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NOTE ON THE POEMS OF 1819.

BY THE EDITOR.

THOUGH Shelley's first eager desire to excite his countrymen to resist openly the oppressions existent during "the good old times" had faded with early youth, still his warmest sympathies were for the people. He was a republican, and loved a democracy. He looked on all human beings as inheriting an equal right to possess the dearest privileges of our nature, the necessaries of life, when fairly earned by labour, and intellectual instruction. His hatred of any despotism, that looked upon the people as not to be consulted or protected from want and ignorance, was intense. He was residing near Leghorn, at Villa Valsovano, writing The Cenci, when the news of the Manchester Massacre reached us; it roused in him

violent emotions of indignation and compassion. The great truth that the many, if accordant and resolute, could control the few, as was shown some years after, made him long to teach his injured countrymen how to resist. Inspired by these feelings, he wrote the Masque of Anarchy, which he sent to his friend, Leigh Hunt, to be inserted in the Examiner, of which he was then the Editor.

"I did not insert it," Leigh Hunt writes in his valuable and interesting preface to this poem, when he printed it in 1832, "because I thought that the public at large had not become sufficiently discerning to do justice to the sincerity and kindheartedness of his spirit, that walked in this flaming robe of verse." Days of outrage have passed away, and with them the exasperation that would cause such an appeal to the many to be injurious. Without being aware of them, they at one time acted on his suggestions, and gained the day; but they rose when human life was respected by the minister in power; such was not the case during the administration which excited Shelley's abhorrence.

The poem was written for the people, and is therefore in a more popular tone than usual; portions strike as abrupt and unpolished, but many stanzas are all his own. I heard him repeat, and admired those beginning,

My Father Time is old and grey,

before I knew to what poem they were to belong. But the most touching passage is that which describes the blessed effects of liberty; they might make a patriot of any man, whose heart was not wholly closed against his humbler fellow-crea

tures.

Shelley loved the people, and respected them as often more virtuous, as always more suffering, and, therefore, more deserving of sympathy, than the great. He believed that a clash between the two classes of society was inevitable, and he eagerly ranged himself on the people's side. He had an idea of publishing a series of poems adapted expressly to commemorate their circumstances and wrongs-he wrote a few, but in those days of prosecution for libel they could not be printed. They are not among the best of his productions, a writer being always shackled when he endeavours to write down to the comprehension of those who could not understand or feel a highly imaginative

style; but they show his earnestness, and with

what heartfelt compassion he went home to the direct point of injury-that oppression is detestable, as being the parent of starvation, nakedness, and ignorance. Besides these outpourings of compassion and indignation, he had meant to adorn the cause he loved with loftier poetry of glory and triumph-such is the scope of the Ode to the Assertors of Liberty. He sketched also a new version of our national anthem, as addressed to Liberty.

God prosper, speed, and save,
God raise from England's grave
Her murdered Queen!

Pave with swift victory
The steps of Liberty,
Whom Britons own to be
Immortal Queen.

See, she comes throned on high,
On swift Eternity!

God save the Queen!

Millions on millions wait
Firm, rapid, and elate,
On her majestic state!

God save the Queen!

She is thine own pure soul
Moulding the mighty whole,

God save the Queen! She is thine own deep love Rained down from heaven above, Wherever she rest or move,

God save our Queen!

Wilder her enemies

In their own dark disguise,

God save our Queen!

All earthly things that dare
Her sacred name to bear,

Strip them, as kings are, bare;
God save the Queen!

Be her eternal throne
Built in our hearts alone,

God save the Queen!

Let the oppressor hold
Canopied seats of gold;
She sits enthroned of old

O'er our hearts Queen.

Lips touched by seraphim
Breathe out the choral hymn
God save the Queen!

Sweet as if Angels sang,
Loud as that trumpet's clang
Wakening the world's dead gang,

God save the Queen!

Shelley had suffered severely from the death of our son during this summer. His heart, attuned to every kindly affection, was full of burning love for his offspring. No words can express the anguish he felt when his elder children were torn from him. In his first resentment against the Chancellor, on the passing of the decree, he had written a curse, in which there breathes, besides haughty indignation, all the tenderness of a father's love, which could imagine and fondly dwell upon its loss and the consequences. It is as follows:

TO THE LORD CHANCELLOR.

THY country's curse is on thee, darkest Crest
Of that foul, knotted, many-headed worm,
Which rends our Mother's bosom-Priestly Pest!
Masked Resurrection of a buried form! *
Thy country's curse is on thee! Justice sold,
Truth trampled, Nature's land-marks overthrown,
And heaps of fraud-accumulated gold,

Plead, loud as thunder, at Destruction's throne. And whilst that slow sure Angel, which aye stands, Watching the beck of Mutability,

Delays to execute her high commands,

And, though a nation weeps, spares thine and thee;

O let a father's curse be on thy soul,

And let a daughter's hope be on thy tomb, And both on thy grey head, a leaden cowl,

To weigh thee down to thine approaching doom!

* The Star Chamber.

I curse thee by a parent's outraged love,
By hopes long cherished and too lately lost,
By gentle feelings thou couldst never prove,
By griefs which thy stern nature never crost:
By those infantine smiles of happy light,

Which were a fire within a stranger's hearth,
Quenched even when kindled, in untimely night,
Hiding the promise of a lovely birth:

By those unpractised accents of young speech,
Which he who is a father thought to frame
To gentlest lore, such as the wisest teach;
Thou strike the lyre of mind! O grief and shame!

By all the happy see in children's growth,
That undeveloped flower of budding years,
Sweetness and sadness interwoven both,

Source of the sweetest hopes and saddest fears:

By all the days under a hireling's care

Of dull constraint and bitter heaviness,O wretched ye, if ever any were,

Sadder than orphans, yet not fatherless!

By the false cant, which on their innocent lips, Must hang like poison on an opening bloom, By the dark creeds which cover with eclipse Their pathway from the cradle to the tomb:

By thy most impious Hell, and all its terrors,
By all the grief, the madness, and the guilt
Of thine impostures, which must be their errors,
That sand on which thy crumbling Power is built

By thy complicity with lust and hate,

Thy thirst for tears, thy hunger after gold, The ready frauds which ever on thee wait, The servile arts in which thou hast grown old;

By thy most killing sneer, and by thy smile,
By all the acts and snares of thy black den,
And-for thou canst outweep the crocodile,-
By thy false tears-those millstones braining men;

By all the hate which checks a father's love,
By all the scorn which kills a father's care,
By those most impious hands that dared remove
Nature's high bounds-by thee-and by despair!

Yes, the despair which bids a father groan,

And cry, my children are no longer mine; The blood within those veins may be mine own, But, Tyrant, their polluted souls are thine.

I curse thee, though I hate thee not; O slave!
If thou couldst quench the earth-consuming hell
Of which thou art a dæmon, on thy grave

This curse should be a blessing. Fare thee well!

At one time, while the question was still pending, the Chancellor had said some words that seemed to intimate that Shelley should not be permitted the care of any of his children, and for a moment he feared that our infant son would be torn from us. He did not hesitate to resolve, if such were menaced, to abandon country, fortune, everything, and to escape with his child; and I find some unfinished stanzas addressed to this son, whom

afterwards we lost at Rome, written under the idea that we might suddenly be forced to cross the sea, so to preserve him. This poem, as well as the one previously quoted, were not written to exhibit the pangs of distress to the public; they were the spontaneous outbursts of a man who brooded over his wrongs and woes, and was impelled to shed the grace of his genius over the uncontrollable emotions of his heart :

The billows on the beach are leaping around it, The bark is weak and frail,

The sea looks black, and the clouds that bound it
Darkly strew the gale.

Come with me, thou delightful child,
Come with me, though the wave is wild,
And the winds are loose, we must not stay,
Or the slaves of law may rend thee away.

They have taken thy brother and sister dear,
They have made them unfit for thee;
They have withered the smile and dried the tear,
Which should have been sacred to me.
To a blighting faith and a cause of crime
They have bound them slaves in youthly time,
And they will curse my name and thee,
Because we fearless are and free.

Come thou, beloved as thou art,

Another sleepeth still,

Near thy sweet mother's anxious heart,
Which thou with joy wilt fill;
With fairest smiles of wonder thrown
On that which is indeed our own,

And which in distant lands will be

The dearest playmate unto thee.

Fear not the tyrants will rule for ever,
Or the priests of the evil faith;
They stand on the brink of that raging river,
Whose waves they have tainted with death.
It is fed from the depth of a thousand dells,
Around them it foams and rages and swells;
And their swords and their sceptres I floating see,
Like wrecks on the surge of eternity.

Rest, rest, shrick not, thou gentle child!
The rocking of the boat thou fearest,
And the cold spray and the clamour wild?
There sit between us two, thou dearest;
Me and thy mother-well we know
The storm at which thou tremblest so,
With all its dark and hungry graves,
Less cruel than the savage slaves

Who hunt thee o'er these sheltering waves.

This hour will in thy memory

Be a dream of days forgotten;

We soon shall dwell by the azure sea
Of serene and golden Italy,
Or Greece, the Mother of the free.
And I will teach thine infant tongue
To call upon their heroes old
In their own language, and will mould
Thy growing spirit in the flame

Of Grecian lore; that by such name
A patriot's birthright thou mayst claim.

I ought to observe that the fourth verse of this effusion is introduced in Rosalind and Helen.

When afterwards this child died at Rome, he wrote, apropos of the English burying-ground in that city, "This spot is the repository of a sacred loss, of which the yearnings of a parent's heart are now prophetic; he is rendered immortal by love, as his memory is by death. My beloved child lies buried here. I envy death the body far less than the oppressors the minds of those whom they have torn from me. The one can only kill the body, the other crushes the affections."

In this new edition I have added to the poems of this year," Peter Bell the Third." A critique on Wordsworth's Peter Bell reached us at Leghorn, which amused Shelley exceedingly and suggested this poem.

I need scarcely observe that nothing personal to the Author of Peter Bell is intended in this poem. No man ever admired Wordsworth's poetry more; he read it perpetually, and taught others to appreciate its beauties. This poem is, like all others written by Shelley, ideal. He conceived the idealism of a poet-a man of lofty and creative genius,-quitting the glorious calling of discovering and announcing the beautiful and good, to support and propagate ignorant prejudices and pernicious errors; imparting to the unenlightened, not that ardour for truth and spirit of toleration which Shelley looked on as the sources of the moral improvement and happiness of mankind; but false and injurious opinions, that evil was good, and that ignorance and force were the best allies of purity and virtue. His idea was that a man gifted even as transcendantly as the Author of Peter Bell, with the highest qualities of genius, must, if he fostered such errors, be infected with dulness. This poem was written, as a warning-not as a narration of the reality. He was unacquainted personally with Wordsworth or with Coleridge, (to whom he alludes in the fifth part of the poem,) and therefore, I repeat, his poem is purely ideal ;-it contains something of criticism on the compositions of these great poets, but nothing injurious to the men themselves.

No poem contains more of Shelley's peculiar views, with regard to the errors into which many of the wisest have fallen, and of the pernicious effects of certain opinions on society. Much of it is beautifully written-and though, like the burlesque drama of Swellfoot, it must be looked on as a plaything, it has so much merit and poetry-so much of himself in it, that it cannot fail to interest greatly, and by right belongs to the world for whose instruction and benefit it was written.

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