The trumpet of a prophecy! O wind, AN EXHORTATION. CHAMELEONS feed on light and air: Poets' food is love and fame: Poets could but find the same With as little toil as they, Would they ever change their hue Suiting it to every ray Twenty times a day? Poets are on this cold earth, That poets range. Yet dare not stain with wealth or power A poet's free and heavenly mind: If bright chameleons should devour Any food but beams and wind, ON THE MEDUSA OF LEONARDO DA VINCL IN THE FLORENTINE GALLERY. Ir lieth, gazing on the midnight sky, Yet it is less the horror than the grace Which turns the gazer's spirit into stone Whereon the lineaments of that dead face Are graven, till the characters be grown Into itself, and thought no more can trace; 'Tis the melodious hues of beauty thrown Athwart the darkness and the glare of pain, Which humanize and harmonize the strain. And from its head as from one body grow, As [ grass out of a watery rock, Hairs which are vipers, and they curl and flow, And their long tangles in each other lock, And with unending involutions show Their mailed radiance, as it were to mock The torture and the death within, and saw The solid air with many a ragged jaw. And from a stone beside, a poisonous eft Of sense, has flitted with a mad surprise 'Tis the tempestuous loveliness of terror; For from the serpents gleams a brazen glare Kindled by that inextricable error, Which makes a thrilling vapour of the air Become a [ ] and ever-shifting mirror Of all the beauty and the terror there,— A woman's countenance, with serpent locks, Gazing in death on heaven from those wet rocks. FLORENCE, 1819. TO WILLIAM SHELLEY. (With what truth I may say Non è più come era prima!) My lost William, thou in whom Here its ashes find a tomb, But beneath this pyramid Thou art not—if a thing divine Where art thou, my gentle child? Let me think that through low seeds June, 1819. NOTE ON POEMS OF 1819; BY THE EDITOR. He 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. 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 nserted 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 kind-heartedness 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 lay; but they rose when human life was respected by the |