 
 
 With a moan 32 
 
 By the drone 
 His at noon.— 
 
 C109J" 
 
The gnats with their hum 
 
 Made us both deaf & dumb 36 
 
 In their dance on the glance of the evening sun 
 
 But we past on the wave 
 
 Of the vapours which pave 
 The regions of day till our journey was done « 
 
 Though our feet were well shod 
 
 Yet the sunbeams we trod 
 Were too sharp & too hard for our delicate palms 
 
 But there fell from aloft 44 
 
 A carpet more soft 
 When twilight was cast on the Oceans calms 
 
 And when we came[ ?] where the spirits of night 
 
 Were mending the roses with mild moonlight « 
 And the shooting stars fell 
 O then we sped well 
 * * * 
 
 A school boy lay near a pond in a copse 
 
 Blackberries just were out of bloom 52 
 
 And the golden bloom of the sunny broom 
 The pine cones they fell like thunder claps 
 
 When the languid noon breathed so hard in its trance 
 That it wakened the sleeping fir tree tops. — se 
 
 Under a branch all leafless & bare 
 
 He was watching the motes in their onion copse 
 Rolling like worlds through the de [ad-still air] 
 
 And he closed his eyes at last to see 60 
 
 The network of darkness woven inside 
 Till the fire tailed stars of the night of his brain 
 Like birds round a pool did flutter quiver & glide 
 And then he would open them wide again [. 64 
 
 Dion 
 
Some pains were devoted to this composition; 
 and in the end the true Shelley awoke sufficiently 
 to close on an almost serious note. Before he had 
 attained to the degree of charm that lines 3 and 4 
 possess he had for some occult reason written goth 
 over devils: he had also supplied the alternative 
 readings great ghosts for spectres, and spirits for 
 angels, had made a false start of line 2 with Angels 
 and struck it out, and two false starts for line 3, one 
 of which is clearly enough Over the, while the 
 other I will not guarantee for To Heme's feast on 
 the, though I firmly believe it to be that. In the 
 short line 8 the first word is a smear, probably 
 meant for With. Line 11 was once Shall avail; 
 but that is boldly cancelled in defiance of the norm 
 of the metre in this part. No punctuation has been 
 supplied above: if it were, the sense would pre- 
 sumably be indicated by a full stop at Pursue and a 
 note of exclamation at adieu. At the foot of the 
 page, without any particular relevancy, is the word 
 Every. In Lines 5 to 16 the short jumps are really 
 in the same metre as lines 3 and 4, harmonious with 
 the rest, only they have some extra rhymes of a 
 skittish kind which Shelley chose to display. 
 There is a cancelled version of line 17— 
 
 The owl & the nightingale dimly roost 
 
 and line 18 seems to have read at first, 
 
 Are asleep in the tower & tower & church [, 
 
the first tower having of course been written acci- 
 dentally for tree, which is written over it and 
 struck out again with the rest of the line: then 
 spire & hollow tree was inserted, spire being can- 
 celled in its turn and tower restored. There is a 
 false start, And, for line 19; and line 21 at first 
 started with Only the [brook?] in the glen; but 
 glen was struck out in favour of [below?'] in the 
 glen. What the words given in the text as brook 
 and below positively are, I should be sorry to state 
 upon oath: they are so ill written in a context so 
 devoid of any guiding sense, that they might be 
 almost anything in reason or even in unreason. A 
 brook is not an unlikely thing to find in a glen ; and 
 the first of the two cryptic words would do pretty 
 well for brook ; but then halloo is an unlikely bur- 
 den for a brook's song. Line 22 first began with 
 Is singing, but that immediately gave place to Is 
 awake & singing; then there is a cancelled start 
 for the complement of the line, am, indicative of a 
 passing intention to let whatever it was that was 
 singing sing amen amen instead of halloo haloo. 
 Amen is a doubtful sort of brook-babble; but I in- 
 cline to the view that he wrote brook and meant to 
 cancel in the along with the first glen. Line 23 was 
 originally 
 
 Who are these ? 
 
 The fairies are we [ ; 
 
 and lines 24 to 26 show the following variations 
 
 C"2 3 
 
Over ) . 1& meadow we tripped all free 
 
 (mountain J 
 
 Over the mountains & over the sea 
 
 Singing our silver wanderings — 
 
 The last word in line 24 is a series of minute blots 
 which we might dissect and hollow out and convert 
 into most of the letters of the alphabet; but I can- 
 not think of any word of four letters except free 
 that has indisputable claims of rhyme and sense to 
 complete the passage. Its repetition in the next 
 line is doubtless an accident of unregenerate revi- 
 sion. 
 
 Line 27 starts another little series of lines con- 
 sisting of some three syllables a piece; but I grieve 
 to record that they do not fall into so practicable a 
 form and order as the first lot (lines 5 to 16) with- 
 out a certain amount of critical assumption. They 
 stand in sober truth thus, several being struck 
 through— 
 
 But the gnats 
 And the 
 The bees horn 
 In the morn 
 And To our scorn 
 
 Was blown 
 At noon . . 
 
 Made a tune 
 And the gnats pipe 
 When the 
 
 CH33 
 
Then at noon 
 
 The 
 
 And Then was blown 
 
 Here the uncancelled words But the gnats are re- 
 dundant; and the word after bees is so much 
 blotted that it might for all we can see be hum. 
 The two words bees and horn look at first as if 
 meant to be struck out; but in reality when Shelley 
 finished line 18 on the opposite page he was using 
 his very worst pen, and, having done the noisy 
 insect page and gone back to write spire & hollow 
 and cancel spire for tower, the exasperating spring- 
 backed book called Cyprian shut itself up more suo 
 and impressed the greater part of the ampersand 
 like a bend sinister across bees, and enough of spire 
 and its cancelling on horn to disguise it completely. 
 Hence it is to be judged that the intention was to 
 cancel But the gnats as well as And the; and the 
 residuum then shapes rather ingeniously into lines 
 2 7 t0 37> ending prettily enough though with the 
 false rhyme of sun with hum and dumb, if indeed 
 the rhyme-word sun was not meant to be satisfied 
 with the word done in line 40 for a mate. 
 
 The fauna of this portentous piece might have 
 included crickets, as evidenced by the cancelled 
 words The crickets at the bottom of the page after 
 line 37; but fortunately the fairies passed on the 
 wave of certain vapours and trod certain sunbeams, 
 leading the poet gradually into a region which re- 
 
 C"43 
 
calls some of the dignified exuberance of movement 
 which characterizes Prometheus Unbound. In- 
 deed we come presently on thoughts which, though 
 over fancifully expressed, are serious and Shel- 
 leyan; and there are genuine cases of parallelism 
 between this fantastic piece of work and passages 
 of Prometheus. To keep pace with the aban- 
 doned readings, we must note the variations in lines 
 38 to 51. In 38 sea stands cancelled in favour of 
 wave; and before line 40 was hammered out, Shel- 
 ley had written thus— 
 
 The Of the hosts 
 
 earth in the 
 The marshes & meads 
 
 regions of morn [ — 
 
 whereof nearly every word was struck out. In line 
 41 are is altered to were; and in line 43 the reading 
 so sharp & so hard has been changed to that of the 
 text by twice writing too so as to obscure so. Lines 
 44 and 45 were at first 
 
 But the twilight aloft 
 
 Was more 
 
 Made a carpet more soft 
 
 Was more being cancelled. Line 47 was first writ- 
 ten And when we are where &c. ; but a rather poor 
 c was afterwards inserted before are. I have not 
 the least doubt about the intention, not strictly ful- 
 filled, of changing are to came ; but it might be con- 
 
 C"S3 
 
tended that Shelley tried to alter are to were and 
 did not succeed very well. There are one or two 
 faintly written and cancelled words belonging to 
 lines 48 to 50; and it seems to have been intended 
 to substitute O then we sped well for O there we 
 sped well\ but no particulars of the good speed of 
 the fairies are expressly given as such in this their 
 lilt. Nevertheless, the somewhat peculiar use of 
 palms to describe the soles of the feet at once recalls 
 the beautiful passage in Prometheus — 
 
 Our feet now, every palm, 
 Are sandalled with calm, 
 And the dew of our wings is a rain of balm; 
 
 and leads us to travel back from the Spirits of the 
 fourth act to those of the first act, where these "gen- 
 tle guides and guardians" of "heaven-oppressed 
 mortality" recount their experiences, and one who 
 has slept "on a poet's lips," the poet that fed 
 
 on the aerial kisses 
 Of shapes that haunt thought's wildernesses, 
 
 tells us that 
 
 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 1 
 
 C"63 
 
If Shelley had any set conception of a scheme for 
 this poem, the interest would clearly have cen- 
 tred in the notes of travel of the fairies; but all we 
 have by way of specimen of those notes is the 
 passage from line 51 to line 64, describing a dreamy 
 school-boy watching the motes over some onion- 
 flowers; and here we have the unexalted double of 
 the poet who watched the yellow bees in the ivy 
 bloom. Shelley was decidedly on the verge of re- 
 turning to serious poetry, and took pains over the 
 elaboration of his school-boy. Were it not for the 
 vulgar associations of the word onion, we should 
 almost think he had got over the fooling fit com- 
 pletely: let us remember, moreover, how ex- 
 quisitely, in a few semi-rhythmical words, Walt 
 Whitman cast the radiance of poesy upon those 
 homely vegetables potatoes and onions— 
 
 The delicate spear of the onion pierces upward, . . . 
 Out of its little hill faithfully rise the potato's dark 
 green leaves, 1 — 
 
 and we shall perhaps attribute the abandonment of 
 this curious poem to the fact that Shelley had in- 
 deed, onions or no onions, opened his eyes "wide 
 again" with his school-boy of the "onion-copse" to 
 behold the supernal beauties of the visible universe 
 of which he was so great, so inspired, so miraculous 
 an interpreter. 
 
 1 This Compost. 
 
 C"73 
 
The first thing cancelled in this school-boy part 
 of the poem is this — 
 
 One school boy sate in a copse 
 And his lesson was [ — 
 
 and the next stage of composition was 
 
 A schoolboy sate in a fir tree woo[d] — 
 
 in which line he at once substituted a nut-tree-copse 
 for his abortive fir tree wood and altered sate to lay. 
 In this opening he was not very circumspect in his 
 cancellings ; and he left a fir tree lying around close 
 to the copse ; but his instinct was so truly awake by 
 then that I do not believe he meant us to read, 
 abnormally, 
 
 A school boy lay near a pond in a fir tree copse. 
 
 Although I retain line 52 in the text it is lightly 
 crossed through together with a false start, In half 
 asleep, and the line 
 
 And he was watching the onion 
 
 which would probably have been completed with 
 crops or tops if the poet had been alive to the im- 
 portance of my present undertaking. He also 
 abandoned the openings The milk and But the 
 gnats was, written over other faintly written words 
 that cannot now be read. Lines 54 to 56 are altered 
 from 
 
 C"83 
 
The fir cones were falling like thunder claps 
 When the faint noon breathed so hard in its sleep 
 And wakened the sleeping fir tree tops. — 
 
 And an alternative reading, lazy for languid, was 
 supplied ; and the artistic conscience of Shelley was 
 reproached by the jingle of sleep in one line and 
 sleeping in the next; for he underlined (with a dif- 
 ferent pen and ink from that used in writing the 
 page) the word sleeping and struck out sleep in 
 favour of a word which I read as trance: it is the 
 only word that would improve upon sleep here; 
 and neither one nor the other is a rhyme for any- 
 thing in its neighbourhood. There is a false start, 
 And, for line 57. Lines 58 to 60 suffered a grievous 
 accident. That page is the verso of a leaf which 
 with the leaf facing it forms the centre section of 
 the sheet; and on the opposite page the poet had 
 pencilled some titles of books. Having occasion to 
 tear off the lowest third of that leaf, he seems to 
 have torn off the right-hand bottom corner of the 
 corresponding leaf with it; and in that corner were 
 written the ends of lines 58, 59 and 60. For line 58 
 I have had to supply the pse in copse; line 59 ends 
 with de, and I have supplied dead-still air between 
 hooks instead of leaving the adjective or adjectives 
 to the imagination ; while in line 60 I have com- 
 pleted last from la and see from se. As to this line 
 I have no misgiving, as lines 61 to 64 need that 
 word see to join up the sense of this final passage, 
 
 Cn 9 ] 
 
which is really characteristic and quite musical, 
 though faintly tinctured with the prevalent extrava- 
 gance of the whole piece. Line 61 shows within as 
 a rejected variant of inside ; in line 62 world stands 
 cancelled in favour of night; and between 63 and 64 
 are written the words the moths, as if it was in- 
 tended to consider the relative merits of moths and 
 birds for the simile in this place. As to this 
 penultimate line, I do not think it was the intention 
 that it should be so long by a foot as it is. The 
 three words flutter, quiver, and glide are all left 
 standing; the chances are that either flutter or 
 quiver was meant to come out,— probably flutter; 
 but as the action of swallows about a pool is beau- 
 tifully depicted, we may rejoice to accept the line, 
 metrical redundancy and all. One would like to 
 know how far Shelley had in mind that delightful 
 line of Virgil's, in the First Georgic — 
 
 Aut arguta lacus circumvolitavit hirundo, 
 
 which, by the by, if we are to credit Commenta- 
 tor Servius, Virgil had himself conveyed directly 
 from Varro, who in turn had translated it from the 
 Greek of Aratus. 
 
 On the 10th of April 1822 Shelley wrote from 
 Pisa to John Gisborne, then in London, a letter 
 already quoted under the head of Cyprian, which 
 shows that he was much preoccupied with Goethe's 
 Faust that spring. He had been translating scenes 
 
 C1203 
 
from that work, as well as those from Calderon's 
 play El Magico Prodigioso, to form the basis of a 
 paper which he meant to contribute to "our jour- 
 nal," as he called The Liberal. As we have seen, he 
 was "well content with those from Calderon, which 
 in fact," says he, "gave me very little trouble ; but 
 those from Faust — I feel how imperfect a repre- 
 sentation, even with all the licence I assume to 
 figure to myself how Goethe would have written in 
 English, my words convey. No one but Coleridge 
 is capable of this work." 
 
 In the same letter he says he did not under- 
 stand the Hartz Mountain scene until he had seen 
 Retsch's outline etching of the subject; but at the 
 time of writing he had got over his difficulties and 
 said he would have sent Gisborne his version but 
 for fear that the postage would not be charged by 
 his publisher Oilier to his account. How com- 
 pletely Shelley had entered into the spirit of 
 Goethe's titanic grotesque, behind which the 
 philosophy of the great German looms large, we 
 know from the Faust scenes which have been in- 
 cluded in Shelley's published works for the best 
 part of a century. The splendour of the versifica- 
 tion in the most turbulent passages of the Walpur-. 
 gisnacht is a thing to wonder at; and the freedom 
 of the metre and vocabulary leave nothing to desire. 
 
 If we can but picture Shelley setting himself 
 exercises in that difficult task of finding the right 
 metrical and verbal representation of his great 
 
 CI2I3 
 
original in his own language, we should naturally 
 expect him to take some subject where the fable, 
 if any, is emancipated from the ordinary conditions 
 of the natural world. Windsor Forest, and Heme's 
 Oak, and Fairies— even the sham Fairies of Merry 
 Wives of Windsor who pretend to the performance 
 of a festal dance round the Oak — 
 
 But till 'tis one a clocke, 
 Our dance of Custome, round about the Oke 
 Of Heme the Hunter, let us not forget — 
 
 all this and all the incredible phenomena of the 
 poetic fragment which I have called Heme's Feast, 
 would seem to be the most natural things for a poet 
 to try his wings upon when about to essay the 
 realization in English of Goethe's Walpurgisnacht: 
 it would be splendid practice; and if we may 
 regard the production of Heme's Feast as an epi- 
 sode in Shelley's struggle to do what he thought 
 Coleridge was the only person qualified to do— to 
 make the Hartz Mountain scene come right in 
 English— then we certainly should not begrudge 
 him a much longer attack of poetic fooling. 
 
 To illustrate the position suggested for Heme's 
 Feast, I cannot do better than set out here in close 
 proximity to that performance the stupendous ver- 
 sion of the Chorus of Witches as executed by our 
 master in the art of translation— call it, if you will, 
 transfiguration. 
 
Chorus of Witches. 
 
 The stubble is yellow, the corn is green, 
 
 Now to the Brocken the witches go ; 
 The mighty multitude here may be seen 
 
 Gathering, wizard and witch, below. 
 Sir Urian is sitting aloft in the air; 
 
 Hey over stock. ! and hey over stone ! 
 
 'Twixt witches and incubi, what shall be done? 
 Tell it who dare 1 tell it who dare ! 
 
 A Voice. 
 
 Upon a sow-swine, whose farrows were nine, 
 Old Baubo rideth alone. 
 
 Chorus. 
 
 Honour to her to whom honour is due, 
 Old mother Baubo, honour to you ! 
 An able sow, with old Baubo upon her, 
 Is worthy of glory, and worthy of honour 1 
 The legion of witches is coming behind, 
 Darkening the night, and outspeeding the wind— 
 
 A Voice. 
 Which way comest thou? 
 
 A Voice. 
 
 Over Ilsenstein; 
 The owl was awake in the white moon-shine; 
 
 I saw her at rest in her downy nest, 
 And she stared at me with her broad bright eyne. 
 
 D23] 
 
Voices. 
 
 And you may now as well take your course on to Hell, 
 Since you ride so fast on the headlong blast. 
 
 A Voice. 
 
 She dropt poison upon me as I past. 
 Here are the wounds — 
 
 Chorus of Witches. 
 
 Come away! Come along! 
 The way is wide, the way is long, 
 But what is that for a Bedlam throng? 
 Stick with the prong, and scratch with the broom. 
 The child in the cradle lies strangled at home, 
 And the mother is clapping her hands. — 
 
 Semichorus of Wizards I. 
 
 We glide in 
 Like snails when the women are all away ; 
 And from a house once given over to sin 
 Woman has a thousand steps to stray. 
 
 Semichorus II. 
 
 A thousand steps must a woman take 
 Where a man but a single spring will make. 
 
 Voices above. 
 Come with us, come with us, from Felsensee. 
 
 D243 
 
Voices below. 
 
 With what joy would we fly through the upper sky ! 
 We are washed, we are 'nointed, stark naked are we ; 
 But our toil and our pain are for ever in vain. 
 
 Both Choruses. 
 
 The wind is still, the stars are fled, 
 The melancholy moon is dead; 
 The magic notes, like spark on spark, 
 Drizzle, whistling through the dark. 
 Come away I 
 
 Voices below. 
 Stay, oh, stay I 
 
 Voices above. 
 
 Out of the crannies of the rocks, 
 Who calls? 
 
 Voices below. 
 
 Oh, let me join your flocks ! 
 I three hundred years have striven 
 To catch your skirt and mount to Heaven,— 
 And still in vain. Oh, might I be 
 With company akin to me ! 
 
 Both Choruses. 
 
 Some on a ram and some on a prong, 
 
 On poles and on broomsticks we flutter along; 
 
 Forlorn is the wight who can rise not to-night. 
 
 CI25J" 
 
A Half-Witch below. 
 
 I have been tripping this many an hour: 
 Are the others already so far before? 
 No quiet at home, and no peace abroad I 
 And less methinks is found by the road. 
 
 Chorus of Witches. 
 
 Come onward, away I aroint thee, aroint ! 
 A witch to be strong must anoint — anoint- 
 Then every trough will be boat enough ; 
 With a rag for a sail we can sweep through the sky, 
 Who flies not to-night, when means he to fly? 
 
 Both Choruses. 
 
 We cling to the skirt, and we strike on the ground; 
 Witch-legions thicken around and around ; 
 Wizard-swarms cover the heath all over. 
 
 [They descend. 
 
 Of the miscellanies interspersed among the pages 
 of Heme's Feast the first (page III * 8 r.) is the 
 memorandum entered in the Auction Catalogue as 
 No. 6 among the items of Unpublished Matter in 
 Note Book III. It is not a very promising memo- 
 randum; but here is it:— 
 
 Modern Timon 
 ist Act. 
 
 deserted by his mistress his sensations— 
 his friend his plans of happiness [. 
 
 D26J- 
 
Page III * 9 r. bears a pencilled memorandum 
 of certain French works which, presumably, the 
 poet meant to consult : 
 
 Laplace Essai sur les Probabilites 
 Les Ouvrages Geologiques de Cuvier 
 Les Ouvrages de [. . . 
 
 Who the third worthy was is unrevealed, the bot- 
 tom of the leaf containing that information having 
 been torn off. The verso of the torn leaf only bears 
 the deleted words 
 
 I love thee not [, 
 
 and probably that sentence is all it ever bore. 
 
 Page III * 10 r. bears the following fragment 
 written in ink: — 
 
 If it 
 
 One word has changed the Universe for me — 
 It is the key of a new world, & opened 
 The blank & secret [ . . . 
 
 The last word is so badly written that I really can- 
 not say with certainty whether it is meant for secret 
 or dull; but one must choose; and secret commends 
 itself as having the greater probability. On 
 III * n r. (verso blank) is a still shorter fragment 
 written in ink: — 
 
 And have we trodden the same paths together 
 Even from our happy [ . . . 
 
The next poem to be dealt with affords us the 
 pleasure of supplying two lines which have been 
 obviously wanting ever since 1824, and should cer- 
 tainly have been "discovered" two or three times 
 over. The poem now completely printed for the 
 first time has no more distinctive title than Lines, 
 and none at all in the manuscript book. 
 
 Lines 
 
 1] Far far away, o ye 
 Halcyons of Memory 
 Seek some far calmer nest 
 Than this abandoned breast 
 No news of your false spring 
 To my hearts winter bring 
 Once having gone in vain 
 Ye come again. — 
 
 11] Vultures who build your bowers 
 High in the Futures towers 
 Wake, for the spirits blast 
 Over my head has past 
 Wrecked hopes on hopes are spread 
 Dying joys choked by dead 
 Will serve your beaks for prey 
 Many a day. 
 
 Although this gem is far less elaborate in its 
 drafting than many of Shelley's brief lyrics, an un- 
 usual degree of care was taken to make the text 
 
safe. The draft of each stanza fills but one small 
 page in this book of 1822 which he called Cyprian ; 
 and the writing is large. The pages are III * 12 r. 
 and 13 r. ; on these the song was written roughly 
 enough with a pencil ; it was not badly rubbed ; and 
 yet the poet wrote every line in ink over the corre- 
 sponding pencilled line— not attempting to ink the 
 strokes over, or even to make any individual ink- 
 stroke coincide with its pencilled forerunner. 
 Thus we can read the song in both forms, with the 
 result that we find but little divergence between 
 the final readings of the pencilled draft, and the 
 text of the superimposed pen and ink copy. As 
 for the text, it leaps unflurried to the editorial eye — 
 a thing complete, harmonious, and symmetrical, 
 not much punctuated, as usual, but really not want- 
 ing any stops to bring out its sense. And yet an evil 
 hap has pursued it from the year 1824 when Mary 
 Shelley published it in the Posthumous Poems, till 
 the present time. There is a misreading of an im- 
 portant word; and one couplet is omitted from the 
 second stanza, obviously through simple oversight. 
 Reading the pencil draft first, we find the four 
 opening lines, to the halcyons, without erasure or 
 revision. Before the fifth line was written, the in- 
 evitable vultures were already flapping in the back 
 of the poet's mind; and line 4 is followed by the 
 incomplete line, 
 
 Vultures old, 
 
rejected at once and followed in turn by 
 
 Cormorants who build y* bower 
 Tell not of azure seas 
 To my hearts winter bring 
 
 which line was at once rejected: so far as that 
 stanza was concerned, Shelley had given up his 
 cormorants, and also his vultures, and made up his 
 mind to deal there only with halcyons. He then 
 wrote lines 4 to 8 as in the text with but one hesita- 
 tion: he set down as a trial, and rejected, cold win- 
 ter for heart's winter, and passed on to stanza II. 
 Here again the pencilling shows no erasure or de- 
 bate for four lines; but for the fifth line there is 
 the cancelled reading Wrecked in the stream ; and 
 then lines 5 to 7 are written fluently without 
 change; line 8, by an apparently mechanical acci- 
 dent, was first written 
 
 For many a year 
 
 and then, after due cancellation, 
 
 Many a day. 
 
 Mary Shelley omitted the essential couplet rousing 
 the vultures and substituted Withered for Wrecked, 
 to the detriment of sense and metre. There is no 
 possibility of doubt, however, the word being writ- 
 ten three times and quite clearly Wrecked both in 
 pencil and in ink. The sixth line is immeasurably 
 
 C 130;] 
 
improved by the omission of a word not authorized 
 
 by the manuscript— the word the. Hitherto it has 
 
 been 
 
 Dying joys choked by the dead, 
 
 sometimes with an intrusive comma after joys and 
 sometimes without. The sense is thus subverted: 
 Shelley clearly meant — dying joys choked by dead 
 joys, not dying joys choked by dead people. In the 
 whole sixteen lines of the pen and ink copy there 
 is no sign of change currente calamo save that 
 after writing the couplet now given for the first 
 time, Shelley drew a faint line through Wake and 
 then wrote over it, not Up or Come or Rise, but 
 just Wake again. How many variants had oc- 
 curred to his fastidious taste in the interval of per- 
 haps a moment, we can never know; but Wake is 
 better than any conceivable word ; and the restored 
 couplet leaves one more of his lyrics absolutely 
 perfect. 
 
 The two pages with which we have been dealing 
 yield us quite enough to leave a certain indifference 
 as to the product of their versos. That of the first 
 is blank; but that of the second has two words on it. 
 They are written in ink and not deleted, and may 
 be reasonably connected with the Lines "Far far 
 away, o ye", for they are 
 
 Ye birds 
 
 which, considering the ornithological character of 
 the imagery of this sad song, are more likely to 
 
 EI3I3 
 
belong to it than to any other. They might be an 
 abortive line for stanza II — 
 
 Ye birds who build your bowers. 
 
 Passing from III * 13 v. to III * 14 r. we come 
 to one more fragment for which the draft does 
 something, but not enough to fill the editorial soul 
 with joy. The piece known as The World's Wan- 
 derers fills that page and the next, III * 14 v. 
 
 The World's Wanderers. 
 
 I] Tell me star, whose wings of light 
 
 Speed thee on thy fiery flight 
 In what cavern of the night 
 
 Will thy pinions close now— 
 Tell me Moon, thou pale & grey 
 Pilgrim of Heaven's homeless way 
 In what depth of night or day 
 
 Seekest thou, repose now? 
 
 II] Weary wind who wanderest 
 Like the world's rejected guest 
 Hast thou still some secret nest 
 
 On some hill or billow — 
 Restless Life, whose spirit flows 
 From birth to death without repose 
 From [ . . . 
 
 As it is on a page between the songs "Far, far 
 away" and "Tell me, star" that the words Ye birds 
 stand alone, they may possibly have been a note for 
 
 D323 
 
a stanza beginning "Tell me, ye birds" in this last 
 song. It was in the Posthumous Poems that lines i 
 to 12 first appeared, without any indication that 
 there was something omitted. When I reprinted 
 this piece in 1877 I drew attention to the striking 
 character of the song's incompleteness, the three 
 stanzas into which the lines were then divided be- 
 ing so finely finished that it was hard to believe 
 Shelley had not written four more lines with pillow 
 at the end of the fourth as the rhyme for billow. I 
 hazarded the suspicion that such a termination still 
 remained "to be found in his note-books." Every- 
 thing comes to him who waits; and here in the 
 book called Cyprian is more than half of the miss- 
 ing stave. For "restless Life" passing "from birth 
 to death without repose," it would be appropriate 
 enough to find repose in some association with a 
 grassy pillow; but we must ransack yet another 
 note-book or two, — say the one from which the 
 poet's widow got her reading of the first line's 
 opening, "Tell me, thou star." The word in in her 
 second line may be defended without another 
 manuscript. It is very indistinct in this one: I 
 think it is meant for on ; but, as it was the exception, 
 not the rule, when Shelley in drafting rapidly 
 dotted his i or closed the top of his 0, this reading 
 is to some extent a matter of taste; and de gustibus 
 non est disputandum. Again in line 3 is a curious 
 point,— whether thy has been changed to the or the 
 to thy before night. I accept Mary Shelley's read- 
 
 D33 3 
 
ing, the. For line 4 of this manuscript he began 
 with Finding thou — he meant Findest thou; and 
 was no doubt going to add repose now, but his 
 mind leapt over the opening to the close of the next 
 stave and anticipated the need for repose there; so 
 he interpolated the line 4 given above. Line 6 was 
 originally 
 
 Climbing oer Heaven's homeless way [— 
 
 but he altered it to Pilgrim of with magic effect. 
 In line 7 he wrote dell and changed the reading to 
 depth with equal effect. Seekest in the line begins 
 with an S on a D, which shows that his mind had 
 shaped first Dost thou seek and instantly saw how 
 to get rid of half a mouthful of consonants. There 
 is a comma at thou ; but this is rather a regrettable 
 incident (probably accident), as commas are very 
 scarce in these drafts or finished copies. Notes of 
 interrogation are rarer still ; but the one addressed 
 to the moon is positively authentic. 
 
 The second line in stanza II— for it now seems 
 clear that there were to be two eight-line stanzas- 
 took up some deal of thought: he began with O'er 
 the the earths and was obviously going to add 
 [ ] breast, but yielded to the claims of guest, 
 
 and wrote Like an undesired, then changing to the 
 sky's rejected guest, and at last substituting world's 
 for sky's, which procedure leaves us in possession of 
 
 £134-3 
 
Mary Shelley's reading. Lines 3 and 4 of the 
 stanza are not strictly as she gives them :— 
 
 Hast thou still some secret nest 
 On the tree or billow? — 
 
 Those words he did write; but he struck out the 
 tree very decidedly and wrote some hill above it: 
 the cancelling stroke goes in an attenuated form 
 through or and partly through billow. I do not 
 think he meant to cancel them: he seldom did ex- 
 actly what he meant with these impetuous strokes. 
 I think he meant to retain On some hill or billow 
 and would have put a for some in the line before, 
 had he gone over it all again. 
 
 We are now nearing the point somewhere in the 
 interior of the Note Book called Cyprian where 
 one of Shelley's latest lyric inspirations was 
 found in all the stages of its composition. Pages 
 III * 15 r. to 18 v., eight pages in all, are occupied 
 by a most unpromising-looking mass of Shelley's 
 least legible penmanship— literally penmanship, 
 for every page of the writing is wholly in ink. The 
 members of The Bibliophile Society have already 
 had before them in the Society's Year Book for 
 1910 some account of this poem; but it is necessary 
 to go over the ground again in this present work; 
 moreover I stand pledged to give a fuller account 
 than I there gave of the vicissitudes of this lyric, on 
 
 D353 
 
which, it will be remembered, I bestowed the inev- 
 itable title of The Kiss. It will be well to give in 
 the first place, as in the Year Book, the text of the 
 poem as known under the title Lines, or "We meet 
 not as we parted," up to the year of Grace 1910. 
 
 LINES 
 
 We meet not as we parted, 
 
 We feel more than all may see, 
 
 My bosom is heavy-hearted, 
 And thine full of doubt for me. 
 One moment has bound the free. 
 
 That moment is gone for ever, 
 
 Like lightning that flashed and died, 
 
 Like a snowflake upon the river, 
 Like a sunbeam upon the tide, 
 Which the dark shadows hide. 
 
 That moment from time was singled 
 As the first of a life of pain. 
 
 The cup of its joy was mingled 
 
 — Delusion too sweet though vain ! 
 Too sweet to be mine again. 
 
 Sweet lips, could my heart have hidden 
 That its life was crushed by you, 
 
 Ye would not have then forbidden 
 The death which a heart so true 
 Sought in your briny dew. 
 
 CI363 
 
Methinks too little cost 
 For a moment so found, so lost ! 
 
 1822. 
 
 These twenty-two lines were found by Garnett 
 hard on half a century ago in what is certainly one 
 of the most tangled wildernesses of the Note Books 
 of Shelley; and the poem occupied a distinguished 
 position in that treasurable little volume of his 
 called Relics of Shelley (1862). It was no light 
 task to make sure that, in the eight pages of puzzle- 
 dom devoted to this composition, there were but 22 
 lines which were meant to constitute the lyric 
 finally evolved and that their sequence was that in- 
 dicated in the Relics. That task, however, Garnett 
 seems to have accomplished. And yet, for all its 
 characteristic charm, the lyric as set out in 1862 has 
 something like the cry of a maimed and mangled 
 thing. The first line starts the poem in a metre not 
 fulfilling the lyric conditions of the whole. There 
 were several expressions so jarring and improbable 
 that one felt Shelley's own words were not there— 
 that what he wrote had not been exhaustively de- 
 ciphered. And in the final couplet there are 
 defects of articulation such as Shelley would not 
 have passed in so fastidiously chastened a song as 
 this. A minute examination of the aforesaid eight 
 pages of manuscript has sufficed to remove every 
 flaw in the marvellous beauty of the poem which 
 should henceforth stand as follows: — 
 
 Ci373 
 
THE KISS 
 
 i] We meet not as then we parted— 
 We feel more than all may see 
 My bosom is heavy hearted 
 And thine full of doubt for me 
 A moment has bound the free 
 
 n] That moment is gone for ever 
 
 Like lightning it flashed and died 
 Like a snowflake upon the river 
 A sunbeam upon the tide — 
 Which the dark shadows hide — 
 
 ill] That moment from time was singled 
 As the price of a life of pain. — 
 In the cup of its joy was mingled 
 Delusion too sweet though vain 
 Too sweet to be mine again 
 
 iv] Sweet lips, could my soul not have hidden 
 That its life was consumed by you 
 Ye would not have then forbidden 
 The death which a heart so true 
 Sought in your burning dew — 
 That methinks were too little cost 
 For a moment so found, so lost I 
 
 Two Cancelled Passages 
 
 O fill high the cup with ruin- 
 Mix delusion & madness therein 
 
'Tis thus the weak frame endures not 
 The joys . . . 
 
 The restoration of the word then makes line i 
 strike the right metrical note; A moment in line 5 
 is an improvement on One moment; the substitu- 
 tion of price for the insignificant reading first in 
 line 12 is of high value to the sense and sound; the 
 abolition of the lady's "crushing" lips by the read- 
 ing consumed for crushed in line 17, and still more 
 notably the elimination of the taste of pickles by 
 reading, with the manuscript, burning dew for 
 briny dew in line 20, are sufficient to repay one for 
 a day or two of hard work for the eyes. Over and 
 above these textual emendations is the settlement 
 of the position and wording of the last couplet. 
 Shelley did not write the separate sentence which 
 is no sentence— 
 
 Methinks too little cost 
 
 For a moment so found, so lost ! 
 
 But he did show how the sense of the extra couplet 
 was to be articulated to that of the rest of the stanza. 
 The drafting of this poem is among the most 
 illuminating turmoils that I have found in these 
 Note Books. The poet, aged 29, seems to have 
 rashly kissed the lady "right on the mouth" and to 
 have found himself in a perfect froth of passion,— 
 almost, one would say with the immortal landlady 
 of another poet, "a-fomentin' at the mouth." In 
 
 Ci393 
 
this there is nothing wonderful, whether the lady 
 was "our beloved Jane"— the work is in her period 
 —or some one else. What is wonderful is the im- 
 petuosity with which his passion resolves itself into 
 music and imagery, and not less so the unerring 
 delicacy with which line after line is condemned 
 as he goes on. In the first of the eight manuscript 
 pages there is little sign of what the metre is to be :— 
 
 Twas the lightning that j , , , > 
 
 The snow flake that fell 
 The blood cup 
 
 In poi 
 Give me 
 That moment was perish. 
 
 The words As with and The life seem to be faintly 
 discernible under The snowflake and The blood 
 cup. Only a few words besides faded are crossed 
 through; but the whole are obviously abandoned, 
 leaving us in possession of the interesting inference 
 that Shelley was familiar with the traditional 
 method of some of the northern races of mingling 
 blood in a cup as a sacrament for the oath of foster- 
 brothers. The second page starts with two lines of 
 cancelled words A poison and All life, followed by 
 
 O poison if when I am dead 
 
 /■ for both -\ 
 One moment •? of life v did borrow 
 (has ) 
 
 D4o3 
 
-r, ■ ■ , c else would ) 
 
 I he joys which \ , _„ J 
 
 (were lent to fill) 
 
 The . . . void 
 
 A life we can ill 
 
 But would ill 
 
 A long life exhausted ill 
 
 But the present J , l to b 
 
 (seemed ) 
 
 orrow 
 
 (pure 
 
 Light from so ( r . > a star I". 
 If air 
 
 i fixed 
 
 In the second of these fragmentary lines, he can- 
 celled of life and has, in the third else would, in 
 the fifth life we can ill, in the seventh long and the 
 ed in exhausted, in the eighth seemed, and in the 
 ninth sweet and fixed. Three or four more obscure 
 short lines show insignificant words uncancelled, 
 mixed with the cancelled words 
 
 That in Heaven 
 
 It is dead, as meteors [are]. 
 
 There is nothing in the page that was meant to be 
 woven into the song at last. The third page yields 
 for final result stanza II as given above; but before 
 these five lines there are two false starts, both struck 
 out, One moment whose, and One moment. In 
 line 2 that is distinctly cancelled for it; And is 
 
 C«40 
 
struck out as a false start for line 3 and Like simi- 
 larly for line 4. Line 5 was written thus— 
 
 Which the dark clouds hide- 
 but clouds was struck out and shadows substituted. 
 At the end of this third page is a fresh attempt to 
 do something with the borrowing imagery, thus— 
 
 The past was all str[ewn with] sorrow 
 
 The future was far more dark 
 But the present refused 
 
 the letters I take to make strewn with being mostly 
 covered by a heavy blot and the letters I read as 
 refused struck out in such a way as to leave a doubt 
 whether they did not form seemed as in the cognate 
 passage on the second page. The readings darker 
 still and darker far were tried for describing the 
 future and rejected. The fourth page of the manu- 
 script starts with the following trial openings, all 
 crossed through, the first in a more thorough and 
 deliberate manner than the rest:— 
 
 O fill high the cup with ruin 
 
 Mix delusion & madness therein 
 Delusion madness & ruin 
 
 And memory 
 The delusion of unknown pleasure 
 That moment was mingled 
 
 With delusion & madness too sweet [ ; 
 
 D42 3 
 
and then we get stanza 3 as above, all but the last 
 line. For line 3 there is a cancelled reading — 
 
 In the cup brief passion was [ . . . 
 
 altered to In one cup before the insertion of words 
 completing the line in the text. On the next page 
 of the manuscript, the fifth, we get first the line 
 
 Too sweet to return again— 
 
 return being altered to be mine. The rest of the 
 page is occupied by attempts to make two more 
 stanzas: the first is very incomplete; but the final 
 outcome of it as far as it goes is— after a cancelled 
 initial For — 
 
 The peace that I knew not before 
 The peace that I mist for ever 
 The peace that I pa[rt]ake not 
 Methinks is little for ever. 
 
 Among rejected readings of these lines are 
 
 The peace that I now have lost 
 The peace that was lost for ever 
 
 The sense of these unfinished and obscurely written 
 lines is of course swallowed up in the fourth stanza; 
 and the same is true of the five lines addressed 
 directly to the lady's lips, discoverable with diffi- 
 culty in the lower half of the page : 
 
 Sweet lips I forswear your sweetness 
 The sweetness not given to me 
 
 CH3 3 
 
The kisses of mortal fears 
 Would hallow mine to thee 
 What I am will I seem to be. 
 
 Before attaining this imperfect result Shelley had 
 tried successively 
 
 Sweet lips when desire 
 
 The sweetness that cost ye pain 
 
 The sweetness I stole 
 
 But after the kisses of fears 
 
 Would hallow their touch to me 
 
 What I am should be seen to be [ ; 
 
 and the words death life, set between the two lines 
 last quoted, without obvious connexion. 
 
 There is no general cancellation of all this; but 
 that Shelley had gone over it before absorbing the 
 general drift into his triumphantly fine fourth 
 stanza is clear from his having specially crossed out 
 the three phrases ending with me and thee, wherein 
 the sense bade fair to be sacrificed in the interests 
 of rhyme. I must admit that I am not certain of 
 the word hallow or the Would before it, which 
 might possibly be Should. The sixth and seventh 
 pages of the manuscript are devoted to the fourth 
 stanza, in which I have adopted the later of two 
 words— heart and soul— both cancelled but with 
 no word substituted'. I think that in line i he 
 meant to use soul, not heart, wanting heart in line 4. 
 Page 6 opens with 
 
 Sweet lips, had my hear[t] hidden [— 
 
 D44J" 
 
had my hear being cancelled in favour of could 
 my heart have: my heart is then lightly crossed 
 through; above the line are written very faintly 
 what I take to be two alternative readings / not and 
 soul not] and I do not doubt that the final reading 
 was meant to be as above, the its of line 2 being left 
 unmolested. The sense is enormously improved. 
 There is a false start, How, for line 2, followed by 
 That thy pleasure, altered to That your dew was 
 poison to, and then by 
 
 That \ " , \ its life was consumed by you 
 I your dew ) 
 
 the bracketed words being struck out, and the 
 words burning dew are followed by a dash— sig- 
 nificant as a special leader to the next page, in the 
 top margin of which is the word that, needed to 
 connect with the rest of the stanza the couplet 
 which was written thus— 
 
 Methinks is little cost 
 
 For a moment so found, so lost ! 
 
 The word is is cancelled in favour of were too. At 
 the foot of the page are four false starts for some- 
 thing or other— all cancelled— 
 
 All joys 
 For think 
 No: think that 
 We all [ . . . 
 
But the long rule under the last line is meant to in- 
 dicate the close of the poem. Supposing Shelley to 
 have reopened his book and reviewed the wilder- 
 ness of abandoned and unabandoned lines, rejected 
 and accepted words, he would have found that the 
 chief need of the poem as left to be discovered in 
 the seven pages of scrawl was an opening stanza; 
 and it is with the opening stanza that the eighth 
 page of the manuscript is chiefly concerned. By 
 the way a little piece of personal moralizing seems 
 to have occurred to him, and he wrote down at the 
 top of the page 
 
 The weak frame— 
 
 which he immediately cancelled and wrote 
 
 Tis thus the weak frame endures not 
 The joys [ . . . 
 
 Then, doubtless remembering how he detested 
 "didactic poetry," and with a delicate intuition or 
 suspicion that the words the joys might be unac- 
 ceptable to the lady, he began with 
 
 We parted 
 
 and at once cancelled that, and without more ado 
 wrote 
 
 We meet not as then we parted— 
 
 but here again comes debate and rejection of a 
 qualifying phrase— 
 
 CI463 
 
Till the time when 
 I We shall [ . . . 
 
 He had considered how those two lines were to 
 end, for after changing time to hour, he wrote 
 words at the other side of the page, leaving spaces 
 to be filled. What the words were I cannot say, for 
 he succeeded in blotting them thoroughly, and shut 
 the book before they were dry. Strictly speaking, 
 the book probably shut itself ; it still opens obstrep- 
 erously and constantly shuts when you want it to 
 keep open. However, he opened it again and got 
 it to stay open while he not only cancelled those 
 two unfinished lines and wrote faintly and ob- 
 scurely between them 
 
 We feel more than all may see [ ; 
 
 but further he rounded the poem by writing lines 3, 
 4 and 5. This he did without further adventure 
 than a false start for 5 (For the or To the, I think) 
 and the use of so much ink about its inscription 
 and obliteration as to obscure the first word of 
 the fifth line as adopted and leave a possibility of 
 dispute between the scholiasts of the twentieth, or, 
 "by 'r lady," twenty-first century on the grave ques- 
 tion whether Garnett was right in reading One or 
 1 in reading A . 
 
 CI473 
 
APPENDIX-UNA FAVOLA 
 
SHELLEY'S UNFINISHED 
 
 COMPOSITION WRITTEN IN ITALIAN PROSE 
 
 AND KNOWN AS 
 
 UNA FAVOLA 
 
 For the reasons given at the end of the First 
 Part of this work, the piece of Italian poetic prose 
 known as Una Favola has been reserved for the 
 conclusion of the whole book. Shelley's draft of 
 this piece in Note Book I is extremely inaccurate 
 and very full of revisions; but it has a remarkable 
 and wholly characteristic charm, which can be 
 most enjoyably communicated through the late Dr. 
 Garnett's delightful English rendering, published 
 in 1862 in Relics of Shelley. That version is as 
 follows:— 
 
 A FABLE. 
 
 There was a youth who travelled through distant 
 lands, seeking throughout the world a lady of 
 whom he was enamoured. And who this lady was, 
 and how this youth became enamoured of her, and 
 how and why the great love he bore her forsook 
 him, are things worthy to be known by every gentle 
 heart. 
 
 At the dawn of the fifteenth spring of his life, a 
 
 C15O 
 
certain one calling himself Love awoke him, say- 
 ing that one whom he had ofttimes beheld in his 
 dreams abode awaiting him. This Love was ac- 
 companied by a great troop of female forms, all 
 veiled in white, and crowned with laurel, ivy, and 
 myrtle, garlanded and interwreathed with violets, 
 roses, and lilies. They sang with such sweetness 
 that perhaps the harmony of the spheres, to which 
 the stars dance, is not so sweet. And their manners 
 and words were so alluring, that the youth was en- 
 ticed, and, arising from his couch, made himself 
 ready to do all the pleasure of him who called him- 
 self Love; at whose behest he followed him by 
 lonely ways and deserts and caverns, until the 
 whole troop arrived at a solitary wood, in a gloomy 
 valley between two most lofty mountains, which 
 valley was planted in the manner of a labyrinth, 
 with pines, cypresses, cedars, and yews, whose shad- 
 ows begot a mixture of delight and sadness. And 
 in this wood the youth for a whole year followed 
 the uncertain footsteps of this his companion and 
 guide, as the moon follows the earth, save that 
 there was no change in him, and nourished by the 
 fruit of a certain tree which grew in the midst of 
 the labyrinth — a food sweet and bitter at once, 
 which being cold as ice to the lips, appeared fire in 
 the veins. The veiled figures were continually 
 around him, ministers and attendants obedient to 
 his least gesture, and messengers between him and 
 Love, when Love might leave him for a little on his 
 other errands. But these figures, albeit executing 
 his every other command with swiftness, never 
 would unveil themselves to him, although he anx- 
 iously besought them; one only excepted, whose 
 name was Life, and who had the fame of a potent 
 
inchantress. She was tall of person and beautiful, 
 cheerful and easy in her manners, and richly 
 adorned, and, as it seemed from her ready unveil- 
 ing of herself, she wished well to this youth. But 
 he soon perceived that she was more false than any 
 Siren, for by her counsel Love abandoned him in 
 this savage place, with only the company of these 
 shrouded figures, who, by their obstinately remain- 
 ing veiled, had always wrought him dread. And 
 none can expound whether these figures were the 
 spectres of his own dead thoughts, or the shadows 
 of the living thoughts of Love. Then Life, haply 
 ashamed of her deceit, concealed herself within the 
 cavern of a certain sister of hers dwelling there; 
 and Love, sighing, returned to his third heaven. 
 
 Scarcely had Love departed, when the masked 
 forms, released from his government, unveiled 
 themselves before the astonished youth. And for 
 many days these figures danced around him whith- 
 ersoever he went, alternately mocking and threat- 
 ening him; and in the night while he reposed they 
 defiled in long and slow procession before his 
 couch, each more hideous and terrible than the 
 other. Their horrible aspect and loathsome figure 
 so overcame his heart with sadness that the fair 
 heaven, covered with that shadow, clothed itself in 
 clouds before his eyes; and he wept so much that 
 the herbs upon his path, fed with tears instead of 
 dew, became pale and bowed like himself. Weary 
 at length of this suffering, he came to the grot of 
 the Sister of Life, herself also an enchantress, and 
 found her sitting before a pale fire of perfumed 
 wood, singing laments sweet in their melancholy, 
 and weaving a white shroud, upon which his name 
 was half wrought, with the obscure and imperfect 
 
 CI53 3 
 
beginning of a certain other name; and he be- 
 sought her to tell him her own, and she said, with 
 a faint but sweet voice, "Death." And the youth 
 said, "O lovely Death, I pray thee to aid me 
 against these hateful phantoms, companions of thy 
 sister, which cease not to torment me." And Death 
 comforted him, and took his hand with a smile, 
 and kissed his brow and cheek, so that every vein 
 thrilled with joy and fear, and made him abide 
 with her in a chamber of her cavern, whither, she 
 said, it was against Destiny that the wicked com- 
 panions of Life should ever come. The youth 
 continually conversing with Death, and she, like- 
 minded to a sister, caressing him and showing him 
 every courtesy both in deed and word, he quickly 
 became enamoured of her, and Life herself, far less 
 any of her troop, seemed fair to him no longer: and 
 his passion so overcame him, that upon his knees 
 he prayed Death to love him as he loved her, and 
 consent to do his pleasure. But Death said, 'Au- 
 dacious that thou art, with whose desire has Death 
 ever complied? If thou lovedst me not, perchance 
 I might love thee— beloved by thee, I hate thee and 
 I fly thee." Thus saying, she went forth from the 
 cavern, and her dusky and aetherial form was soon 
 lost amid the interwoven boughs of the forest. 
 
 From that moment the youth pursued the track 
 of Death ; and so mighty was the love that led him, 
 that he had encircled the world and searched 
 through all its regions, and many years were al- 
 ready spent, but sorrows rather than years had 
 blanched his locks and withered the flower of his 
 beauty, when he found himself upon the confines 
 of the very forest from which his wretched wander- 
 ings had begun. He cast himself upon the grass 
 
 CI543 
 
and wept for many hours, so blinded by his tears 
 that for much time he did not perceive that not all 
 that bathed his face and his bosom were his own, 
 but that a lady bowed behind him wept for pity of 
 his weeping. And lifting up his eyes he saw her, 
 and it seemed to him never to have beheld so glo- 
 rious a vision, and he doubted much whether she 
 were a human creature. And his love of Death 
 was suddenly changed into hate and suspicion, for 
 this new love was so potent that it overcame every 
 other thought. This compassionate lady at first 
 loved him for mere pity; but love grew up swiftly 
 with compassion, and she loved for Love's own 
 sake, no one beloved by her having need of pity any 
 more. This was the lady in whose quest Love had 
 led the youth through that gloomy labyrinth of 
 error and suffering, haply for that he esteemed him 
 unworthy of so much glory, and perceived him too 
 weak to support such exceeding joy. After having 
 somewhat dried their tears, the twain walked to- 
 gether in that same forest, until Death stood before 
 them, and said, "Whilst, O youth, thou didst love 
 me, I hated thee, and now that thou hatest me, I 
 love thee, and wish so well to thee and thy bride 
 that in my kingdom, which thou mayest call Para- 
 dise, I have set apart a chosen spot, where ye may 
 securely fulfil your happy loves." And the lady, 
 offended, and perchance somewhat jealous by rea- 
 son of the past love of her spouse, turned her back 
 upon Death, saying within herself, "What would 
 this lover of my husband who comes here to trouble 
 us?" and cried, "Life! Life!" and Life came, with 
 a gay visage, crowned with a rainbow, and clad in 
 a various mantle of chameleon skin; and Death 
 went away weeping, and departing said with a 
 
sweet voice, "Ye mistrust me, but I forgive ye, and 
 await ye where ye needs must come, for I dwell 
 with Love and Eternity, with whom the souls whose 
 love is everlasting must hold communion; then will 
 ye perceive whether I have deserved your distrust. 
 Meanwhile I commend ye to Life; and, sister mine, 
 I beseech thee, by the love of that Death with 
 whom thou wert twin born, not to employ thy cus- 
 tomary arts against these lovers, but content thee 
 with the tribute thou hast already received of sighs 
 and tears, which are thy wealth." The youth, 
 mindful of how great evil she had wrought him in 
 that wood, mistrusted Life ; but the lady, although 
 she doubted, yet being jealous of Death, . . . 
 
 [End of Garnett's Translation.] 
 
 D563 
 
In the following pages Shelley's draft is set out 
 opposite the very much revised Italian of the 
 Relics of Shelley; and, for convenient comparison, 
 the two versions are printed facing each other as 
 nearly page for page as practicable. Shelley's draft 
 begins at page I * 35 v., extends unbroken to the 
 end of page I * 41 r., and is concluded on pages 
 I * 3 v. to 7 v. It is of course given in accordance 
 with what I take to be the final outcome or inten- 
 tion at the time of writing. Words and passages 
 which he cancelled or rejected at that time are 
 shown at the foot of each page of this his un- 
 doubted work; their position in the draft being 
 indicated by means of Arabic numerals enclosed 
 within parentheses. 
 
 Ci573 
 
SHELLEY'S DRAFT IN NOTE BOOK I 
 
 Cera un certo giovane d'un paese lontano, chi 
 viaggiava pel mondo di trovar una donna ( i ) della 
 quale esso fu innamorato dai verdi anni.— (2) E 
 chi fu questa donna, e (3) come questo giovane 
 primo s'innamoro di lei, e perche gli cessa l'amore 
 tan to forte che aveva sono cose degne d'essere co- 
 nosciute da ogni gentil cuore.— 
 
 Al spuntare della decima quinta (4) primavera 
 della vita sua (5) uno (6) chiamandosi Amore, ap- 
 parivo a questo giovane, seguitato d'una grande 
 schiera de (7) persone tutte velati in veli bianchi, e 
 coronati (8) di mirto e di lauro (9) ed' ellera in- 
 trecciati di viole rose e fiordilisi — E cantanavo 
 [sic for cantavano] (10) si dolcemente che, (11) 
 l'armonia delle sfere, al quale le stelle ballano, 
 (12) fu meno soave. — E le loro maniere (13) 
 erano cose (14) gentile che questo giovane (15) 
 era allettato fa [sic for a] fare il volere di quello 
 chi si chiamava Amore e lo seguivata [sic for se- 
 guitava] — per solinghe vie, (16) e selve e caverni 
 finche (17) furono tutti arrivati ad (18) un giar- 
 dino fra due altissime montagne che fu piantato 
 (19) in guisa di laberinto di alberi, pini cipressi, 
 
 (i)chemo (2) perche la cessa ma primamente de (3) perche 
 (4) della I5ta anno / quind (5) l'amore (6) chi se 
 
 (7) gente (8) di mirto e lauro / ghirlande di (9) e di mirto 
 (10) diresti (11) il cuore suo batteva violentamente / chi non 
 avrebbe udito e un visione fu ociso / ch (12) forse (13) fu- 
 rono (14) dilettevole (15) fu (16) montane (17) ar- 
 riva (18) una spelonca per un solitario chiuso in torno di ci sassi 
 (19) una specie 
 
 D583 
 
UNA FAVOLA 1 AS GIVEN IN "RELICS OF SHELLEY" 
 
 Cera un giovane il quale viaggiava per paesi 
 lontani, cercando per il mondo una donna, della 
 quale esso fu innamorato. E chi fu quella donna, 
 e come questo giovane s'innamoro di lei, e come e 
 perche gli cesso l'amore tanto forte che aveva, sono 
 cose degne d'essere conosciute da ogni gentil cuore. 
 
 Al spuntare della decima quinta primavera della 
 sua vita, uno chiamandosi Amore gli destava, di- 
 cendo che una chi egli aveva molte volte veduto nei 
 sogni gli stava aspettando. Quello fu accompa- 
 gnato d'una schiera immensa di persone, tutte 
 velate in bianchi veli, e coronate di lauro, ellera e 
 mirto inghirlandite ed intrecciate di viole, rose, e 
 fiordilisi. Cantavano si dolcemente che forse l'ar- 
 monia delle sfere alia quale le stelle ballano, e 
 meno soave. E le maniere e le parole loro erano 
 cosi lusinghevoli, che il giovane fu allettato, e le- 
 vandosi del letto, si fece pronto di fare tutto il 
 volere di quello che si chiamava Amore, al di cui 
 cenno lo seguitava per solinghe vie ed eremi e ca- 
 verne, fino che tutta la schiera arrivo ad un bosco 
 solitario in una cupa valle per due altissime raon- 
 tagne, il quale fu piantato a guisa di laberinto di 
 pini, cipressi, cedari e tassi, le ombre dei quali 
 
 1 Of this title, obviously appropriate as it is, there is no trace 
 in the Note Boole. 
 
 CI593 
 
cedari e tassi, le (20) ombre dei quali destavano 
 (21) un misto di piacere e di orrore— E qui per 
 un anno intero seguitava i passi (22) di questo 
 compagno e duce suo come la luna segui la terra. 
 E fu nutrito d'un erbe amara e dolce insieme la 
 frutta d'un certo albero che fu nel mezzo del labe- 
 rinto, e essendo freddo come ghiaccio sulle labre, 
 pareva foco nelle vene.— E queste forme velate 
 svolazzavano intorno di lui, e furono i suoi mi- 
 nistri, e le cor[r]ieri fra lui ed Amore passare 
 quello e quando ma non mai (23) volevano mai 
 svelarsi, passe diversi quantunque (24) le pre- 
 ghasse fo (25) ; eccetuato una (26) che si chia- 
 mava Vita, (27) ed aveva reputazione di in- 
 cantratrice [_sic~\. Era (28) grande di persona e 
 bella, allegra, (29) e sciolta, ornata riccamente e 
 siccome pareva (30) dal suo svelarsi voleva bene a 
 questo giovane; ma ben presto fu (31) reconosciu- 
 tate d'essere piu finta (32) che alcuna Sirena, 
 poiche per consiglio suo, Amore gli abbandono in 
 questo (33) selvaggio louga [sic for luogo], e (34) 
 tutti gli due gli lasciavano solo con queste velate 
 forme; e se quelle furono (35) le sprettri [sic for 
 spettri] (36) dei suoi (37) morti pensieri o (38) 
 
 (20) di (21) al' (22) del amore (23) se (24) 
 molte volte (25) molto (26) Passegiavano (27) la questa 
 schiera c'era una, che gagliarda (28) bella (29) di maniere 
 
 (30) amava questo giovane / volera tanto bene a questo giovane 
 
 (31) conos (32) di (33) solitario bosco / loco (34) gli 
 lascia solo / con nessuno (35) i suoi (36) ombre (37) 
 proprie (38) di quelli 
 
 Ci6o] 
 
destavano un misto di diletto e malinconia. Ed in 
 questo bosco il giovane seguitava per un anno in- 
 tero i passi incerti di questo compagno e duce suo, 
 come la luna segue la terra; non pero tramutandosi 
 come essa. E fu egli nutrito delle f rutta d'un certo 
 albero che crebbe nel mezzo del laberinto, un cibo 
 insieme dolce ed amaro, il quale essendo freddo 
 come ghiaccio sulle labbre, pareva fuoco nelle 
 vene. Le forme velate sempre gli furono intorno, 
 erano servi e ministri ubbedienti al menomo cenno, 
 e corrieri per lui ed Amore quando per affari suoi 
 l'Amore un poco lo lascierebbe. Ma queste forme, 
 eseguendo ogni altra ordine sua prestamente, mai 
 non vollero svelarsi a lui quantunque le pregasse 
 sollecitamente; eccettuato una, che aveva nome la 
 Vita, ed aveva riputazione di incantatrice gagli- 
 arda. Era essa grande di persona e bella, allegra e 
 sciolta, ed ornata riccamente, e, siccome pareva dal 
 suo pronto svelarsi, voleva bene a questo giovane. 
 Ma ben presto la riconobbe d'essere piu finta che 
 alcuna Sirena, poiche per consiglio suo, Amore gli 
 lascio in questo selvaggio luogo, colla sola compa- 
 gnia di queste velate, le quali per il loro ostinato 
 celarsi sempre gli avevano fatte qualche paura. E, 
 se quelle forme erano i spettri dei suoi proprii 
 morti pensieri, owero le ombre dei vivi pensieri 
 
 C16O 
 
le ombre dei vivi del Amore nessuno puo schiarire. 
 (39) La Vita, in quel punto si celava (40) nella 
 interiore parte d'una spelonca d'una sua sorella 
 abitando (41) cola, ed Amore se ne torno sospi- 
 rando alia (42) sua terza sfera. 
 
 Appena fu partito Amore quando le forme so- 
 lute della sua legge, tutte insieme si svelarono e si 
 presentarono (43) davanti al attonito giovane. II 
 loro orribile aspetto e trista figura gli ingombrava 
 il cuore di malinconia, e per (44) molti giorni 
 pianse tante, che le erbe del suo cammimo [sic for 
 cammino\ pasciate di lagrime in vece di rugiada 
 divantavano come lui pallide e chinate. Le sopra- 
 dette forme ballavano intorno di lui (45) il giorno 
 dovunque andasse, e ora mottegiavandolo, ed or 
 tremendi e gridavano (46) minacciandolo, in (47) 
 accestia e quando riposavava, (48) filavano in 
 (49) lenta e lunga processione davanti (50) dal 
 suo letto, ognuna piu schifosa e terrbile che l'altra 
 — (51) Alfine stanco di questo (52) malmenare 
 andava alia caverna della Sorella della Vita, incan- 
 tatrice anch' ella, e la trovo (53) seduta davanti un 
 lento fuoco di cipresso cantando soave[me]nte do- 
 lorosi tessendo una bianca mortaia ornata di molti 
 strani geroglifici, e la prego di dirlo suo nome ed 
 ella disse col voce (54) fiocca ma dolce "La Mor- 
 te."— Ed il giovane (55) disse— O bella Morte 
 
 (39) II momento che Vita ed Amore (40) sotto una la 
 
 (41) qu (42) terza sua (43) all' (44) giorni molti 
 
 (45) il notte e (46) minacciavolmente (47) terribili 
 
 (48) facevano prec (49) dubii (50) di lui ognuna piu 
 
 brutta e tremenda (51) finale / Al fino (52) travaglia 
 (53) sedando (54) dolce ma (55) Suo viso fu tale, che 
 il mondo 
 
 CI62 3 
 
dell' Amore, nessuno pud schiarire. La Vita, ver- 
 gognandosi forse della sua fraude, si celo allora 
 dentro alia spelonca d'una sua sorella abitando 
 cola; ed Amore se ne torno, sospirando, alia sua 
 terza sfera. 
 
 Appena fu partito Amore, quando le mascherate 
 forme, solute della sua legge, si svelarono davanti 
 all' attonito giovane. E per molti giorni le sopra- 
 dette figure ballavano intorno di lui dovunque an- 
 dasse — ora motteggiando ed ora minacciandolo, e 
 la notte quando riposava sfilavano in lunga e lenta 
 processione davanti al suo letto, ognuna piu schi- 
 fosa e terribile che l'altra. II loro orribile aspetto 
 e ria figura gli ingombrava tanto il cuore di tris- 
 tezza, che il bel cielo, coperto di quella ombra, si 
 vesti di nuvoloso tutto agli occhi suoi ; e tanto 
 pianse, che le erbe del suo cammino pasciate di la- 
 grime in vece di rugiada, diventarono come lui, 
 pallide e chinate. Stanco alfine di questo soffrire, 
 veniva alia grotta della Sorella della Vita, incan- 
 tatrice anch'ella e la trovo seduta davanti un 
 pallido fuoco di odorose legna, cantando lai soave- 
 mente dolorosi, e tessendo una bianca mortaia, 
 sopra la quale suo nome era a mezzo intessato, con 
 qualche altro nome oscuro ed imperfetto; ed egli 
 la prego di dirlo suo nome, ed ella disse con voce 
 fiocca ma dolce— "La Morte;" ed il giovane disse 
 — "O bella Morte, ti prego di aiutarmi contre di 
 
 Ci63 3 
 
ti prego di ajutar mi (56) contro di queste noiose 
 imagini compagni della tua Sorella che mi tormen- 
 tono tuttavia— E la Morte rideva (57) soava- 
 mente, e gli bacio la fronte, sicche tremava ogni 
 vena di gioia e paura e le fece stare presso di lei in 
 una stanza della sua Spelonca, donde sperava che 
 piu mai non uscir[e]bbe f[u]ori Perche si inma- 
 moro [sic~] si fortemente della Morte, che La Vita, 
 stessa non che alcuna della sua schiera, (58) piu 
 non gli pareva bella. E tanto lo vinse la passione, 
 sul ginocchio prego la Morte di amarlo (59) come 
 egli amava lei e fare suo piacere. E la Morte disse 
 — Ardito che tu sei! . . ai desiri del quale mai 
 ha la Morte corrisposta? Si [sic for Se~\ tu non mi 
 amasti forse ti amerei, ma amondomi [sic for 
 amandomi\ io ti odio e fuggo — . Cosi dicendo 
 usci della spelonca, e (60) la sua (61) oscura e ete- 
 rea figura fu presto (62) persa fra gli intrecciati 
 rami della selva. 
 
 (63) Di loro il Giovane seguitava le orme della 
 Morte, (64) per il Mondo— (65) e si forte fu l'a- 
 more che gli (66) menava, che (67) aveva cercato 
 La per tutto l'orbe, e molti anni erano gia (68) 
 spenti ed appassito il fiore della forma, quando si 
 
 (56) e difedarmi (57) dolce (58) non (59) come 
 egli l'amava. — E la Morte disse — Ardito che tu sei . . ai voti 
 di cui (60) fuggeva (61) aeria (62) perduta (63) II 
 Giovane cercava la Morte (64) tutto quel (65) ben furono 
 
 conosciuti \ . > vestigii (66) as (67) molti anni (68) 
 
 passati, ed i capelli suoi avevano devenuti bianci piu per dolor 
 ma / ed il dolor piu che gli anni avevano imbiancita la chioma e 
 seccati / spenti / il la ed / e seccata il vigore della membra quando 
 
 Cl643 
 
queste noiose immagini, compagni della tua so- 
 rella, le quali mi tormentano tutta-via." E la 
 Morte le rassicuro, gli prese la mano, ridendo, 
 e gli bacio la fronte e le guancie, sicche tre- 
 mava ogni vena di gioia e di paura; e gli fece 
 stare presso di se, in una camera della sua grotta, 
 dove, disse, fu contro al destino che le rie forme, 
 compagne della Vita, venissero. II giovane con- 
 tinuamente praticandosi colla Morte, ed ella, coll' 
 animo di sorella, carezzandolo e facendo ogni cor- 
 tesia di atto e di parola, ben presto s'innamoro di 
 lei; e la Vita stessa, non che alcuna della sua 
 schiera, non gli pareva bella. E tanto lo vinse la 
 passione, che sul ginocchio prego la Morte di 
 amarlo come egli amava lei, e di voler fare il suo 
 piacere. Ma la Morte disse, "Ardito che tu siei, al 
 desir del quale mai ha la Morte corrisposta? Si tu 
 non mi amasti, io forse ti amerei, amandomi io ti 
 odio, e fuggo." Cosi dicendo, usci della spelonca, 
 e la sua oscura ed eterea figura fu presto persa fra 
 gli intrecciati rami della selva. 
 
 Da quel punto il giovane seguiva le orme della 
 Morte, e si forte fu l'amore chi lo menava, che 
 aveva circuito l'orbe, ed indagato ogni sua regione ; 
 e molti anni erano gia spenti, ma le soffranze piu 
 che gli anni avevano imbiancita la chioma ed ap- 
 passito il fiore della forma, quando si trovo sui con- 
 
 ci6 5 n 
 
trovo (69) sui confini della stessa selva, dalle quale 
 (70) aveva cominciato il suo misero errare; e si 
 gittava sull erba lagrimando, e le sue lagrime l'ac- 
 cecava tanto, che per molto tempo non se n'awi- 
 dea, che tutte quelle che bagnavano il viso e (71) 
 il petto non furono sue proprie, — ma che una 
 donna pianse con lui, per pieta del suo pianto. E 
 levando gli occhi, la vidde eil' (72) suo amore per 
 la Morte (73) fu cangiato subito in odio e sospetto, 
 perche questo nuovo amore fu si forte, che vinse 
 (74) °g n i a l tro (75) E quella donna, (76) primo 
 l'amava per pieta sola, (77) ma tosto col compas- 
 sione crebbe l'amore stesso; non avendo piu uopo 
 di (78) essere compatito alcuno amato da lei. (79) 
 Fu questa la donna per la quale amore (80) me- 
 nava il giovane in quel (81) oscuro laberinto, e 
 gli fece tanto soffrire; (82) e che lo giudicava an- 
 cora indegno di tanta gloria, o che lo vidde troppo 
 debole per tolerare(83) siimmensagioia— (84). E 
 
 (69) sulla falda (70) comin (71) le mane (72) 
 
 amore suo p (73) spariva sorti perche amava / sfuggio / 
 lasciavo voto il cuore, e torno del cuore e l'imagine di questa 
 angelica donna ci sedersi, e fu cacciato in men travolto (74) 
 non (75) pensiere — e la (76) fa tanta fu, la sua divina 
 compassione, (77) e (78) compassione (79) Questa 
 
 era la quella per la quale Amore non giudicandolo ancora indegno 
 scese del cielo e la fece tanto soffriere in questa (80) lo 
 
 (81) laberinto oscuro (82) g (83) gi (84) II giovane 
 e questa / Non sono parole che possono / capace de / rappresen- 
 
 tare questa donna i soli pensieri dell' < . > gentile possone 
 
 figurarla 
 
 C 166:1 
 
fini della stessa selva della quale aveva cominciato 
 il suo misero errare. E si gitto sull'erbe, e per 
 molte ore pianse; e le lagrime l'accecavano tanto, 
 che per molto tempo non se n'awidde, che tutte 
 quelle che bagnavano il viso e il petto, non furono 
 sue proprie ; ma che una donna chinata dietro di lui 
 pianse per pieta del suo pianto. E levando gli 
 occhi la vidde; e mai gli pareva d'aver veduto una 
 visione si gloriosa; e dubitava forte si fosse cosa 
 umana. Sue amore per la Morte fu improwisa- 
 mente cangiato in odio e sospetto, perche questo 
 nuovo amore fu si forte che vinse ogni altro pen- 
 siero. E quella pietosa donna primo gli amava per 
 pieta sola, ma tosto colla compassione crebbe l'a- 
 more; e gl'amava schiettamente, non avendo piu 
 uopo d'essere compatito alcuno amato da quella. 
 Fu questa la donna, in traccia della quale Amore 
 aveva menato il giovane per quel oscuro laberinto, 
 e f atto tanto errare e soffrire ; forse che lo giudicava 
 indegno ancora di tanta gloria, e che lo vedeva 
 debole per tolerare si immensa gioia. Dopo avere 
 
 Ci673 
 
ci sono, chi dicono chi [sic for che] Le anime di tutti 
 i due furono segnati, davanti d'essere nati nel mon- 
 do, a contentarsi una della' altra, e di non conten- 
 tarsi finche (85) furono divise (86) Queste due si 
 (87) passegiavano insieme in quella selva, (88) 
 quando la Morte si mise avanti, e disse (89) "Men- 
 tre che tu, o giovane, mi amasti, io ti odiava, (90) 
 ora, che tu mi odiasti, io ti amo; (91) ed io voglio 
 tanto bene a te, ed alia tua sposa, che nel mio regno, 
 (92) che (93) i piu chiammano Paradiso (94) vi 
 ho serbato un eletto luogo, dove voi potete sicura- 
 mente compire i vostri felici amori." (95) Ma la 
 donna sdegnata, (96) e forse per un poco di gelosia 
 cagione del passato amore della sua sposa [sic] tor- 
 no il dosso sopra la Morte, dicendo fra se stesso, 
 "Che vuol questa amante del mio sposa [sic] che 
 viene qua turbarci?"— (97) e chiamd, vita vita! e 
 la Vita venne, col viso allegra [sic] coronato [sic] 
 dun iride, e vestita in versicolor manto di pelle di 
 chameleone e la Morte si ne ando (98) piangendo, 
 e dipartendo disse dolcemente— (99) Voi mi sos- 
 pettate, ma io vi lo perdono, e vi aspetto dove a 
 bisogna che passiate; (100) perche io abito col 
 Amore ed Eternita (101) con quelle e forza che si 
 praticassero, quelle anime che eternamente amano 
 se — Voi verrete [sic for vedrete] allora, si io ho 
 
 meritato i vostri dubbj. In tanto j-j raccam- 
 
 (85) non piu (86) E tutti passioni perche quelli, che (87) 
 canbeavan (88) finche (89) Finche tu mi (90) adess 
 (91) e ti (92) ho (93) tu dicevi (94) ti (95) E 
 
 (96) \ t vedere la sffacciatetta [.sic for sffacciatezza] (97) ed 
 
 il giovane / ed (98) ridendo io (99) Tu mi (100) ed 
 
 Amore abb (101) e tu 
 
 C 168;] 
 
un poco asciugato il pianto, quei due passeggiavano 
 insieme in questa stessa selva, fin che la Morte si 
 mise avanti e disse, "Mentre che, o giovane, mi 
 amasti, io ti odiava, ed ora che tu mi odiasti, ti amo, 
 e voglio tanto bene a te ed alia tua sposa che nel mio 
 regno, che tu puoi chiamare Paradiso, ho serbato 
 un eletto luogo, dove voi potete securamente com- 
 pire i vostri felici amori." E la donna sdegnata, o 
 forse un poco ingelosita per cagione dell'amore 
 passato dello suo sposo, torno il dosso sopra la 
 Morte, dicendo fra se stesso, "Che vuol questa 
 amante del mio sposo che viene qui turbarci?" e 
 chiamo "Vita, Vital" e la Vita venne col viso alle- 
 gro, coronata d'una iride, e vestita in versicolore 
 manto di pelle di cameleone, e la Morte se ni ando 
 piangendo, e partendo disse dolcemente, "Voi mi 
 sospettate, ma io vi lo perdono, e vi aspetto dove 
 bisogna che passiate, perche io abito coll' Amore e 
 coll' Eternita, con quelle e forza che praticassero 
 quelle anime che eternamente amano. Voi vedrete 
 
 D693 
 
mando [sic] alia Vita e Sorella mia, ti prego per 
 amore di quella Morte dalla quale (102) tu sei la 
 gemella (103), di non adoperare piu contro di 
 questi amanti le tue solite arte, ( 104) da loro che ti 
 basti il tributo gia pagato di lagrime e (105) sos- 
 piri, che sono le richezze tue— (106) II giovane, 
 rammentandosi di quanti mali (107) la gli aveva 
 recati in quel bosco, se (108) disfidava della Vita, 
 (109) ma la Donna quantunque fu sospettosa 
 nondemmino [sic for nondimeno\ essendo pure 
 gelosa della Morte, credeva di far la dispetto di 
 andare piu — s 
 
 (102) mai (103) tu non eri divisa (104) ma di con- 
 
 ducer gli a me senza (105) di (106) E le (107) aveva 
 (108) p (109) ed la Donna la 
 
 D70] 
 
allora se io ho meritata i vostri dubbj. Intanto vi 
 raccomando alia Vita, e, sorella mia, ti prego per 
 amore di quella Morte della quella tu sei la ge- 
 mella, di non adoperare contra di questi amanti le 
 tue solite arti, che ti basti il tribute gia pagato di 
 sospiri e di lagrime, che sono le ricchezze tue." II 
 giovane, rammentandosi di quanti mali gli aveva 
 recati in quel bosco, se disfidava della Vita; ma la 
 donna, quantunque in sospetto, essendo pure gelosa 
 della Morte, . . . 
 
 Ci70 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL PARTICULARS OF 
 THE THREE NOTE BOOKS 
 
 The three Note Books dealt with in these vol- 
 umes and in the paper which appeared in The 
 Bibliophile Society's Ninth Year Book should per- 
 haps be briefly described. No. I and No. Ill are 
 of identical type in their material manufacture, 
 that is to say, the type of a small Bank of England 
 pass-book, but with a flap meant to be secured by 
 tying instead of a flap with a tongue passing through 
 a slit or strap as in an old-fashioned pocket-book. 
 The covers of these two Shelley books are mere 
 strips of uncoloured parchment lined with poor 
 paper. The flap of No. I shows no trace of having 
 had a tie attached to it; but No. Ill still has the 
 remains of the leather tie forming part of its 
 original design. Each of these two books was 
 formed by stitching six fasciculi of paper into the 
 primitive parchment cover; and the sewing threads 
 pass through the backs of the covers, where they 
 still remain unbroken. The strength of this the 
 original sewing did not prevent Shelley from tear- 
 ing out leaves or parts of leaves when so minded ; 
 
and No. I has had hard enough usage in that way 
 —so much so that it cannot be stated for certain of 
 how many leaves the complete book at first con- 
 sisted. No. Ill always contained as it still does six 
 fasciculi of sixteen leaves each. 
 
 Note Book II, also not ruled for cash, is less 
 businesslike-looking than I and III, being a little 
 half-bound volume with a pink parchment back 
 and boards covered with dark green mottled paper. 
 It was made up of ten fasciculi of ten leaves each 
 sewn in the ordinary way and lined into a cover 
 with a rounded back. It has regular end-papers, 
 white and of a decent quality, and each consisting 
 of a paste-down and a fly-leaf; so that, to a poet 
 with a soul above the futile luxury of end-papers, 
 the book was one containing a hundred and two 
 leaves and two stuck-down pages available for his 
 immortal purposes. 
 
 Thus far as regards the blank books in whish 
 Shelley wrote the poems, and made the notes and 
 memoranda, and drew the pictures, diagrams, etc., 
 which are dealt with in this present work. It re- 
 mains to set down, apart from the spiritual contents 
 which it has taken over a year and a half to 
 examine and deal with, the material contents of the 
 three manuscript volumes as now existing in the 
 collection of Mr. Bixby; and they can in this re- 
 spect be dealt with in their natural order, Note 
 Book I, Note Book II, and Note Book III. 
 
Note Book I is the least easy to calendar. My 
 long daily intimacy with the soul of the little vol- 
 ume has naturally led to an intimate acquaintance 
 with every detail of its body and its body's mishaps, 
 —its bends and its breaks, its wrenches and its 
 lacerations, stains, creases, and so on; and it has 
 become a conviction almost amounting to certainty 
 that the six fasciculi of which the book originally 
 consisted were not of uniform bulk, three being 
 composed of sixteen leaves each and three of twelve 
 leaves each. The matter is not very important; 
 and yet it were well to know as much as may be as 
 to the measure of what we have lost through the 
 poet's many acts of aggression and assault on this 
 poor little receptacle into which he poured such 
 infinitely valuable treasure. I have no doubt, then, 
 that, in starting from "Swiftly walk o'er the West- 
 ern wave," we are beginning at what was the first 
 leaf of the book when it was a virgin volume 
 whereon Shelley's pen had made no assault, and 
 that that fasciculus was one of sixteen leaves. Let- 
 tering the fasciculi as "A" to "F," we may now 
 record what leaves, in my opinion, they originally 
 contained, and how many of them they now con- 
 tain. 
 
 Fasciculus A, then, appears to have consisted of 
 
sixteen leaves, of which the fourth has been torn out 
 all but a narrow blank stub, and the eleventh all but 
 a half-inch stub of some interest, while the present 
 middle leaves of the fasciculus, the seventh and 
 eighth, are blasted with such evidences of an earth- 
 quake that I am sure Shelley impetuously tore out 
 the real middle, and that thus the true middle (the 
 original eighth and ninth leaves) is missing: re- 
 mainder twelve leaves, of which two are mutilated. 
 
 Fasciculus B no doubt started in life twelve 
 leaves strong, of which the third, eighth, tenth, 
 eleventh, and twelfth, are gone. The first and sec- 
 ond are lying loose in the book: doubtless they and 
 the third got adrift when Shelley violently divorced 
 them from their fellows, the tenth, eleventh, and 
 twelfth. One, the third (which Garnett certainly 
 transcribed), was not in the book when sold; and 
 the second was misplaced as the first leaf in the 
 mutilated book, and catalogued accordingly. Re- 
 mainder seven leaves. 
 
 Fasciculus C was another twelve-leaved one; but 
 the first and second leaves are gone all but two 
 uneventful stubs, while the ninth, tenth, eleventh, 
 and twelfth have been roughly torn out, leaving 
 two eventful and two uneventful stubs. Remainder 
 six leaves. 
 
 Fasciculus D was the third twelve-leaved one. 
 The fifth, sixth, eighth, tenth, and eleventh leaves 
 are torn out, nothing worth record being left on 
 any of the stubs. Remainder seven leaves. 
 
 CI763 
 

 Fasciculus E had sixteen leaves to start with; but 
 the fourth, tenth, eleventh, thirteenth, fifteenth, 
 and sixteenth are gone all but unmarked stubs. Re- 
 mainder ten leaves. 
 
 Fasciculus F originally ended the book with six- 
 teen leaves, of which the fifteenth has gone, leaving 
 only an unmarked stub, while two thirds of the 
 sixteenth have been torn off. Remainder fourteen 
 leaves and a third. 
 
 Thus, Note Book I, in which as in the case of II 
 and III Shelley made a beginning at each end, 
 has fifty-six leaves for its two paginations. These 
 have now been paged by me in pencil at Mr. Bix- 
 by's request, and form an unstarred and a starred 
 pagination, in each of which the leaves are num- 
 bered with the addition of the letters r. (recto) 
 and v. (verso), thus:— i r., i v., 2 r., 2 v., and so on 
 up to 16 r. ; and * 1 r., * 1 v., and so on up to * 41 r. 
 (which forms the verso of 16 r., though each is, in 
 its own pagination, a recto). The rough paper of 
 the lining having got unstuck by moisture and hav- 
 ing marks, sums, etc., on it at each end of the book, 
 the loose lining of the recto cover is numbered 
 1 r. (a) and that of the verso cover * 1 r. (a). 
 
 II 
 
 In Note Book II the original one hundred and 
 two leaves are represented now by ninety-four 
 
 1^771 
 
(counting the fly-leaves, as in the original hundred 
 and two). Two of the ninety-four are mutilated, 
 but come into the account in virtue of the writing 
 Shelley left upon them. Of the eight missing leaves 
 six are indicated by the barest stubs, one by a wide 
 stub with no marks on it, and one by a stub with 
 the remains of pencilled words on both sides. The 
 leaves are numbered from i r. to 32 r. in the first 
 pagination and from * 1 r. to * 63 r. in the second 
 pagination. Page * 63 r. forms the verso of page 
 32 r., though each is, in its own pagination, a recto. 
 The paste-downs, being written and drawn upon, 
 have been numbered 1 r. (a) and * 1 r. (a). 
 
 Ill 
 
 Of the original ninety-six leaves of Note Book 
 III, not one has been removed; but two have been 
 mutilated, — one with the disastrous effect of re- 
 moving, with the part torn out, a corner of the cor- 
 responding leaf bearing words of Shelley's that we 
 particularly want, — the other harmlessly, as far as 
 we can judge, for it was probably blank all over. 
 The leaves are numbered from 1 r. to 78 v. in the 
 first pagination and from * 1 r. to * 18 v. in the 
 second. The coarse paper lining of the parchment 
 cover is blank at one end, while the other bears a 
 very slight pencil sketch— just a few lines, repre- 
 senting a schooner with sails set on both masts and 
 
 D783 
 
a bare hull alongside, like the hull of the boat 
 figured at page 101 of this volume. 
 
 The objects of the numbering of the pages in 
 these books are that it may be known exactly how 
 many leaves are at the present time comprised in 
 these extraordinarily precious relics of a great poet, 
 and that any students allowed access to the books 
 may be able, henceforth, to refer to any page by its 
 actual number— thus I 15 r., I * 28 v., II 9 v., 
 II * 21 r., Ill 19 r., Ill * 6 v., and so on, as exem- 
 plified in the commentary interspersed among 
 Shelley's compositions in this present work. 
 
 
 Ci793