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The trumpet of a prophecy! O wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

AN EXHORTATION.

CHAMELEONS feed on light and air:

Poets' food is love and fame:
If in this wide world of care

Poets could but find the same

With as little toil as they,

Would they ever change their hue
As the light chameleons do,

Suiting it to every ray

Twenty times a day?

Poets are on this cold earth,
As chameleons might be,
Hidden from their early birth
In a cave beneath the sea;
Where light is, chameleons change!
Where love is not, poets do.
Fame is love disguised: if few
Find either, never think it strange

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,
They would grow as earthly soon
As their brother lizards are.
Children of a sunnier star,
Spirits from beyond the moon,
O, refuse the boon!

ON

THE MEDUSA OF LEONARDO DA VINCL

IN THE FLORENTINE GALLERY.

Ir lieth, gazing on the midnight sky,
Upon the cloudy mountain peak supine;
Below, far lands are seen tremblingly;
Its horror and its beauty are divine.
Upon its lips and eyelids seems to lie
Loveliness like a shadow, from which shine,
Fiery and lurid, struggling underneath,
The agonies of anguish and of death.

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
Peeps idly into these Gorgonian eyes;
Whilst in the air a ghastly bat, bereft

Of sense, has flitted with a mad surprise
Out of the cave this hideous light hath cleft,
And he comes hastening like a moth that hies
After a taper; and the midnight sky
Flares, a light more dread than obscurity.

'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
Roma, Roma, Roma,

Non è più come era prima!)

My lost William, thou in whom
Some bright spirit lived, and did
That decaying robe consume
Which its lustre faintly hid,

Here its ashes find a tomb,

But beneath this pyramid

Thou art not—if a thing divine
Like thee can die, thy funeral shrine
Is thy mother's grief and mine.

Where art thou, my gentle child?
Let me think thy spirit feeds,
With its life intense and mild,
The love of living leaves and weeds,
Among these tombs and ruins wild ;-

Let me think that through low seeds
Of the sweet flowers and sunny grass,
Into their hues and scents may pass,
A portion

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

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