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 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 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 gray, 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-creatures. 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, Pave with swift victory The steps of Liberty, Immortal Queen! See, she comes throned on high, On swift Eternity! God save the Queen! Millions on millions wait God save the Queen! She is thine own pure soul 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 God save the Queen! Let the oppressor hold O'er our hearts Queen! Lips touched by seraphim 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, Thy country's curse is on thee! Justice sold, 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 gray head, a leaden cowl, To weigh thee down to thine approaching doom! I curse thee by a parent's outraged love, 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 these unpractised ascents of young speech, The Star Chamber. By all the happy see in children's growth, Source of the sweetest hopes and saddest fears: By all the days under a hireling's care 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 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, Yes, the despair which bids a father groan, I curse thee, though I hate thee not; O slave! 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, every thing, 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 sea looks black, and the clouds that bound it 1 Come with me, thou delightful child, Come thou, beloved as thou art, Near thy sweet mother's anxious heart, The dearest playmate unto thee. Fear not the tyrants will rule for ever, 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 Or Greece, the Mother of the free. In their own language, and will mould 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. POEMS WRITTEN THE SENSITIVE PLANT. PART I. A SENSITIVE Plant in a garden grew, But none ever trembled and panted with bliss The snowdrop, and then the violet, Arose from the ground with warm rain wet, And their breath was mixed with fresh odour, sent Then the pied windflowers and the tulip tall, And the Naiad-like lily of the vale, And the hyacinth purple, and white, and blue, And the rose like a nymph to the bath addrest, And the wandlike lily, which lifted up, Gazed through the clear dew on the tender sky; And the jessamine faint, and the sweet tuberose, And on the stream whose inconstant bosom Broad water-lilies lay tremulously, With the light and the odour its neighbour shed, But the Sensitive Plant, which could give small fruit For the Sensitive Plant has no bright flower; It loves, even like Love, its deep heart is full, The light winds, which from unsustaining wings The plumed insects swift and free, Like golden boats on a sunny sea, The unseen clouds of the dew, which lie The quivering vapours of dim noontide, Which, like a sea o'er the warm earth glide, In which every sound, and odour, and beam, Move, as reeds in a single stream; Each and all like ministering angels were And when evening descended from heaven above, And the Earth was all rest, and the air was all love, And delight, though less bright, was far more deep, And the day's veil fell from the world of sleep. And the beasts, and the birds, and the insects were In an ocean of dreams without a sound; [drowned Whose waves never mark, though they ever impress The light sand which paves it, consciousness; (Only overhead the sweet nightingale Were mixed with the dreams of the Sensitive Plant.) The Sensitive Plant was the earliest Up-gathered into the bosom of rest; A sweet child weary of its delight, The feeblest and yet the favourite, Cradled within the embrace of night. PART II. THERE was a Power in this sweet place, A Lady, the wonder of her kind, Tended the garden from morn to even: She had no companion of mortal race, But her tremulous breath and her flushing face Told whilst the morn kissed the sleep from her eyes, That her dreams were less slumber than Paradise: As if some bright spirit for her sweet sake Her step seemed to pity the grass it prest: You might hear, by the heaving of her breast, That the coming and the going of the wind Brought pleasure there and left passion behind. And wherever her airy footstep trod, I doubt not the flowers of that garden sweet She sprinkled bright water from the stream She emptied the rain of the thunder showers. She lifted their heads with her tender hands, And all killing insects and gnawing worms, THREE days the flowers of the garden fair, And on the fourth, the Sensitive Plant The weary sound and the heavy breath, The dark grass, and the flowers among the grass, |