^rllcjj j&octetg's ^Publications 
 
 SECOND SERIES— No. 17 
 
 ROSALIND AND HELEN 
 
 A MODERN ECLOGUE 
 
 WITH OTHER POEMS 
 
 PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY. 
 
 EDITED BV 
 
 H. BUXTON FORMAN 
 
 LONDON: 
 
 PUBLISHED FOR THE SHELLEY SOCIETY 
 BY REEVES AND TURNER 196 STRAND 
 
 1888 
 
 PRICE TEN SHILLINGS 
 

 
 
 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. 
 Class '5~S-A-C- CASE \d» 
 
 
 
 i^>. /y 
 
 
ROSALIND AND HELEN 
 
Of this book five hundred copies have been printed. 
 
ROSALIND AND HELEN 
 
 A MODERN ECLOGUE 
 Mitb otber poems 
 
 PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 
 
 A TYPE FACSIMILE OF THE 
 
 ORIGINAL EDITION OF MDCCCXIX 
 
 EDITED BY 
 
 H. BUXTON FORMAN 
 
 LONDON 
 
 PUBLISHED FOR THE SHELLEY SOCLE TV 
 
 BY REEVES AND TURNER 196 STRAND 
 
 _ 1888 
 
ADVERTISEMENT. 
 
 The story of " Rosalind and Helen " is, un- 
 doubtedly, not an attempt in the highest style 
 of poetry. It is in no degree calculated to 
 excite profound meditation; and if, by inte- 
 resting the affections and amusing the imagi- 
 nation, it awakens a certain ideal melancholy 
 favourable to the reception of more important 
 impressions, it will produce in the reader all 
 that the writer experienced in the composition. 
 I resigned myself, as I wrote, to the impulse of 
 the feelings which moulded the conception of 
 the story; and this impulse determined the 
 pauses of a measure, which only pretends to be 
 regular inasmuch as it corresponds with, and 
 expresses, the irregularity of the imaginations 
 which inspired it. 
 
 I do not know which of the few scattered 
 poems I left in England will be selected by 
 
 102465 
 
VI ADVERTISEMENT. 
 
 my bookseller, to add to this collection. One, 
 which I sent from Italy, was written after a day's 
 excursion among those lovely mountains which 
 surround what was once the retreat, and where 
 is now the sepulchre, of Petrarch. If any one 
 is inclined to condemn the insertion of the in- 
 troductory lines, which image forth the sudden 
 relief of a state of deep despondency by the 
 radiant visions disclosed by the sudden burst 
 of an Italian sunrise in autumn on the highest 
 peak of those delightful mountains, I can only 
 offer as my excuse, that they were not erased 
 at the request of a dear friend, with whom 
 added years of intercourse only add to my ap- 
 prehension of its value, and who would have 
 had more right than any one to complain, that 
 she has not been able to extinguish in me the 
 very power of delineating sadness. 
 
 Naples, Bee. 20, 1818. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 Page 
 
 Rosalind and Helen 3 
 
 Lines written on the Euganean Hills 69 
 
 Hymn to Intellectual Beauty 87 
 
 Sonnet 98 
 
CA*Jfi* A/$*£t ~ 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 A GENEROUS member of the Shelley Society, who 
 chooses to be unnamed and unknown, offered some time 
 ago to present to his fellow members a reprint of 
 one of the poet's volumes if I would undertake to edit 
 it. Various circumstances combined to direct the choice 
 to the volume issued in 1819 containing Rosalind and 
 Helen, the Lines written among the Euganean Hills, the 
 Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, and the sonnet entitled Ozy- 
 mandias. The preparation of the reprint naturally leads 
 to a few reflexions on the poetical contents of the 
 original volume, and more particularly on that eclogue 
 which occupies sixty-eight of the ninety-two pages com- 
 posing the book ; and, on studying afresh that poem of v 
 which Shelley himself spoke or wrote so slightingly^ 7 
 I found myself once more in that atmosphere of reform 
 which surrounds and permeates so many other works 
 of the poet. Moreover this necessary re-perusal of an 
 old favourite revives a well-worn impression that Rosalind 
 and Helen, though disjointed and inconsistent in exe- 
 cution, is quite unusually replete with passages in a 
 high degree beautiful and characteristic, 
 
 Shelley knew only too well how imperfect was his 
 own work, — how imperfect was all human work, when 
 judged by the elevated standard which he set up for 
 himself and future aspirants to the poetic priesthood to 
 follow ; and his almost contemptuous attitude towards 
 this particular child of his swift and splendid imagina- 
 tion is not difficult to understand. Yet I cannot bring 
 myself to admit Rosalind and Helen to quite so low a 
 
 L 
 
viii ROSALIND AND HELEN, &*c. 
 
 place as he would seem to have assigned to it. Before 
 attempting to examine the poem and the circumstances 
 of its composition, let us look at what its author said 
 about it. In the "Advertisement" prefixed to his own 
 edition he frankly damns it with the faintest praise/ 
 
 " The story of ' Rosalind and Helen ' is," he says, 
 " undoubtedly, not an attempt in the highest style of 
 poetry. It is in no degree calculated to excite profound 
 meditation ; and if, by interesting the affections and 
 amusing the imagination, it awaken a certain ideal 
 melancholy favourable to the reception of more im- 
 portant impressions, it will produce in the reader all 
 that the writer experienced in the composition. I 
 resigned myself, as I wrote, to the impulse of the 
 feelings which moulded the conception of the story ; 
 and this impulse determined the pauses of a measure, 
 which only pretends to be regular inasmuch as it 
 corresponds with, and expresses, the irregularity of the 
 imaginations which inspired it." 
 
 By Mrs. Shelley we are told that Rosalind and Helen 
 was begun at Marlow and thrown aside until she found 
 it in Italy, when Shelley, at her request, finished it at 
 the Baths of Lucca in the summer of 1818. When he 
 had finished it, and Mrs. Shelley had transcribed it for 
 the press, he wrote to Peacock of it that its structure was 
 " slight and aery, its subject ideal," — adding in a later 
 letter, " I lay no stress on it one way or the other. The 
 concluding lines are natural." 
 
 Now the essential statement in all this is that the 
 creation of Rosalind and Helen did no more than awaken 
 in Shelley "a certain ideal melancholy favourable to the 
 reception of more important impressions." To my 
 apprehension it seems that the poem is properly to be 
 regarded as a solid result of moral speculation rather 
 than an exercise, — the outcome of impressions decidedly 
 more important than any which can fairly be described 
 by the term " ideal melancholy " ; and what Shelley 
 either forgets or modestly ignores is that those more 
 important themes are there in the poem in such a form 
 as to take effect at once on that receptiveness of the 
 reader which he regards as the only probable result of 
 his poem. 
 
INTRODUCTION. ix 
 
 Let us look first at the story : who are Rosalind and 
 Helen, and what have their lives produced for them at 
 the time of their conversation forming the staple fabric 
 of the poem ? 
 
 Rosalind and Helen are two young mothers at the 
 time of their introduction to us, seemingly both of 
 English middle-class birth, though of Helen's parents 
 nothing is said. Rosalind, living with her mother, in 
 her father's absence from England, has formed an attach- 
 ment for a young man, who is about to marry her. 
 When the pair are already at the altar her father 
 suddenly appears from abroad, and forbids the banns on 
 the ground that the bridegroom is his son by another 
 mother than Rosalind's. The youth falls dead, but 
 Rosalind lives on in self-contained misery. Her father 
 dies leaving his wife and daughter unprovided for ; and 
 Rosalind in sheer despair, and for her mother's sake, 
 marries a man whom she positively loathes in the sequel, 
 if not from the first. She has three children, all of whom 
 fear their father like the plague. He in turn dies, 
 leaving a will under which his widow is abominably 
 traduced, and his children only provided for on condi- 
 tion of absolute separation from their mother. Rosalind 
 accepts the position of a childless outcast rather than 
 expose her offspring to the horrors of poverty. 
 
 With a good deal of the fierce resolve of a martyr, 
 Rosalind from first to last has been the slave of conven- 
 tional duty. Not so Helen, who loves, from Rosalind's 
 point of view " not wisely but too well," Lionel, a youth 
 of noble birth, amiable character, great personal attrac- 
 tions, and revolutionary-humanitarian sentiments and 
 convictions. Rosalind, apparently at a time anterior to 
 her own dire misfortunes, considers Helen's relations 
 with Lionel sufficient cause for breaking with her friend. 
 Lionel throws himself as orator and pamphleteer into 
 the ferment of agitation against political, social, and 
 priestly tyranny ; and, when the popular hope dies for 
 the moment, and tyranny and superstition are triumph- 
 antly consolidated in power, the frustrated spirit of 
 freedom within him drives him forth to wander in far 
 lands, away from Helen, and not unsuspected of seeking 
 solace in strange loves. After three years he returns, 
 
 C 
 
x ROSALIND AND HELEN, &*c. 
 
 desolate, and renews his intercourse with Helen, under 
 whose influence his spirit has a second birth of faith, 
 hope, and power to agitate, while his bodily health 
 begins to fail. Although Helen's account is a trifle 
 vague, there seems to me to be no doubt that, during 
 this spiritual revival, Lionel was conducting a second 
 courtship of Helen, the end of which is that she consents 
 to a second union with him of the same unconventional 
 character as the first. No sooner is this matter settled 
 than Lionel is arrested on a charge of uttering a 
 blasphemous and seditious libel of and concerning 
 Almighty God and of and concerning the Holy Scrip- 
 tures, — to translate into the jargon of the contemporary 
 law-courts the flowing poetic generalities of Helen's 
 narrative. " Soon, but too late," Lionel is released from 
 prison, and proceeds in a carriage from London to his 
 home in the Welsh mountains near the coast, with the 
 stamp of death already on him ; and there, after a short 
 time, he dies. Helen goes mad, is tended by Lionel's 
 mother, and gives birth to a son. When she recovers 
 her reason she learns for the first time that she is a 
 mother, that Lionel's mother has died during her period 
 of insanity, that Lionel has left great wealth to her by 
 will, and that " the ready lies of law " have bereft her 
 and her child of all. She commences an action to 
 vindicate her legal rights ; but what came of it is not 
 recorded. Whatever the result of her lawsuit, Helen 
 acquires a home with her little son on the banks of the 
 Lake of Como, where Rosalind takes up her abode with 
 her early friend. Eventually Rosalind's daughter is 
 restored to her (we hear no more of her other two 
 children), and grows up with Helen's son ; and the young 
 people are at last married, or rather, I should say, 
 consecrated to each other, for we are not told whether 
 in this respect they followed the orthodox traditions of 
 Rosalind or the anti-matrimonial heresy of Lionel and 
 Helen. Of the two friends Rosalind dies prematurely, 
 while Helen lives to be old and dies among her relations. 
 Such in brief is the argument of Rosalind and Helen: 
 I have interpreted the details of the narrative literally 
 and set them down in commonplace terms, in order to 
 emphasize and bring home to the mind the fundamental 
 
IN TROD UC TION. xi 
 
 conceptions which Shelley has embodied in so much 
 poetry and overlaid with so much of his characteristic 
 propagandism, that the mind is apt to dwell upon 
 isolated passages rather than lay hold on the fable as 
 a whole. No doubt the poet had good reasons for lead- 
 ing the attention of Peacock to the ideal side of the 
 subject ; but probably Peacock's wit was far too keenly 
 edged for the real basis of the work to escape him, 
 although he may perhaps not have discovered what 
 Shelley may perhaps have been most anxious to have 
 undiscovered, namely, that the relations of Rosalind and 
 Helen were a reproduction of the relations of Mary 
 Wollstonecraft Shelley and an early friend, — a reproduc- 
 tion highly idealized, be it conceded, but still a repro- 
 duction. 
 
 Whatever Peacock may have known or divined on 
 this subject, he can scarcely have failed to recognize his 
 friend's delightful self-portraiture in Lionel ; for this is 
 one of the thinnest of the disguises in which Shelley 
 has masked the essential characteristics of his person- 
 ality, — that personality which Peacock had himself been 
 caricaturing as Scythrop, in my opinion rather wildly 
 and remotely, in his charming book Nightmare Abbey \ 
 published in 1818. Nor is it likely that the author 
 of Nightmare Abbey, when he read for Shelley the proof- 
 sheets of Rosalind and Helen and recognized in Lionel 
 the lineaments of which he had just given the world so 
 different a representation in Scythrop, failed to observe 
 in what particular popular agitation it was that Lionel 
 figured as taking part. For, although the terms are 
 large enough to be applicable to the French Revolution, 
 the local colour is wholly English ; and I cannot avoid 
 the conclusion that here we have nothing more or less 
 than an idealized record of the Reform agitation of 
 1 8 16 and 18 17. That very collapse of the democratic 
 aspirations which Shelley witnessed in 18 17 finds its 
 appropriate place in Rosalind and Helen ; and the final 
 outrage of Lionel's imprisonment on a charge of blas- 
 phemy is precisely what Shelley was in constant risk 
 of experiencing himself, and had been ever since his 
 boyhood. 
 
 I have already referred to the basis of that part of 
 
xii ROSALIND AND HELEN, &>c. 
 
 the poem which deals especially with the relations be- 
 tween the two women whose names it bears ; and I 
 cannot better enlarge on this point than by quoting a 
 passage from the second volume of Professor Dowden's 
 Life of Shelley, in which we read at pages 130 and 131 
 as follows : — 
 
 " It can hardly be doubted that the incidents and feelings 
 portrayed were to some extent suggested to Shelley by Mary's 
 relations with the friend of her girlhood, in the old Dundee days — ■ 
 Isabel Baxter/ Since Mary's flight from her father's house in 
 July, 1 8 14, Isabel had fallen away from friendship. Now she was 
 herself a wife, and rumours, probably false rumours, reached Mary 
 that Isabel was not a happy wife. A visit of Isabel's father, 
 William Baxter, to Marlow, in September, tended to draw the 
 alienated friends once more together; and when it was proposed 
 that Isabel Booth should be Mary's companion on the journey to 
 Italy, she would gladly have acceded to the proposal. But David 
 Booth, her husband, no ordinary man, had heard scandalous and 
 lying tales of Shelley's life ; his strong moral sense was shocked by 
 the thought of danger to his wife's character or fame, and sternly 
 yet tenderly he forbade a renewal of the intimacy. So by the Lake 
 of Como there was no meeting, like that represented in the poem, 
 of the sundered friends." 
 
 Now although we must not for a moment mix up in 
 our minds the stalwart-minded David Booth and the 
 inconceivably despicable wretch whom Shelley has in- 
 vented for a mate to Rosalind,— ^although, indeed, we 
 may accept both Rosalind and her husband as ideal per- 
 sonalities created for the purpose of giving expression 
 to Shelley's views on certain matters of personal con- 
 duct, still I think it probable that this episode in Mary's 
 history not only "to some extent suggested" certain 
 incidents, but was the predominating influence which 
 drove Shelley to set about his eclogue^ If so, the record 
 just quoted is doubly interesting as establishing approxi- 
 mately the time of Shelley's first occupation with 
 Rosalind and Helen. That the poem was begun at 
 Marlow we know from Mrs. Shelley, but not whether 
 early or late in 18 17, or whether during the summer 
 which was mainly devoted to Lao?i and Cythna. It was 
 in September, as we learn from Professor Dowden, that 
 Laon and Cythna was finished — the 23rd of September; 
 
INTRODUCTION. xiii 
 
 and by the 26th Mrs. Shelley was already bewailing the 
 enforced abandonment of the eclogue ; so that, if the 
 Baxter incidents of that month were the beginning of the 
 scheme, he must have been working on both poems at 
 once ; for he left Marlow for London on the day of Laon 
 and Cythnds completion ; and, while in London, he 
 seems to have communicated to Mary an injunction of 
 Abernethy's pupil, William Lawrence, "to cease from 
 the exciting toil of composition, and to seek the benefits 
 of rest and change of air." 1 On hearing this, Mary wrote 
 to him, " It is well that your poem [meaning Laon and 
 Cythnd\ was finished before this edict was issued against 
 the imagination ; but my pretty eclogue will suffer from 
 it." 2 Whether the composition was resumed at Marlow 
 in defiance of the edict, I do not know ; but if not, 
 Shelley had already done enough of it to commit to the 
 press; for, before finally quitting England on the 12th 
 of March 1 8 18, he had confided the poem, or a part 
 of it, to his publisher, Mr. Oilier. This was probably 
 the portion copied by Mary at Marlow as recorded in her 
 diary under date the 19th of February 18 18 ; and the 
 original manuscript most likely went to Italy with them. 
 Perhaps, when the poem was completed in August 18 18 
 at the Baths of Lucca, and Shelley wrote to Peacock as 
 if Mary had just then copied it all out, he had so far 
 altered the original scheme as to make a fresh copy 
 of the whole necessary. 
 
 I have not failed to deprecate the confusion of David 
 Booth with Rosalind's husband as depicted by Shelley ; 
 but we must now look a little more closely at the Baxter- 
 Booth circle, as we find it delineated in Professor Dow- 
 den's Life of Shelley. In the house of William Baxter 
 at Dundee, Mary had, it seems, " spent some of the 
 happiest months of her girlhood," finding " close and 
 dear companions " in his daughters, Christy and Isabel ; 
 but, although Baxter was a man of such liberal views 
 as to merit and incur expulsion from the sect of Glass- 
 ites which his forefathers had helped to establish at 
 Dundee, and although, to boot, he was Godwin's ardent 
 
 1 Dowden's Life of Shelley, vol. ii., p. 129. 
 
 2 Ibid. 
 
xiv ROSALIND AND HELEN, &*c. 
 
 admirer as well as his friend, Isabel's friendship was 
 withdrawn on Mary's flight with Shelley in 1814. David 
 Booth, to whom Isabel was led to ally herself in a union 
 far more strange though more orthodox, was many 
 years older than her father, "a self-educated man of 
 vigorous intellect, imperious will, and disposition impe- 
 riously kind, . . . not five feet high, very dark of hue, 
 with eyes red and watery, and something of the imp, if 
 not the fiend, in his look." It seems he was a brewer 
 and afterwards a schoolmaster, recognized in and about 
 Newburgh as "a person of stupendous learning and 
 mysterious power." He "was in principles a republican," 
 and it was " whispered that he had sold himself to the 
 devil for learning." 
 
 If it was also whispered, as we have seen, that 
 the young girl who had surrendered her life into the 
 keeping of this elderly curiosity was not a happy wife, 
 the whisperers had certainly some show of reason on 
 their side : at all events, when Baxter had found out 
 how unaltered Mary was by her union with Shelley, 
 which by the bye was now duly conventionalized, and 
 how entirely amiable, frugal in personal habits, benevo- 
 lent, and delicately considerate of others, was the man 
 of genius to whom she had given herself, — when the 
 sometime Glassite of Dundee had told all this to his 
 daughter, her devotion to her brewer was not so enthrall- 
 ing but that she would gladly have " made it up " with 
 Mary and accompanied the Shelleys to Italy. But 
 David Booth said " No." In November 1817, both 
 Booth and Baxter spent an evening with the Shelleys in 
 London ; and before the close of the year the sturdy 
 little brewer, whether seeing in the attractions of that 
 charming society an element of danger to his wife's peace 
 and his own, or finding Shelley's views in morals and 
 politics really too wide for even his republican swallow, 
 over-ruled the tolerant impulsiveness of his too facile, 
 not to say frisky, young father-in-law (Baxter was a little 
 over forty), and decreed eternal separation. The verdict 
 was communicated to Shelley by Baxter; and the poet 
 took the close of the episode in such a serious, frank, 
 and dignified spirit that I cannot resist the temptation 
 to reproduce here his letter to Baxter on the subject, 
 
INTRODUCTION. xv 
 
 more especially as it contains some useful backward 
 glimpses. This is the letter : J — 
 
 " Mario w, December 30, 181 7. 
 
 " My dear Sir, 
 
 " Your candid explanation is very welcome to me, as it 
 relieves me from a weight of uncertainty, and is consistent with my 
 own mode of treating those who honour me with their friendship — 
 which is, either to maintain with them a free and unsuspicious 
 intercourse, or explicitly to state to them my motives for interrupt- 
 ing or circumscribing it, so soon as they arise within my own 
 mind. 
 
 " I understand by your letter that you decline, in the name of your 
 family, an intercourse which I believe had its sole foundation in 
 the intimacy of Isabel and Mary. This intercourse entirely 
 originated in an unsolicited advance on their part ; 2 a change in 
 their opinions and feelings produced it then, and now concludes it. 
 Mary renewed with pleasure the friendship of her early years. I 
 considered her friends as mine, and found much satisfaction, 
 distinct from that duty, in discovering in you, the first of the new 
 circle to whom I was introduced, a man of virtue and talent with 
 whose feelings and opinions I perpetually found occasions of 
 sympathy. To me, a secluded valetudinarian, all this was quite an 
 event. Mary for three Avhole years had been lamenting the loss of 
 her friend, and was made miserable and indignant that her friend- 
 ship had been sacrificed to opinions which she supposed had 
 already received their condemnation in the mind of every 
 enlightened reasoner on moral science. Young and ardent spirits 
 confound theory and practice. / saw that all this was in the 
 natural order of things, and it is neither my habit to feel indigna- 
 tion or disappointment at the inconsistencies of mankind. People 
 who had one atom of pride or resentment for injury or neglect 
 would have refused the renewal of an intimacy which had already 
 been once dissolved on a plea, in their conception, to the last 
 degree unworthy and erroneous. I thus see your determination to 
 deprive Mary of the intercourse of her friend, and most highly 
 respect the motives, as I know they must exist in your mind, for 
 this proceeding. May I ask precisely what those motives are ? 
 You do not distinctly say, but only allude to certain free opinions 
 which I hold, inconsistent with yours. We had a good deal of 
 discussion about all sorts of opinions, and I thought we agreed on 
 all — except matters of taste ; and I don't think any serious con- 
 sequences ought to flow from a controversy whether Wordsworth 
 or Campbell be the greater poet. Yet I would not be misap- 
 prehended. Though I have not a spark of pride or resentment in 
 this matter, I disdain to say a word that should tend to persuade 
 
 1 Dowden's Life of Shelley, vol. ii., pp. 175-8. 
 
 2 " Consequent," says Professor Dowden, " on Godwin's informing 
 Mr. Baxter in May of the fact of Shelley's marriage, celebrated in 
 December, 18 16." 
 
xvi ROSALIND AND HELEN, &*c. 
 
 you to change your decision. On any such change you know- 
 where to find a man constant and sincere in his predilections. But 
 all I now want is to know the plain truth. 
 
 " Mr. Booth is no doubt a man of great intellectual acuteness and 
 consummate skill in the exercise of logic. I never met with a man 
 by whom, in the short time we exchanged ideas, I felt myself 
 excited to so much severe and sustained mental competition, or 
 from whom I derived so much amusement and instruction. It 
 would have given me much pleasure to have cultivated his 
 acquaintance. But I know that this desire could not be reciprocal. 
 Nor is it difficult to apprehend the cause of this distinction. Am I 
 not right in my conjecture in attributing to Mr. Booth the change 
 in your sentiment announced in your letter ? His keen and subtle 
 mind, deficient in those elementary feelings which are the prin- 
 ciples of all moral reasoning, is better fitted for the detection of 
 error than the establishment of truth, and .his pleadings, urged or 
 withdrawn with sceptical caution and indifference, may be 
 employed with almost equal force as an instrument of fair argu- 
 ment or sophistry. In matters of abstract speculation we can 
 readily recur to the first principles on which our opinions rest, and 
 thus confute a sophism or derive instruction from an argument. 
 But in the complicated relations of private life, it is a practice 
 difficult, dangerous, and rare to appeal to an elementary principle ; 
 the motives of the sophist are many and secret ; the resources of 
 his ingenuity as numerous as the relations respecting which it is 
 exercised. Mr. Booth's reasonings may be right ; they may be 
 sincere ; he may be conscientiously impressed with views widely 
 differing from mine. But be frank with me, my dear sir ; is it not 
 Mr. Booth who has persuaded you to see things in this way since 
 your last visit, when no such considerations as you allege in your 
 letter were present to your thoughts ? The only motive that 
 suggests this question is an unwillingness to submit to the having 
 my intimacies made the sport of secret and unacknowledged 
 manoeuvres. 
 
 " I need not say that your expressions of kindness and service are 
 flattering to me, and that I can say with great truth that I should 
 consider myself honoured if at any time it were possible that you 
 would make the limited power which I possess a source of utility 
 to you. 
 
 " My dear Sir, 
 
 " Yours most sincerely, 
 
 " P. B. Shelley." 
 
 To this delightful letter Mary added the following 
 pretty postscript : — 
 
 "My dear Sir, 
 
 " You see I prophesied well three months ago, when you 
 were here. I then said that I was sure that Mr. Booth was averse 
 
 I 
 
INTRODUCTION. xvii 
 
 wish I had you by the fire here in my little study, and it might be 
 'double, double, toil and trouble,' but I could quickly convince 
 you that your girls are not below me in station, and that in fact I 
 am the fittest companion for them in the world ; but I postpone the 
 argument until I see you, for I know (pardon me) that viva voce 
 is all in all with you." 
 
 Baxter, it seems, showed the letter to Booth, who wrote 
 thus to Shelley : 1 — 
 
 "You have amused yourself in sketching the characters of Mr. 
 Baxter and me. They are composition pictures, and as a pair of 
 portraits form together a ludicrous, mystical Duality, combining the 
 abstract principles of good and of evil — of Divinity and of Demon." 
 
 It is regret-worthy that we have not the whole com- 
 position before us ; but it seems to have ended thus : — 
 
 " I have only to add that Mr. Baxter's (to which yours now 
 before me is an answer) was written and sent off without having 
 been shown to me. I certainly should not have suggested any 
 expressions which could have called forth remarks about rank or 
 station. In these I never would acknowledge inferiority, and at all 
 events they have nothing to do with the present question." 
 
 Shelley saw Baxter again on the 2nd of March, when 
 preparing for his journey to the Continent ; but, although 
 Isabel Booth was in London at the time, no communi- 
 cation took place between her and Mary. It appears 
 that the latest expressions from the Shelleys to the 
 Baxters were of the sincerest good-will and solicitude. 
 
 We all know that, although Shelley, urged by motives 
 more or less unselfish, was three times married, twice to 
 Harriett and once to Mary, he was an ardent disbeliever 
 in the institution of marriage, in which he saw an instru- 
 ment of tyranny and oppression. We all know how 
 eagerly he desired to see reform in the marriage laws 
 and in the views of society concerning the relations of 
 the sexes. We have seen in his letter to Baxter — who, 
 by the bye, told Mary, 2 he thought the anti-matrimonial 
 Queen Mab " the best poem of modern days " — that 
 Mary had lamented for three years the rupture of her 
 friendship with Isabel and had been made miserable and 
 indignant by the sacrifice of that friendship to a matter 
 
 1 Dowden's Life of Shelley^ vol. ii., p. 178. 
 ' Ibid. p. 144. 
 
xviii ROSALIND AND HELEN, &*c. 
 
 of opinion practically concerning the institution of 
 marriage. In David Booth, Shelley evidently saw a 
 man prone to tyrannize over those with whom he came 
 in contact/ and it is clear that he respected the little 
 brewer's intellect more than his heart. And yet he saw 
 this young girl indissolubly bound to David Booth — 
 destined to pass her life in the society and under the 
 tutelage of a man, to say the least, unengaging — a man 
 under whose dictatorship she and her family were de- 
 prived of all communication with a dear friend of her 
 own sex and years. This to Shelley would naturally 
 seem intolerable tyranny ; and no wonder that he was 
 stirred to read the world a fresh homily on this text, 
 concerning marriage and free union. No wonder that 
 one of the heroines of his next poem should address 
 the other thus on meeting her beside the Lake of 
 Como : — 
 
 " None doth behold us now : the power 
 That led us forth at this lone hour 
 Will be but ill requited 
 If thou depart in scorn : oh ! come, 
 And talk of our abandoned home. 
 Remember, this is Italy, 
 And we are exiles. Talk with me 
 Of that our land, whose wilds and floods, 
 Barren and dark although they be, 
 Were dearer than these chestnut woods : 
 Those heathy paths, that inland stream, 
 And the blue mountains, shapes which seem 
 Like wrecks of childhood's sunny dream : 
 Which that we have abandoned now, 
 Weighs on the heart like that remorse 
 Which altered friendship leaves. I seek 
 No more our youthful intercourse. 
 That cannot be ! Rosalind, speak, 
 Speak to me. Leave me not. — When morn did come, 
 When evening fell upon our common home, 
 When for one hour we parted, — do not frown : 
 I would not chide thee, though thy faith is broken : 
 But turn to me. Oh ! by this cherished token, 
 Of woven hair, which thou wilt not disown, 
 Turn, as 'twere but the memory of me, 
 And not my scorned self who prayed to thee." 
 
 Nor is it strange that, in reading his homily on the 
 tyranny of wedlock, Shelley should so far have idealized 
 
INTRODUCTION. xix 
 
 the conception of a tyrant husband as to endow him 
 liberally with the meanest vices. 
 
 " He was a man 
 Hard, selfish, loving only gold, 
 Yet full of guile : his pale eyes ran 
 With tears, which each some falsehood told, 
 And oft his smooth and bridled tongue 
 Would give the lie to his flushing cheek : 
 He^as a coward to the strong : 
 He was a tyrant to the weak, 
 On whom his vengeance he would wreak : 
 For scorn, whose arrows search the heart, 
 From many a stranger's eye would dart, 
 And on his memory cling, and follow 
 His soul to its home so cold and hollow. 
 ***** 
 
 He died : 
 I know not how : he was not old, 
 If age be numbered by its years : 
 But he was bowed and bent with fears, 
 Pale with the quenchless thirst of gold, 
 Which, like fierce fever, left him weak ; 
 And his strait lip and bloated cheek 
 Were warped in spasms by hollow sneers ; 
 And selfish cares with barren plough, 
 Not age, had lined his narrow brow, 
 And foul and cruel thoughts, which feed 
 Upon the withering life within, 
 Like vipers on some poisonous weed. 
 Whether his ill were death or sin 
 None knew, until he died indeed, 
 And then men owned they were the same." 
 
 Rosalind's separation from her children under her 
 dead husband's will is, of course, the reflexion of 
 Shelley's separation from his children through the action 
 of their dead mother's relations ; and as, in the Chancery 
 suit of these people, the argument had been used that 
 Shelley's views of marriage led to immorality according 
 to the legal standard of morals, it was a natural relief to 
 the outraged father to emphasize in his fiction the moral 
 evils of marriage without love : certainly he leads the 
 reader's sympathies with great delicacy and dexterity to 
 the side of Helen, who trusted herself and her happiness 
 unreservedly to Lionel because she loved him, rather 
 than of Rosalind, who sold herself body and soul to one 
 whom she not only did not love but whom she abso- 
 
xx ROSALIND AND HELEN, &*c. 
 
 lutely contemned and loathed. Her price was food, 
 lodging, and respectability for herself and her mother. 
 Her mother soon died ; her husband, from his " putrid 
 shroud" as Shelley says, lyingly denied her respect- 
 ability ; and when his death had shaken her free from 
 what she described as " those abhorred embraces," she 
 underwent the frightful experience of reading /in her 
 involuntary and irrepressible joy at his death, the con- 
 demnation of her own dutifully ordered life. 
 
 Rosalind's story is indeed far from a pleasant or even 
 an interesting one ; and it is in Helen's that we find the 
 agreeable side of the poem. Devoted to the memory of 
 Lionel, she gives her friend an enthusiastic account of 
 his genius and amiable qualities ; and that account is, 
 as I have said, full of the personality of Shelley and his 
 views upon reform. It tells of the time 
 
 " When liberty's dear pasan fell 
 'Mid murderous howls. To Lionel, 
 Though of great wealth and lineage high, 
 Yet through those dungeon walls there came 
 Thy thrilling light, O liberty ! 
 And as the meteor's midnight flame 
 Startles the dreamer, sun-like truth 
 Flashed on his visionary youth, 
 And filled him, not with love, but faith, 
 And hope, and courage ..." 
 
 The restless and reckless propagandism of Lionel is 
 clearly Shelley's own experience but slightly idealized, 
 and the account of the wonder it inspired in common- 
 place minds might have been translated from the prose 
 of some commentators on Shelley's doings as a reform 
 agitator : 
 
 " Men wondered, and some sneered to see 
 One sow what he could never reap : 
 For he is rich, they said, and young, 
 And might drink from the depths of luxury. 
 If he seeks fame, fame never crowned 
 The champion of a trampled creed : 
 If he seeks power, power is enthroned 
 'Mid antient rights and wrongs, to feed 
 Which hungry wolves with praise and spoil, 
 Those who would sit near power must toil ; 
 And such, there sitting, all may see. 
 What seeks he ? All that others seek 
 
INTRODUCTION. xxi 
 
 He casts away, like a vile weed 
 
 Which the sea casts unreturningly. 
 
 That poor and hungry men should break 
 
 The laws which wreak them toil and scorn 
 
 We understand ; but Lionel 
 
 We know is rich and nobly born." 
 
 Then the account of the "wild and queer" verses 
 about " devils and saints and all such gear," which he 
 aimed against the priests and so incurred their hatred, 
 is very suggestive of foundation in fact; and, if the 
 following passage had occurred in a poem headed 
 " England in 1817-18," who would have wondered ? — 
 
 " Grey Power was seated 
 Safely on her ancestral throne ; 
 And Faith, the Python, undefeated, 
 Even to its blood-stained steps dragged on 
 Her foul and wounded train, and men 
 Were trampled and deceived again, 
 And words and shews again could bind 
 The wailing tribes of human kind 
 In scorn and famine." 
 
 If we had met the next few lines in prose in Mary's 
 journal for 18 14, we should scarcely have been sur- 
 prised : — 
 
 u Then he would bid me not to weep, 
 And say with flattery false, yet sweet, 
 That death and he could never meet, 
 If I would never part with him. 
 And so we loved, and did unite 
 All that in us was yet divided : 
 For when he said, that many a rite, 
 By men to bind but once provided, 
 Could not be shared by him and me, 
 Or they would kill him in their glee, 
 I shuddered, and then laughing said — 
 ' We will have rites our faith to bind, 
 But our church shall be the starry night, 
 Our altar the grassy earth outspread, 
 And our priest the muttering wind.' " 
 
 And a page or two further on we emerge with cer- 
 tainty into the region of the actual in a curious way 
 enough ; for when Lionel has been taken for sedition 
 and blasphemy, as Shelley was quite prepared to be, he 
 
 F 
 
xxii ROSALIND AND HELEN, &»c. 
 
 cries to Helen as she is driven forth from the prison she 
 would fain share with him : 
 
 " Fear not the tyrants shall rule for ever, 
 Or the priests of the bloody faith ; 
 They stand on the brink of that mighty river, 
 Whose waves they have tainted with death : 
 It is fed from the depths of a thousand dells, 
 Around them it foams, and rages, and swells, 
 And their swords and their sceptres I floating see, 
 Like wrecks in the surge of eternity." 
 
 This stanza is really one of six addressed by Shelley 
 to his infant son William, between the time of the Lord 
 Chancellor's decree depriving him of the custody of 
 Harriett's children and the time of the final departure 
 for Italy — I should say in March 1818 ; for there are 
 allusions to the sea and the boat in other stanzas which 
 make it probable the poem was composed on the rough 
 passage in the boat Lady Castlereagh that carried Shelley 
 and his family from Dover to Calais, and written down 
 perhaps at the end of that stormy voyage. When Mrs. 
 Shelley printed the verses to William in 1839, she gave 
 the second line with the epithet evil instead of bloody — 
 a change which leaves the verse, if more polite, still less 
 forcible and characteristic ; but the words are for the 
 rest practically identical. It would be interesting to 
 know whether, when Shelley addressed his son on the 
 subject of their flight from England, he repeated the eight 
 lines from a part of his eclogue already completed, or 
 whether, when he revised the eclogue in Italy, he was 
 tempted to insert in it this very appropriate stanza of 
 his little poem. I lean to the latter supposition ; but 
 know of no external evidence on the subject. 
 
 It is not necessary to elaborate the evidence of what 
 few will be disposed to dispute, to wit, the position that 
 the motives of this poem of Rosalind and Helen are before 
 all things personal and homiletic ; nor need I enter on 
 a long analysis of the faults of execution which show 
 how feeble a hold the story, as a story, had on Shelley's 
 imagination. The principal flaws are inconsistencies in 
 the narrative of Rosalind, which is precisely where we 
 should expect the interest of Shelley in his own creation 
 
INTRODUCTION. xxiii 
 
 to relax, seeing that her character was just such as he 
 would be most likely to contemn. Hence it is no great 
 marvel that Rosalind, the mother of three children, who 
 at one point speaks of her two wild boys as cowering 
 fearfully near her knee while the babe at her bosom was 
 hushed with fear at its father's approach, thus making 
 the girl the youngest, should so far forget herself in the 
 sequel as to mention her daughter as the first-born. 
 Similarly we do not think much of her inconsistency when, 
 after promising Helen to tell her the truth, she first says 
 she watched her husband's unlamented tomb morning 
 and evening, and would not depart from it, while her child- 
 ren " laughed aloud in frantic glee," and afterwards affirms 
 that she went away from the place immediately after 
 the reading of the will without even noticing her children. 
 But if Rosalind and her story had had for Shelley an 
 interestTother than didactic these things would probably 
 have been obvious to him. 
 
 These flaws, such as they are, are left upon the poem 
 for all time, for it was Shelley's will not to bring his work 
 to perfection. To the few errors in the sense which 
 Peacock's unsympathetic revision of the proofs failed 
 to detect, and which gave Shelley some small concern, 
 we may yet hope to see justice done in time ; for it would 
 be strange if the original manuscript and Mrs. Shelley's 
 copy had both disappeared for ever : meanwhile rather 
 than bewail our ignorance as to the particular passages 
 which were thus corrupted, let us congratulate ourselves 
 that the noble close of the poem is free from corruption, 
 and that most of the many flashes of self-revelation 
 which Shelley vouchsafed us in the portraiture of Lionel 
 are unimpaired by their passage through the press. 1 
 
 1 The bare text here reprinted requires for pleasurable reading 
 the following corrections and suggestions : — 
 
 Page 6 line II. For thee read there. 
 
 Page 1 8, line 9. Omit the turned commas. 
 
 Pages 23-4. This passage is probably corrupt. It is possible 
 that Which in the last line but one of page 23 is a misprint for 
 While, and and in line 2 of page 24 a misprint for had. 
 
 Page 33, line 2. The words nursling child may be right, but are 
 suspicious. They form something very like a pleonasm ; whereas 
 nursing child is a familiar equivalent for a child at nurse. 
 
 Page 40, line 8. For striken read stricken. 
 
xxiv ROSALIND AND HELEN, &>c. 
 
 It has often pleased me to connect in my mind with 
 the name of Shelley that memorable stanza of the Poet 
 Laureate's — 
 
 "The poet in a golden clime was born, 
 With golden stars above ; 
 Dower'd with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, 
 The love of love." 
 
 Indeed, apart from the golden clime, I know of no one 
 to whom that stanza applies so perfectly ; and of all the 
 fictitious characters in Shelley's poetry that serve to 
 bring his own personality before us in various phases 
 and modifications, — Laon, Athanase, the poet in A las tor, 
 Lionel, — I think the one that renders most of the essen- 
 tial spirit of Shelley is Lionel. It would not be far 
 from the truth if we applied to Shelley the words of 
 Helen concerning Lionel — 
 
 " love and life in him were twins, 
 Born at one birth : in every other 
 First life then love its course begins, 
 Though they be children of one mother ; 
 And so through this dark world they fleet 
 Divided, till in death they meet : 
 But he loved all things ever." 
 
 H. Buxton Forman. 
 46 Marlborough Hill, St. John's Wood, 
 October 1888. 
 
 Page 60, lines 11-14. Whether lax, licentious, or eccentric in its 
 construction or diction, I do not doubt this passage is what 
 Shelley wrote. 
 
 Page 61, lines 9-1 1. To bring out the sense of these lines the 
 punctuation should be that adopted by Mr. Rossetti : — 
 " O that I were now dead ! but such 
 (Did they not, love, demand too much, 
 Those dying murmurs ?) he forbade." 
 "But such he forbade" means, of course, "but he forbade me to 
 put myself to death." 
 
 Page 62, line 12. For rescued read rescue. 
 
 Page 63, line 12. The final comma is probably a misprint. 
 
 Page 77, line 9. The word songs seems to me suspiciously like 
 a misprint for sons. 
 
 Page 89, lines 5 and 6 from foot. For lover's read lovers' ; and 
 for are read art. 
 
 Page 91, line 1. For loves read love's. 
 
ROSALIND AND HELEN, 
 
 MODERN ECLOGUE. 
 
ROSALIND AND HELEN. 
 
 Rosalind, Helen and her Child. 
 Scene, the Shore of the Lake of Como. 
 
 HELEN. 
 
 Come hither, my sweet Rosalind. 
 Tis long since thou and I have met ; 
 And yet methinks it were unkind 
 Those moments to forget. 
 Come sit by me. I see thee stand 
 By this lone lake, in this far land, 
 Thy loose hair in the light wind flying, 
 Thy sweet voice to each tone of even 
 United, and thine eyes replying 
 To the hues of yon fair heaven. 
 Come, gentle friend : wilt sit by me ? 
 And be as thou wert wont to be 
 
4 KOSALIND AND HELEN. 
 
 Ere we were disunited ? 
 
 None doth behold us now : the power 
 
 That led us forth at this lone hour 
 
 Will be but ill requited 
 
 If thou depart in scorn : oh ! come, 
 
 And talk of our abandoned home. 
 
 Remember, this is Italy, 
 
 And we are exiles. Talk with me 
 
 Of that our land, whose wilds and floods, 
 
 Barren and dark although they be, 
 
 Were dearer than these chesnut woods : 
 
 Those heathy paths, that inland stream, 
 
 And the blue mountains, shapes which seem 
 
 Like wrecks of childhood's sunny dream : 
 
 Which that we have abandoned now, 
 
 Weighs on the heart like that remorse 
 
 Which altered friendship leaves. I seek 
 
 No more our youthful intercourse. 
 
 That cannot be ! Rosalind, speak, 
 
 Speak to me. Leave me not. — When morn 
 
 did come, 
 When evening fell upon our common home, 
 
ROSALIND AND HELEN. 5 
 
 When for one hour we parted, — do not frown : 
 I would not chide thee, though thy faith is 
 
 broken : 
 But turn to me. Oh ! by this cherished token, 
 Of woven hair, which thou wilt not disown, 
 Turn, as 'twere but the memory of me, 
 And not my scorned self who prayed to thee. 
 
 ROSALIND. 
 
 Is it a dream, or do I see 
 
 And hear frail Helen ? I would flee 
 
 Thy tainting touch ; but former years 
 
 Arise, and bring forbidden tears ; 
 
 And my o'erburthened memory 
 
 Seeks yet its lost repose in thee. 
 
 I share thy crime. I cannot choose 
 
 But weep for thee : mine own strange grief 
 
 But seldom stoops to such relief : 
 
 Nor ever did I love thee less, 
 
 Though mourning o'er thy wickedness 
 
 Even with a sister's woe. I knew 
 
 What to the evil world is due, 
 
6 ROSALIND AND HELEN. 
 
 And therefore sternly did refuse 
 To link me with the infamy 
 Of one so lost as Helen. Now 
 Bewildered by my dire despair, 
 Wondering I blush, and weep that thou 
 Should'st love me still, — thou only ! — There, 
 Let us sit on that grey stone, 
 Till our mournful talk be done. 
 
 HELEN. 
 
 Alas ! not there ; I cannot bear 
 
 The murmur of this lake to hear. 
 
 A sound from thee, Rosalind dear, 
 
 Which never yet I heard elsewhere 
 
 But in our native land, recurs, 
 
 Even here where now we meet. It stirs 
 
 Too much of suffocating sorrow ! 
 
 In the dell of yon dark chesnut wood 
 
 Is a stone seat, a solitude 
 
 Less like our own. The ghost of peace 
 
 Will not desert this spot. To-morrow, 
 
ROSALIND AND HELEN. I 
 
 If thy kiud feelings should not cease, 
 We may sit here. 
 
 ROSALIND. 
 
 Thou lead, my sweet, 
 And I will follow. 
 
 HENRY. 
 
 Tis Fenici's seat 
 Where you are going ? This is not the way, 
 Mamma ; it leads behind those trees that grow 
 Close to the little river. 
 
 HELEN. 
 Yes : I know : 
 I was bewildered. Kiss me, and be gay, 
 Dear boy : why do you sob ? 
 
 HENRY. 
 
 I do not know : 
 But it might break any one's heart to see 
 You and the lady cry so bitterly. 
 
8 KOSALIND AND HELEN. 
 
 HELEN. 
 
 It is a gentle child, my friend. Go home, 
 Henry, and play with Lilla till I come. 
 We only cried with joy to see each other ; 
 We are quite merry now : Good night. 
 
 The boy 
 Lifted a sudden look upon his mother, 
 And in the gleam of forced and hollow joy 
 Which lightened o'er her face, laughed with 
 
 the glee 
 Of light and unsuspecting infancy, 
 And whispered in her ear, " Bring home with 
 
 you 
 That sweet strange lady-friend." Then off he 
 
 flew, 
 But stopt, and beckoned with a meaning smile, 
 Where the road turned. Pale Kosalind the while, 
 Hiding her face, stood weeping silently. 
 
 In silence then they took the way 
 Beneath the forest's solitude. 
 
KOSALIND AND HELEN. 
 
 It was a vast and antique wood, 
 
 Thro' which they took their way ; 
 
 And the grey shades of evening 
 
 O'er that green wilderness did fling 
 
 Still deeper solitude. 
 
 Pursuing still the path that wound 
 
 The vast and knotted trees around 
 
 Thro' which slow shades were wandering, 
 
 To a deep lawny dell they came, 
 
 To a stone seat beside a spring, 
 
 O'er which the columned wood did frame 
 
 A roofless temple, like the fane 
 
 Where, ere new creeds could faith obtain, 
 
 Man's early race once knelt beneath 
 
 The overhanging deity. 
 
 O'er this fair fountain hung the sky, 
 
 Now spangled with rare stars. The snake, 
 
 The pale snake, that with eager breath 
 
 Creeps here his noontide thirst to slake, 
 
 Is beaming with many a mingled hue, 
 
 Shed from yon dome's eternal blue, 
 
 When he floats on that dark and lucid flood 
 
10 ROSALIND AND HELEN. 
 
 In the light of his own loveliness ; 
 And the birds that in the fountain dip 
 Their plumes, with fearless fellowship 
 Above and round him wheel and hover. 
 The fitful wind is heard to stir 
 One solitary leaf on high ; 
 The chirping of the grasshopper 
 Fills every pause. There is emotion 
 In all that dwells at noontide here : 
 Then, thro' the intricate wild wood, 
 A maze of life and light and motion 
 Is woven. But there is stillness now : 
 Gloom, and the trance of Nature now : 
 The snake is in his cave asleep ; 
 The birds are on the branches dreaming 
 Only the shadows creep : 
 Only the glow-worm is gleaming : 
 Only the owls and the nightingales 
 Wake in this dell when day-light fails, 
 And grey shades gather in the woods : 
 And the owls have all fled far away 
 In a merrier glen to hoot and play, 
 
ROSALIND AND HELEN. 11 
 
 For the moon is veiled and sleeping now. 
 The accustomed nightingale still broods 
 On her accustomed bough, 
 But she is mute ; for her false mate 
 Has fled and left her desolate. 
 
 This silent spot tradition old 
 
 Had peopled with the spectral dead. 
 
 For the roots of the speakers hair felt cold 
 
 And stiff, as with tremulous lips he told 
 
 That a hellish shape at midnight led 
 
 The ghost of a youth with hoary hair, 
 
 And sate on the seat beside him there, 
 
 Till a naked child came wandering by, 
 
 When the fiend would change to a lady fair ! 
 
 A fearful tale ! The truth was worse : 
 
 For here a sister and a brother 
 
 Had solemnized a monstrous curse, 
 
 Meeting in this fair solitude : 
 
 For beneath yon very sky, 
 
 Had they resigned to one another 
 
 Body and soul. The multitude, 
 
12 ROSALIND AND HELEN. 
 
 Tracking them to the secret wood, 
 Tore limb from limb their innocent child, 
 And stabbed and trampled on it's mother ; 
 But the youth, for God's most holy grace, 
 A priest saved to burn in the market-place. 
 
 Duly at evening Helen came 
 
 To this lone silent spot, 
 
 From the wrecks of a tale of wilder sorrow 
 
 So much of sympathy to borrow 
 
 As soothed her own dark lot. 
 
 Duly each evening from her home, 
 
 With her fair child would Helen come 
 
 To sit upon that antique seat, 
 
 While the hues of day were pale ; 
 
 And the bright boy beside her feet 
 
 Now lay, lifting at intervals 
 
 His broad blue eyes on her ; 
 
 Now, where some sudden impulse calls 
 
 Following. He was a gentle boy 
 
 And in all gentle sports took joy ; 
 
 Oft in a dry leaf for a boat, 
 
KOSALIND AND HELEN. 13 
 
 With a small feather for a sail, 
 His fancy on that spring would float, 
 If some invisible breeze might stir 
 It's marble calm : and Helen smiled 
 Thro' tears of awe on the gay child, 
 To think that a boy as fair as he, 
 In years which never more may be, 
 By that same fount, in that same wood, 
 The like sweet fancies had pursued ; 
 And that a mother, lost like her, 
 Had mournfully sate watching him. 
 Then all the scene was wont to swim 
 Through the mist of a burning tear. 
 
 For many months had Helen known 
 
 This scene ; and now she thither turned 
 
 Her footsteps, not alone. 
 
 The friend whose falsehood she had mourned, 
 
 Sate with her on that seat of stone. 
 
 Silent they sate ; for evening, 
 
 And the power it's glimpses bring 
 
 Had, with one awful shadow, quelled 
 
14 ROSALIND AND HELEN. 
 
 The passion of their grief. They sate 
 With linked hands, for unrepelled 
 Had Helen taken Kosalind's. 
 Like the autumn wind, when it unbinds 
 The tangled locks of the nightshade's hair, 
 Which is twined in the sultry summer air 
 Round the walls of an outworn sepulchre, 
 Did the voice of Helen, sad and sweet, 
 And the sound of her heart that ever beat, 
 As with sighs and words she breathed on her, 
 Unbind the knots of her friend's despair, 
 Till her thoughts were free to float and flow ; 
 And from her labouring bosom now, 
 Like the bursting of a prisoned flame, 
 The voice of a long pent sorrow came. 
 
 ROSALIND. 
 
 I saw the dark earth fall upon 
 The coffin ; and I saw the stone 
 Laid over him whom this cold breast 
 Had pillowed to his nightly rest ! 
 Thou knowest not, thou can'st not know 
 
ROSALIND AND HELEN. 15 
 
 My agony. Oh I I could not weep : 
 
 The sources whence such blessings flow 
 
 Were not to be approached by me ! 
 
 But I could smile, and I could sleep, 
 
 Though with a self-accusing heart. 
 
 In morning's light, in evening's gloom, 
 
 I watched, — and would not thence depart — 
 
 My husband's unlamented tomb. 
 
 My children knew their sire was gone, 
 
 But when I told them, — ' he is dead,' — 
 
 They laughed aloud in frantic glee, 
 
 They clapped their hands and leaped about, 
 
 Answering each other's ecstacy 
 
 With many a prank and merry shout. 
 
 But I sat silent and alone, 
 
 Wrapped in the mock of mourning weed. 
 
 They laughed, for he was dead : but I 
 Sate with a hard and tearless eye, 
 And with a heart which would deny 
 The secret joy it could not quell, 
 
16 ROSALIND AND HELEN. 
 
 Low muttering o'er his loathed name ; 
 Till from that self-contention came 
 Remorse where sin was none ; a hell 
 Which in pure spirits should not dwell. 
 
 I'll tell thee truth. He was a man 
 Hard, selfish, loving only gold, 
 Yet full of guile : his pale eyes ran 
 With tears, which each some falsehood told 
 And oft his smooth and bridled tongue 
 Would give the lie to his flushing cheek : 
 He was a coward to the strong : 
 He was a tyrant to the weak, 
 On whom his vengeance he would wreak : 
 For scorn, whose arrows search the heart 
 From many a stranger's eye would dart, 
 And on his memory cling, and follow 
 His soul to it's home so cold and hollow. 
 He was a tyrant to the weak, 
 And we were such, alas the day ! 
 Oft, when my little ones at play, 
 
ROSALIND AND HELEN. 17 
 
 Were in youth's natural lightness gay, 
 
 Or if they listened to some tale 
 
 Of travellers, or of fairy land, — 
 
 When the light from the wood-fire's dying 
 
 brand 
 Flashed on their faces, — if they heard 
 Or thought they heard upon the stair 
 His footstep, the suspended word 
 Died on my lips : we all grew pale : 
 The babe at my bosom was hushed with fear 
 If it thought it heard its father near ; 
 And my two wild boys would near my knee 
 Cling, cowed and cowering fearfully. 
 
 Ill tell thee truth : I loved another. 
 His name in my ear was ever ringing, 
 His form to my brain was ever clinging : 
 Yet if some stranger breathed that name, 
 My lips turned white, and my heart beat fast : 
 My nights were once haunted by dreams of 
 flame, 
 
18 ROSALIND AND HELEN. 
 
 My days were dim in the shadow cast, 
 
 By the memory of the same ! 
 
 Day and night, day and night, 
 
 He was my breath and life and light, 
 
 For three short years, which soon were past. 
 
 On the fourth, my gentle mother 
 
 Led me to the shrine, to be 
 
 His sworn bride eternally. 
 
 " And now we stood on the altar stair, 
 
 When my father came from a distant land, 
 
 And with a loud and fearful cry 
 
 Rushed between us suddenly. 
 
 I saw the stream of his thin grey hair, 
 
 I saw his lean and lifted hand, 
 
 And heard his words, — and live ! Oh God ! 
 
 Wherefore do I live ?— ' Hold, hold !' 
 
 He cried, — ( I tell thee 'tis her brother ! 
 
 Thy mother, boy, beneath the sod 
 
 Of yon church-yard rests in her shroud so cold 
 
 I am now weak, and pale, and old : 
 
 We were once dear to one another, 
 
ROSALIND AND HELEN. 19 
 
 I and that corpse ! Thou art our child ! ' 
 Then with a laugh both long and wild 
 The youth upon the pavement fell : 
 They found him dead ! All looked on me, 
 The spasms of my despair to see : 
 But I was calm. I went away : 
 I was clammy-cold like clay ! 
 I did not weep : I did not speak : 
 But day by day, week after week, 
 I walked about like a corpse alive ! 
 Alas ! sweet friend, you must believe 
 This heart is stone : it did not break. 
 
 My father lived a little while, 
 But all might see that he was dying, 
 He smiled with such a woful smile ! 
 When he was in the church-yard lying 
 Among the worms, we grew quite poor, 
 So that no one would give us bread : 
 My mother looked at me, and said 
 Faint words of cheer, which only meant 
 That she could die and be content ; 
 
20 KOSALIND AND HELEN. 
 
 So I went forth from the same church door 
 
 To another husband's bed. 
 
 And this was he who died at last, 
 
 When weeks and months and years had past, 
 
 Through which I firmly did fulfil 
 
 My duties, a devoted wife, 
 
 With the stern step of vanquished will, 
 
 Walking beneath the night of life, 
 
 Whose hours extinguished, like slow rain 
 
 Falling for ever, pain by pain, 
 
 The very hope of death's dear rest ; 
 
 Which, since the heart within my breast 
 
 Of natural life was dispossest, 
 
 It's strange sustainer there had been. 
 
 When flowers were dead, and grass was green 
 Upon my mother's grave, — that mother 
 Whom to outlive, and cheer, and make 
 My wan eyes glitter for her sake, 
 Was my vowed task, the single care 
 Which once gave life to my despair, — 
 
ROSALIND AND HELEN. 21 
 
 When she was a thing that did not stir 
 
 And the crawling worms were cradling her 
 
 To a sleep more deep and so more sweet 
 
 Than a baby's rocked on its nurse's knee, 
 
 I lived : a living pulse then beat 
 
 Beneath my heart that awakened me. 
 
 What was this pulse so warm and free ? 
 
 Alas ! I knew it could not be 
 
 My own dull blood : 'twas like a thought 
 
 Of liquid love, that spread and wrought 
 
 Under my bosom and in my brain, 
 
 And crept with the blood through every vein ; 
 
 And hour by hour, day after day, 
 
 The wonder could not charm away, 
 
 But laid in sleep, my wakeful pain, 
 
 Until I knew it was a child, 
 
 And then I wept. For long, long years 
 
 These frozen eyes had shed no tears : 
 
 But now — 'twas the season fair and mild 
 
 When April has wept itself to May : 
 
 I sate through the sweet sunny day 
 
22 ROSALIND AND HELEN. 
 
 By my window bowered round with leaves, 
 And down my cheeks the quick tears ran 
 Like twinkling rain-drops from the eaves, 
 When warm spring showers are passing o'er 
 
 Helen, none can ever tell 
 
 The joy it was to weep once more ! 
 
 1 wept to think how hard it were 
 To kill my babe, and take from it 
 The sense of light, and the warm air, 
 And my own fond and tender care, 
 And love and smiles ; ere I knew yet 
 That these for it might, as for me. 
 Be the masks of a grinning mockery. 
 And haply, I would dream, 'twere sweet 
 To feed it from my faded breast, 
 
 Or mark my own heart's restless beat 
 Kock it to it's untroubled rest, 
 And watch the growing soul beneath 
 Dawn in faint smiles ; and hear its breath, 
 Half interrupted by calm sighs, 
 
KOSALIND AND HELEN. 23 
 
 And search the depth of its fair eyes 
 
 For long departed memories ! 
 
 And so I lived till that sweet load 
 
 Was lightened. Darkly forward flowed 
 
 The stream of years, and on it bore 
 
 Two shapes of gladness to my sight ; 
 
 Two other babes, delightful more 
 
 In my lost soul's abandoned night, 
 
 Than their own country ships may be 
 
 Sailing towards wrecked mariners, 
 
 Who cling to the rock of a wintry sea. 
 
 For each, as it came, brought soothing tears, 
 
 And a loosening warmth, as each one lay 
 
 Sucking the sullen milk away 
 
 About my frozen heart, did play, 
 
 And weaned it, oh how painfully ! — 
 
 As they themselves were weaned each one 
 
 From that sweet food, — even from the thirst 
 
 Of death, and nothingness, and rest, 
 
 Strange inmate of a living breast ! 
 
 Which all that I had undergone 
 
 Of grief and shame, since she, who first 
 
24 ROSALIND AND HELEN. 
 
 The gates of that dark refuge closed, 
 Came to my sight, and almost burst 
 The seal of that Lethean spring ; 
 But these fair shadows interposed : 
 For all delights are shadows now ! 
 And from my brain to my dull brow 
 The heavy tears gather and flow : 
 I cannot speak : Oh let me weep ! 
 
 The tears which fell from her wan eyes 
 Glimmered among the moonlight dew : 
 Her deep hard sobs and heavy sighs 
 Their echoes in the darkness threw. 
 When she grew calm, she thus did keep 
 The tenor of her tale : 
 
 He died : 
 I know not how : he was not old, 
 If age be numbered by its years : 
 But he was bowed and bent with fears, 
 Pale with the quenchless thirst of gold, 
 Which, like fierce fever, left him weak 
 
ROSALIND AND HELEN. 25 
 
 And his strait lip arid bloated cheek 
 Were warped in spasms by hollow sneers ; 
 And selfish cares with barren plough, 
 Not age, had lined his narrow brow, 
 And foul and cruel thoughts, which feed 
 Upon the withering life within, 
 Like vipers on some poisonous weed. 
 Whether his ill were death or sin 
 None knew, until he died indeed, 
 And then men owned they were the same. 
 
 Seven days within my chamber lay 
 That corse, and my babes made holiday : 
 At last, I told them what is death : 
 The eldest, with a kind of shame, 
 Came to my knees with silent breath, 
 And sate awe-striken at my feet ; 
 And soon the others left their play, 
 And sate there too. It is unmeet 
 To shed on the brief flower of youth 
 The withering knowledge of the grave ; 
 From me remorse then wrung that truth. 
 
2b ROSALIND AND HELEN. 
 
 I could not bear the joy which gave 
 Too just a response to mine own. 
 In vain. I dared not feign a groan ; 
 And in their artless looks I saw, 
 Between the mists of fear and awe, 
 That my own thought was theirs ; and they 
 Expressed it not in words, but said, 
 Each in its heart, how every day 
 Will pass in happy work and play, 
 Now he is dead and gone away. 
 
 After the funeral all our kin 
 
 Assembled, and the will was read. 
 
 My friend, I tell thee, even the dead 
 
 Have strength, their putrid shrouds within, 
 
 To blast and torture. Those who live 
 
 Still fear the living, but a corse 
 
 Is merciless, and power doth give 
 
 To such pale tyrants half the spoil 
 
 He rends from those who groan and toil, 
 
 Because they blush not with remorse 
 
 Among their crawling worms. Behold, 
 
ROSALIND AND HELEN. 27 
 
 I have no child ! my tale grows old 
 
 With grief, and staggers : let it reach 
 
 The limits of my feeble speech, 
 
 And languidly at length recline 
 
 On the brink of its own grave and mine. 
 
 Thou knowest what a thing is Poverty 
 Among the fallen on evil days : 
 'Tis Crime, and Fear, and Infamy, 
 And houseless Want in frozen ways 
 Wandering ungarmented, and Pain, 
 And, worse than all, that inward stain 
 Foul Self-contempt, which drowns in sneers 
 Youth's starlight smile, and makes its tears 
 First like hot gall, then dry for ever ! 
 And well thou knowest a mother never 
 Could doom her children to this ill, 
 And well he knew the same. The will 
 Imported, that if e'er again 
 I sought my children to behold, 
 Or in my birth-place did remain 
 Beyond three days, whose hours were told, 
 
28 ROSALIND AND HELEN. 
 
 They should inherit nought : and he, 
 To whom next came their patrimony, 
 A sallow lawyer, cruel and cold, 
 Aye watched me, as the will was read, 
 With eyes askance, which sought to see 
 The secrets of my agony ; 
 And with close lips and anxious brow 
 Stood canvassing still to and fro 
 The chance of my resolve, and all 
 The dead man's caution just did call ; 
 For in that killing lie 'twas said — 
 " She is adulterous, and doth hold 
 In secret that the Christian creed 
 Is false, and therefore is much need 
 That I should have a care to save 
 My children from eternal fire." 
 Friend, he was sheltered by the grave, 
 And therefore dared to be a liar ! 
 In truth, the Indian on the pyre 
 Of her dead husband, half consumed, 
 As well might there be false, as I 
 To those abhorred embraces doomed, 
 
ROSALIND AND HELEN. 29 
 
 Far worse than fire's brief agony. 
 
 As to the Christian creed, if true 
 
 Or false, I never questioned it : 
 
 I took it as the vulgar do : 
 
 Nor my vext soul had leisure yet 
 
 To doubt the things men say, or deem 
 
 That they are other than they seem. 
 
 All present who those crimes did hear, 
 
 In feigned or actual scorn and fear, 
 
 Men, women, children, slunk away, 
 
 Whispering with self-contented pride, 
 
 Which half suspects its own base lie. 
 
 I spoke to none, nor did abide, 
 
 But silently I went my way, 
 
 Nor noticed I where joyously 
 
 Sate my two younger babes at play, 
 
 In the court-yard through which I past ; 
 
 But went with footsteps firm and fast 
 
 Till I came to the brink of the ocean green, 
 
 And there, a woman with grey hairs, 
 
 Who had my mother's servant been, 
 
30 ROSALIND AND HELEN. 
 
 Kneeling, with many tears and prayers, 
 Made me accept a purse of gold, 
 Half of the earnings she had kept 
 To refuge her when weak and old. 
 
 With woe, which never sleeps or slept, 
 
 I wander now. 'Tis a vain thought — 
 
 But on yon alp, whose snowy head 
 
 'Mid the azure air is islanded, 
 
 (We see it o'er the flood of cloud, 
 
 Which sunrise from its eastern caves 
 
 Drives, wrinkling into golden waves, 
 
 Hung with its precipices proud, 
 
 From that grey stone where first we met) 
 
 There, now who knows the dead feel nought ? 
 
 Should be my grave ; for he who yet 
 
 Is my soul's soul, once said : " 'Twere sweet 
 
 'Mid stars and lightnings to abide, 
 
 And winds and lulling snows, that beat 
 
 With their soft flakes the mountain wide, 
 
 When weary meteor lamps repose, 
 
 And languid storms their pinions close : 
 
ROSALIND AND HELEN. 31 
 
 And all things strong and bright and pure, 
 
 And ever during, aye endure : 
 
 Who knows, if one were buried there, 
 
 But these things might our spirits make, 
 
 Amid the all-surrounding air, 
 
 Their own eternity partake ? " 
 
 Then 'twas a wild and playful saying 
 
 At which I laughed, or seemed to laugh : 
 
 They were his words : now heed my praying, 
 
 And let them be my epitaph. 
 
 Thy memory for a term may be 
 
 My monument. Wilt remember me ? 
 
 I know thou wilt, and canst forgive 
 
 Whilst in this erring world to live 
 
 My soul disdained not, that I thought 
 
 Its lying forms were worthy aught 
 
 And much less thee. 
 
 HELEN. 
 
 O speak not so, 
 But come to me and pour thy woe 
 Into this heart, full though it be, 
 
32 ROSALIND AND HELEN. 
 
 Aye overflowing with its own : 
 
 I thought that grief had severed me 
 
 From all beside who weep and groan ; 
 
 Its likeness upon earth to be, 
 
 Its express image ; but thou art 
 
 More wretched. Sweet ! we will not part 
 
 Henceforth, if death be not division ; 
 
 If so, the dead feel no contrition. 
 
 But wilt thou hear since last we parted 
 
 All that has left me broken hearted ? 
 
 ROSALIND. 
 
 Yes, speak. The faintest stars are scarcely shorn 
 Of their thin beams by that delusive morn 
 Which sinks again in darkness, like the light 
 Of early love, soon lost in total night. 
 
 HELEN. 
 
 Alas ! Italian winds are mild, 
 But my bosom is cold — wintry cold — 
 When the warm air weaves, among the fresh 
 leaves, 
 
ROSALIND AND HELEN. S3 
 
 Soft music, my poor brain is wild, 
 And I am weak like a nursling child, 
 Though my soul with grief is gray and old. 
 
 ROSALIND. 
 
 Weep not at thine own words, though they 
 
 must make 
 Me weep. What is thy tale ? 
 
 HELEN. 
 
 I fear 'twill shake 
 Thy gentle heart with tears. Thou well 
 Kememberest when we met no more, 
 And, though I dwelt with Lionel, 
 That friendless caution pierced me sore 
 With grief ; a wound my spirit bore 
 Indignantly, but when he died 
 With him lay dead both hope and pride. 
 
 Alas ! all hope is buried now. 
 But then men dreamed the aged earth 
 Was labouring in that mighty birth, 
 D 
 
34 ROSALIND AND HELEN. 
 
 Which many a poet and a sage 
 Has aye foreseen — the happy age 
 When truth and love shall dwell below 
 Among the works and ways of men ; 
 Which on this world not power but will 
 Even now is wanting to fulfil. 
 
 Among mankind what thence befel 
 Of strife, how vain, is known too well ; 
 When liberty's dear paean fell 
 'Mid murderous howls. To Lionel, 
 Though of great wealth and lineage high, 
 Yet through those dungeon walls there came 
 Thy thrilling light, O liberty ! 
 And as the meteor's midnight flame 
 Startles the dreamer, sun-like truth 
 Flashed on his visionary youth, 
 And filled him, not with love, but faith, 
 And hope, and courage mute in death ; 
 For love and life in him were twins, 
 Born at one birth : in every other 
 First life then love its course begins, 
 
ROSALIND AND HELEN. 35 
 
 Though they be children of one mother ; 
 
 And so through this dark world they fleet 
 
 Divided, till in death they meet : 
 
 But he loved all things ever. Then 
 
 He past amid the strife of men, 
 
 And stood at the throne of armed power 
 
 Pleading for a world of woe : 
 
 Secure as one on a rock-built tower 
 
 O'er the wrecks which the surge trails to and fro, 
 
 'Mid the passions wild of human kind 
 
 He stood, like a spirit calming them ; 
 
 For, it was said, his words could bind 
 
 Like music the lulled crowd, and stem 
 
 That torrent of unquiet dream, 
 
 Which mortals truth and reason deem, 
 
 But is revenge and fear and pride. 
 
 Joyous he was ; and hope and peace 
 
 On all who heard him did abide, 
 
 Raining like dew from his sweet talk, 
 
 As where the evening star may walk 
 
 Along the brink of the gloomy seas, 
 
 Liquid mists of splendour quiver. 
 
36 ROSALIND AND HELEN. 
 
 His very gestures touched to tears 
 
 The unpersuaded tyrant, never 
 
 So moved before : his presence stung 
 
 The torturers with their victim's pain, 
 
 And none knew how ; and through their ear 
 
 The subtle witchcraft of his tongue 
 
 Unlocked the hearts of those who keep 
 
 Gold, the world's bond of slavery. 
 
 Men wondered, and some sneered to see 
 
 One sow what he could never reap : 
 
 For he is rich, they said, and young, 
 
 And might drink from the depths of luxury. 
 
 If he seeks fame, fame never crowned 
 
 The champion of a trampled creed : 
 
 If he seeks power, power is enthroned 
 
 'Mid antient rights and wrongs, to feed 
 
 Which hungry wolves with praise and spoil, 
 
 Those who would sit near power must toil ; 
 
 And such, there sitting, all may see. 
 
 What seeks he ? All that others seek 
 
 He casts away, like a vile weed 
 
 Which the sea casts unreturningly. 
 
ROSALIND AND HELEN. 37 
 
 That poor and hungry men should break 
 
 The laws which wreak them toil and scorn, 
 
 We understand ; but Lionel 
 
 We know is rich and nobly born. 
 
 So wondered they : yet all men loved 
 
 Young Lionel, though few approved ; 
 
 All but the priests, whose hatred fell 
 
 Like the unseen blight of a smiling day, 
 
 The withering honey dew, which clings 
 
 Under the bright green buds of May, 
 
 Whilst they unfold their emerald wings : 
 
 For he made verses wild and queer 
 
 On the strange creeds priests hold so dear, 
 
 Because they bring them land and gold. 
 
 Of devils and saints and all such gear, 
 
 He made tales which whoso heard or read 
 
 Would laugh till he were almost dead. 
 
 So this grew a proverb : " don't get old 
 
 Till Lionel's ' banquet in hell ' you hear, 
 
 And then you will laugh yourself young again." 
 
 So the priests hated him, and he 
 
 Repaid their hate with cheerful glee. 
 
38 ROSALIND AND HELEN. 
 
 Ah, smiles and joyance quickly died, 
 
 For public hope grew pale and dim 
 
 In an altered time and tide, 
 
 And in its wasting withered him, 
 
 As a summer flower that blows too soon 
 
 Droops in the smile of the waning moon, 
 
 When it scatters through an April night 
 
 The frozen dews of wrinkling blight. 
 
 None now hoped more. Grey Power was seated 
 
 Safely on her ancestral throne ; 
 
 And Faith, the Python, undefeated, 
 
 Even to its blood-stained steps dragged on 
 
 Her foul and wounded train, and men 
 
 Were trampled and deceived again, 
 
 And words and shews again could bind 
 
 The wailing tribes of human kind 
 
 In scorn and famine. Fire and blood 
 
 Raged round the raging multitude, 
 
 To fields remote by tyrants sent 
 
 To be the scorned instrument 
 
 With which they drag from mines of gore 
 
 The chains their slaves yet ever wore : 
 
ROSALIND AND HELEN. 39 
 
 And in the streets men met each other, 
 And by old altars and in halls, 
 And smiled again at festivals. 
 But each man found in his heart's brother 
 Cold cheer ; for all, though half deceived, 
 The outworn creeds again believed, 
 And the same round anew began, 
 Which the weary world yet ever ran. 
 
 Many then wept, not tears, but gall 
 
 Within their hearts, like drops which fall 
 
 Wasting the fountain-stone away. 
 
 And in that dark and evil day 
 
 Did all desires and thoughts, that claim 
 
 Men's care — ambition, friendship, fame, 
 
 Love, hope, though hope was now despair — 
 
 Indue the colours of this change, 
 
 As from the all-surrounding air 
 
 The earth takes hues obscure and strange, 
 
 When storm and earthquake linger there. 
 
 And so, my friend, it then befel 
 To many, most to Lionel, 
 
40 ROSALIND AND HELEN. 
 
 Whose hope was like the life of youth 
 Within him, and when dead, became 
 A spirit of unresting flame, 
 Which goaded him in his distress 
 Over the world's vast wilderness. 
 Three years he left his Dative land, 
 And on the fourth, when he returned, 
 None knew him : he was striken deep 
 With some disease of mind, and turned 
 Into aught unlike Lionel. 
 On him, on whom, did he pause in sleep, 
 Serenest smiles were wont to keep, 
 And, did he wake, a winged band 
 Of bright persuasions, which had fed 
 On his sweet lips and liquid eyes, 
 Kept their swift pinions half outspread, 
 To do on men his least command ; 
 On him, whom once 'twas paradise 
 Even to behold, now misery lay : 
 In his own heart 'twas merciless, 
 To all things else none may express 
 Its innocence and tenderness. 
 
ROSALIND AND HELEN. 41 
 
 'Twas said that he had refuge sought 
 
 In love from his unquiet thought 
 
 In distant lands, and been deceived 
 
 By some strange shew ; for there were found, 
 
 Blotted with tears as those relieved 
 
 By their own words are wont to do, 
 
 These mournful verses on the ground, 
 
 By all who read them blotted too. 
 
 " How am I changed ! my hopes were once like 
 
 fire: 
 I loved, and I believed that life was love. 
 How am I lost ! on wings of swift desire 
 Among Heaven's winds my spirit once did move. 
 I slept, and silver dreams did aye inspire 
 My liquid sleep : I woke, and did approve 
 All nature to my heart, and thought to make 
 A paradise of earth for one sweet sake, 
 
 " I love, but I believe in love no more. 
 I feel desire, but hope not. O, from sleep 
 
42 ROSALIND AND HELEN. 
 
 Most vainly must my weary brain implore 
 Its long lost flattery now : I wake to weep, 
 And sit through the long day gnawing the core 
 Of my bitter heart, and, like a miser, keep, 
 Since none in what I feel take pain or plea- 
 sure, 
 To my own soul its self-consuming treasure." 
 
 He dwelt beside me near the sea : 
 
 And oft in evening did we meet, 
 
 When the waves, beneath the starlight, flee 
 
 O'er the yellow sands with silver feet. 
 
 And talked : our talk was sad and sweet, 
 
 Till slowly from his mien there passed 
 
 The desolation which it spoke ; 
 
 And smiles, — as when the lightning's blast 
 
 Has parched some heaven-delighting oak, 
 
 The next spring shews leaves pale and rare, 
 
 But like flowers delicate and fair, 
 
 On its rent boughs, — again arrayed 
 
 His countenance in tender light : 
 
EOSALIND AND HELEN. 43 
 
 His words grew subtile fire, which made 
 The air his hearers breathed delight : 
 His motions, like the winds, were free, 
 Which bend the bright grass gracefully, 
 Then fade away in circlets faint : 
 And winged hope, on which upborne 
 His soul seemed hovering in his eyes, 
 Like some bright spirit newly born 
 Floating amid the sunny skies, 
 Sprang forth from his rent heart anew. 
 Yet o'er his talk, and looks, and mien, 
 Tempering their loveliness too keen, 
 Past woe its shadow backward threw, 
 Till like an exhalation, spread 
 From flowers half drunk with evening dew, 
 They did become infectious : sweet 
 And subtile mists of sense and thought : 
 Which wrapt us soon, when we might meet, 
 Almost from our own looks and aught 
 The wide world holds. And so, his mind 
 Was healed, while mine grew sick with fear : 
 For ever now his health declined, 
 
44 ROSALIND AND HELEN. 
 
 Like some frail bark which cannot bear 
 
 The impulse of an altered wind, 
 
 Though prosperous : and my heart grew full 
 
 'Mid its new joy of a new care : 
 
 For his cheek became, not pale, but fair, 
 
 As rose-o'ershadowed lilies are ; 
 
 And soon his deep and sunny hair, 
 
 In this alone less beautiful, 
 
 Like grass in tombs grew wild and rare. 
 
 The blood in his translucent veins 
 
 Beat, not like animal life, but love 
 
 Seemed now its sullen springs to move, 
 
 When life had failed, and all its pains : 
 
 And sudden sleep would seize him oft 
 
 Like death, so calm, but that a tear, 
 
 His pointed eye-lashes between, 
 
 Would gather in the light serene 
 
 Of smiles, whose lustre bright and soft 
 
 Beneath lay undulating there. 
 
 His breath was like inconstant flame, 
 
 As eagerly it went and came ; 
 
 And I hung o'er him in his sleep, 
 
ROSALIND AND HELEN. 45 
 
 Till, like an image in the lake 
 Which rains disturb, my tears would break 
 The shadow of that slumber deep : 
 Then he would bid me not to weep, 
 And say with flattery false, yet sweet, 
 That death and he could never meet, . 
 If I would never part with him. 
 And so we loved, and did unite 
 All that in us was yet divided : 
 For when he said, that many a rite, 
 By men to bind but once provided, 
 Could not be shared by him and me, 
 Or they would kill him in their glee, 
 I shuddered, and then laughing said — 
 " We will have rites our faith to bind, 
 But our church shall be the starry night, 
 Our altar the grassy earth outspread, 
 And our priest the muttering wind." 
 
 'Twas sunset as I spoke : one star 
 Had scarce burst forth, when from afar 
 
46 ROSALIND AND HELEN. 
 
 The ministers of misrule sent, 
 
 Seized upon Lionel, and bore 
 
 His chained limbs to a dreary tower, 
 
 In the midst of a city vast and wide. 
 
 For he, they said, from his mind had bent 
 
 Against their gods keen blasphemy, 
 
 For which, though his soul must roasted be 
 
 In hell's red lakes immortally 
 
 Yet even on earth must he abide 
 
 The vengeance of their slaves : a trial, 
 
 I think, men call it. What avail 
 
 Are prayers and tears, which chase denial 
 
 From the fierce savage, nursed in hate ? 
 
 What the knit soul that pleading and pale 
 
 Makes wan the quivering cheek, which late 
 
 It painted with its own delight ? 
 
 We were divided. As I could, 
 
 I stilled the tingling of my blood, 
 
 And followed him in their despite, 
 
 As a widow follows, pale and wild, 
 
 The murderers and corse of her only child ; 
 
ROSALIND AND HELEN. 47 
 
 And when we came to the prison door 
 
 And I prayed to share his dungeon floor 
 
 With prayers which rarely have been spurned, 
 
 And when men drove me forth and I 
 
 Stared with blank frenzy on the sky, 
 
 A farewell look of love he turned, 
 
 Half calming me ; then gazed awhile, 
 
 As if thro' that black and massy pile, 
 
 And thro' the crowd around him there, 
 
 And thro' the dense and murky air, 
 
 And the thronged streets, he did espy 
 
 What poets know and prophecy ; 
 
 And said, with voice that made them shiver 
 
 And clung like music in my brain, 
 
 And which the mute walls spoke again 
 
 Prolonging it with deepened strain : 
 
 " Fear not, the tyrants shall rule for ever, 
 
 Or the priests of the bloody faith ; 
 
 They stand on the brink of that mighty river, 
 
 Whose waves they have tainted with death : 
 
 It is fed from the depths of a thousand dells, 
 
 Around them it foams, and rages, and swells, 
 
48 ROSALIND AND HELEN. 
 
 And their swords and their sceptres I floating 
 
 see, 
 Like wrecks in the surge of eternity." 
 
 I dwelt beside the prison gate, 
 
 And the strange crowd that out and in 
 
 Passed, some, no doubt, with mine own fate, 
 
 Might have fretted me with its ceaseless din, 
 
 But the fever of care was louder within. 
 
 Soon, but too late, in penitence 
 
 Or fear, his foes released him thence : 
 
 I saw his thin and languid form, 
 
 As leaning on the jailor's arm, 
 
 Whose hardened eyes grew moist the while, 
 
 To meet his mute and faded smile, 
 
 And hear his words of kind farewell, 
 
 He tottered forth from his damp cell. 
 
 Many had never wept before, 
 
 From whom fast tears then gushed and fell : 
 
 Many will relent no more, 
 
 Who sobbed like infants then : aye, all 
 
 Who thronged the prisons stony hall, 
 
ROSALIND AND HELEN. 49 
 
 The rulers or the slaves of law, 
 Felt with a new surprise and awe 
 That they were human, till strong shame 
 Made them again become the same. 
 The prison blood- hounds, huge and grim, 
 From human looks the infection caught, 
 And fondly crouched and fawned on him ; 
 And men have heard the prisoners say, 
 Who in their rotting dungeons lay; 
 That from that hour, throughout one day, 
 The fierce despair and hate which kept 
 Their trampled bosoms almost slept : 
 When, like twin vultures, they hung feeding 
 On each heart's wound, wide torn and bleeding, 
 Because their jailors' rule, they thought, 
 Grew merciful, like a parent's sway. 
 
 I know not how, but we were free : 
 
 And Lionel sate alone with me, 
 
 As the carriage drove thro' the streets apace ; 
 
 And we looked upon each other's face ; 
 
 And the blood in our fingers intertwined 
 
50 ROSALIND AND HELEN. 
 
 Ran like the thoughts of a single mind, 
 
 As the swift emotions went and came 
 
 Thro' the veins of each united frame. 
 
 So thro' the long long streets we past 
 
 Of the million-peopled City vast ; 
 
 Which is that desart, where each one 
 
 Seeks his mate yet is alone, 
 
 Beloved and sought and mourned of none ; 
 
 Until the clear blue sky was seen, 
 
 And the grassy meadows bright and green, 
 
 And then I sunk in his embrace, 
 
 Enclosing there a mighty space 
 
 Of love : and so we travelled on 
 
 By woods, and fields of yellow flowers, 
 
 And towns, and villages, and towers, 
 
 Day after day of happy hours. 
 
 It was the azure time of June, 
 
 When the skies are deep in the stainless noon, 
 
 And the warm and fitful breezes shake 
 
 The fresh green leaves of the hedge-row briar, 
 
 And there were odours then to make 
 
 The very breath we did respire 
 
ROSALIND AND HELEN. 51 
 
 A liquid element, whereon 
 
 Our spirits, like delighted things 
 
 That walk the air on subtle wings, 
 
 Floated and mingled far away, 
 
 'Mid the warm winds of the sunny day. 
 
 And when the evening star came forth 
 
 Above the curve of the new bent moon, 
 
 And light and sound ebbed from the earth, 
 
 Like the tide of the full and weary sea 
 
 To the depths of its tranquillity, 
 
 Our natures to its own repose 
 
 Did the earth's breathless sleep attune : 
 
 Like flowers, which on each other close 
 
 Their languid leaves when day-light's gone, 
 
 We lay, till new emotions came, 
 
 Which seemed to make each mortal frame 
 
 One soul of interwoven flame, 
 
 A life in life, a second birth 
 
 In worlds diviner far than earth, 
 
 Which, like two strains of harmony 
 
 That mingle in the silent sky 
 
 Then slowly disunite, past by 
 
52 ROSALIND AND HELEN. 
 
 And left the tenderness of tears, 
 
 A soft oblivion of all fears, 
 
 A sweet sleep : so we travelled on 
 
 Till we came to the home of Lionel, 
 
 Among the mountains wild and lone, 
 
 Beside the hoary western sea, 
 
 Which near the verge of the echoing shore 
 
 The massy forest shadowed o'er. 
 
 The ancient steward, with hair all hoar, 
 
 As we alighted, wept to see 
 
 His master changed so fearfully ; 
 
 And the old man's sobs did waken me 
 
 From my dream of unremaining gladness ; 
 
 The truth flashed o'er me like quick madness 
 
 When I looked, and saw that there was death 
 
 On Lionel : yet day by day 
 
 He lived, till fear grew hope and faith, 
 
 And in my soul I dared to say, 
 
 Nothing so bright can pass away : 
 
 Death is dark, and foul, and dull, 
 
 But he is — O how beautiful ! 
 
ROSALIND AND HELEN. 5.3 
 
 Yet day by day he grew more weak, 
 And his sweet voice, when he might speak, 
 Which ne'er was loud, became more low ; 
 And the light which flashed through his waxen 
 
 cheek 
 Grew faint, as the rose-like hues which flow 
 From sunset o'er the Alpine snow : 
 And death seemed not like death in him, 
 For the spirit of life o'er every limb 
 Lingered, a mist of sense and thought. 
 When the summer wind faint odours brought 
 From mountain flowers, even as it passed 
 His cheek would change, as the noon-day sea 
 Which the dying breeze sweeps fitfully. 
 If but a cloud the sky o'ercast, 
 You might see his colour come and go, 
 And the softest strain of music made 
 Sweet smiles, yet sad, arise and fade 
 Amid the dew of his tender eyes ; 
 And the breath, with intermitting flow, 
 Made his pale lips quiver and part. 
 You might hear the beatings of his heart, 
 
54 ROSALIND AND HELEN. 
 
 Quick, but not strong ; and with my tresses 
 
 When oft he playfully would bind 
 
 In the bowers of mossy lonelinesses 
 
 His neck, and win me so to mingle 
 
 In the sweet depth of woven caresses, 
 
 And our faint limbs were intertwined, 
 
 Alas ! the unquiet life did tingle 
 
 From mine own heart through every vein, 
 
 Like a captive in dreams of liberty, 
 
 Who beats the walls of his stony cell. 
 
 But his, it seemed already free, 
 
 Like the shadow of fire surrounding me ! 
 
 On my faint eyes and limbs did dwell 
 
 That spirit as it passed, till soon, 
 
 As a frail cloud wandering o'er the moon, 
 
 Beneath its light invisible, 
 
 Is seen when it folds its grey wings again 
 
 To alight on midnight's dusky plain, 
 
 I lived and saw, and the gathering soul 
 
 Passed from beneath that strong controul, 
 
 And I fell on a life which was sick with fear 
 
 Of all the woe that now I bear. 
 
ROSALIND AND HELEN. 55 
 
 Amid a bloomless myrtle wood, 
 
 On a green and sea-girt promontory, 
 
 Not far from where we dwelt, there stood 
 
 In record of a sweet sad story, 
 
 An altar and a temple bright 
 
 Circled by steps, and o'er the gate 
 
 Was sculptured, " To Fidelity 
 
 And in the shrine an image sate, 
 
 All veiled : but there was seen the light 
 
 Of smiles, which faintly could express 
 
 A mingled pain and tenderness 
 
 Through that ethereal drapery. 
 
 The left hand held the head, the right — 
 
 Beyond the veil, beneath the skin, 
 
 You might see the nerves quivering within — 
 
 Was forcing the point of a barbed dart, 
 
 Into its side-convulsing heart. 
 
 An unskilled hand, yet one informed 
 
 With genius, had the marble warmed 
 
 With that pathetic life. This tale 
 
 It told : A dog had from the sea, 
 
 When the tide was raging fearfully, 
 
o6 ROSALIND AND HELEN. 
 
 Dragged Lionel's mother, weak and pale, 
 
 Then died beside her on the sand, 
 
 And she that temple thence had planned ; 
 
 But it was Lionel's own hand 
 
 Had wrought the image. Each new moon 
 
 That lady did, in this lone fane, 
 
 The rites of a religion sweet, 
 
 Whose god was in her heart and brain : 
 
 The seasons' loveliest flowers were strewn 
 
 On the marble floor beneath her feet, 
 
 And she brought crowns of sea-buds white, 
 
 Whose odour is so sweet and faint, 
 
 And weeds, like branching chrysolyte, 
 
 Woven in devices fine and quaint, 
 
 And tears from her brown eyes did stain 
 
 The altar : need but look upon 
 
 That dying statue fair and wan, 
 
 If tears should cease, to weep again : 
 
 And rare Arabian odours came, 
 
 Through the myrtle copses steaming thence 
 
 From the hissing frankincense, 
 
 Whose smoke, wool-white as ocean foam, 
 
ROSALIND AND HELEN. 57 
 
 Hung in dense flocks beneath the dome, 
 That ivory dome, whose azure night 
 With golden stars, like heaven, was bright 
 O'er the split cedars pointed flame ; 
 And the lady's harp would kindle there 
 The melody of an old air, 
 Softer than sleep ; the villagers 
 Mixt their religion up with her's, 
 And as they listened round, shed tears. 
 
 One eve he led me to this fane : 
 Daylight on its last purple cloud 
 Was lingering grey, and soon her strain 
 The nightingale began ; now loud, 
 Climbing in circles the windless sky, 
 Now dying music ; suddenly 
 'Tis scattered in a thousand notes, 
 And now to the hushed ear it floats 
 Like field smells known in infancy, 
 Then failing, soothes the air again. 
 We sate within that temple lone, 
 Pavilioned round with Parian stone ; 
 
58 ROSALIND AND HELEN. 
 
 His mother's harp stood near, and oft 
 
 I had awakened music soft 
 
 Amid its wires : the nioditinsrale 
 
 Was pausing in her heaven-taught tale : 
 
 " Now drain the cup," said Lionel, 
 
 " Which the poet-bird has crowned so well 
 
 With the wine of her bright and liquid song ! 
 
 Heardst thou not sweet words among 
 
 That heaven-resounding minstrelsy ? 
 
 Heardst thou not, that those who die 
 
 Awake in a world of extacy ? 
 
 That love, when limbs are interwoven, 
 
 And sleep, when the night of life is cloven, 
 
 And thought, to the world's dim boundaries 
 
 clinging, 
 And music, when one beloved is singing, 
 Is death ? Let us drain right joyously 
 The cup which the sweet bird fills for me." 
 He paused, and to my lips he bent 
 His own : like spirit his words went 
 Through all my limbs with the speed of fire ; 
 And his keen eyes, glittering through mine, 
 
ROSALIND AND HELEN. 59 
 
 Filled me with the flame divine, 
 
 Which in their orbs was burning far, 
 
 Like the light of an unmeasured star, 
 
 In the sky of midnight dark and deep : 
 
 Yes, 'twas his soul that did inspire 
 
 Sounds, which my skill could ne'er awaken ; 
 
 And first, I felt my fingers sweep 
 
 The harp, and a long quivering cry 
 
 Burst from my lips in symphony : 
 
 The dusk and solid air was shaken, 
 
 As swift and swifter the notes came 
 
 From my touch, that wandered like quick flame. 
 
 And from my bosom, labouring 
 
 With some unutterable thing : 
 
 The awful sound of my own voice made 
 
 My faint lips tremble, in some mood 
 
 Of wordless thought Lionel stood 
 
 So pale, that even beside his cheek 
 
 The snowy column from its shade 
 
 Caught whiteness : yet his countenance 
 
 Raised upward, burned with radiance 
 
 Of spirit-piercing joy, whose light, 
 
60 ROSALIND AND HELEN. 
 
 Like the moon struggling through the night 
 
 Of whirlwind-rifted clouds, did break 
 
 With beams that might not be confined. 
 
 I paused, but soon his gestures kindled 
 
 New power, as by the moving wind 
 
 The waves are lifted, and my song 
 
 To low soft notes now changed and dwindled, 
 
 And from the twinkling wires among, 
 
 My languid fingers drew and flung 
 
 Circles of life dissolving sound, 
 
 Yet faint : in aery rings they bound 
 
 My Lionel, who, as every strain 
 
 Grew fainter but more sweet, his mien 
 
 Sunk with the sound relaxedly ; 
 
 And slowly now he turned to me, 
 
 As slowly faded from his face 
 
 That awful joy : with looks serene 
 
 He was soon drawn to my embrace, 
 
 And my wild song then died away 
 
 In murmurs : words, I dare not say 
 
 We mixed, and on his lips mine fed 
 
 Till they methought felt still and cold : 
 
ROSALIND AND HELEN. 61 
 
 " What is it with thee, love ? " I said : 
 No word, no look, no motion ! yes, 
 There was a change, but spare to guess, 
 Nor let that moment's hope be told. 
 I looked, and knew that he was dead, 
 And fell, as the eagle on the plain 
 Falls when life deserts her brain, 
 And the mortal lightning is veiled again. 
 
 O that I were now dead ! but such 
 Did they not, love, demand too much 
 Those dying murmurs ? He forbade. 
 O that I once again were mad ! 
 And yet, dear Rosalind, not so, 
 For I would live to share thy woe. 
 Sweet boy, did I forget thee too ? 
 Alas, we know not what we do 
 When we speak words. 
 
 No memory more 
 Is in my mind of that sea shore. 
 Madness came on me, and a troop 
 
62 ROSALIND AND HELEN. 
 
 Of misty shapes did seem to sit 
 
 Beside me, on a vessel's poop, 
 
 And the clear north wind was driving it. 
 
 Then I heard strange tongues, and saw strange 
 
 flowers, 
 And the stars methought grew unlike ours, 
 And the azure sky and the stormless sea 
 Made me believe that I had died, 
 And waked in a world, which was to me 
 Drear hell, though heaven to all beside : 
 Then a dead sleep fell on my mind, 
 Whilst animal life many long years 
 Had rescued from a chasm of tears ; 
 And when I woke, I wept to find 
 That the same lady, bright and wise, 
 With silver locks and quick brown eyes, 
 The mother of my Lionel, 
 Had tended me in my distress, 
 And died some months before. Nor less 
 Wonder, but far more peace and joy 
 Brought in that hour my lovely boy ; 
 For through that trance my soul had well 
 
ROSALIND AND HELEN. 63 
 
 The impress of thy being kept ; 
 
 And if I waked, or if I slept, 
 
 No doubt, though memory faithless be, 
 
 Thy image ever dwelt on me ; 
 
 And thus, O Lionel, like thee 
 
 Is our sweet child. 'Tis sure most strange 
 
 I knew not of so great a change, 
 
 As that which gave him birth, who now 
 
 Is all the solace of my woe. 
 
 That Lionel great wealth had left 
 By will to me, and that of all 
 The ready lies of law bereft, 
 My child and me might well befall. 
 But let me think not of the scorn, 
 Which from the meanest I have borne, 
 When, for my child's beloved sake, 
 I mixed with slaves, to vindicate 
 The very laws themselves do make : 
 Let me not say scorn is my fate, 
 Lest I be proud, suffering the same 
 With those who live in deathless fame. 
 
64 ROSALIND AND HELEN. 
 
 She ceased. — " Lo, where red morning thro' 
 
 the woods 
 Is burning o'er the dew ; " said Rosalind. 
 And with these words they rose, and towards 
 
 the flood 
 Of the blue lake, beneath the leaves now wind 
 With equal steps and fingers intertwined : 
 Thence to a lonely dwelling, where the shore 
 Is shadowed with steep rocks, and cypresses 
 Cleave with their' dark green cones the silent 
 
 skies, 
 And with their shadows the clear depths below, 
 And where a little terrace from its bowers, 
 Of blooming myrtle and faint lemon-flowers, 
 Scatters its sense-dissolving fragrance o'er 
 The liquid marble of the windless lake ; 
 And where the aged forest's limbs look hoar, 
 Under the leaves which their green garments 
 
 make, 
 They come : 'tis Helen's home, and clean and 
 
 white, 
 Like one which tyrants spare on our own land 
 
ROSALIND AND HELEN. 65 
 
 In some such solitude, its casements bright 
 Shone thro' their vine-leaves in the morning- 
 sun, 
 And even within 'twas scarce like Italy. 
 And when she saw how all things there were 
 
 planned, 
 As in an English home, dim memory 
 Disturbed poor Eosalind : she stood as one 
 Whose mind is where his body cannot be, 
 Till Helen led her where her child yet slept, 
 And said, " Observe, that brow was Lionel's, 
 Those lips were his, and so he ever kept 
 One arm in sleep, pillowing his head with it. 
 You cannot see his eyes, they are two wells 
 Of liquid love : let us not wake him yet." 
 But Eosalind could bear no more, and wept 
 A shower of burning tears, which fell upon 
 His face, and so his opening lashes shone 
 With tears unlike his own, as he did leap 
 In sudden wonder from his innocent sleep. 
 
 So Eosalind and Helen lived together 
 F 
 
66 KOSALIND AND HELEN. 
 
 Thenceforth, changed in all else, yet friends 
 
 again, 
 Such as they were, when o'er the mountain 
 
 heather 
 They wandered in their youth, through sun and 
 
 rain. 
 And after many years, for human things 
 Change even like the ocean and the wind, 
 Her daughter was restored to Rosalind, 
 And in their circle thence some visitings 
 Of joy 'mid their new calm would intervene : 
 A lovely child she was, of looks serene, 
 And motions which o'er things indifferent shed 
 The grace and gentleness from whence they 
 
 came. 
 And Helen's boy grew with her, and they fed 
 From the same flowers of thought, until each 
 
 mind 
 Like springs which mingle in one flood became, 
 And in their union soon their parents saw 
 The shadow of the peace denied to them. 
 And Rosalind, for when the living stem 
 
ROSALIND AND HELEN. 67 
 
 Is cankered in its heart, the tree must fall, 
 Died ere her time ; and with deep grief and awe 
 The pale survivors followed her remains 
 Beyond the region of dissolving rains, 
 Up the cold mountain she was wont to call 
 Her tomb ; and on Chiavenna's precipice 
 They raised a pyramid of lasting ice, 
 Whose polished sides, ere day had yet begun, 
 Caught the first glow of the unrisen sun, 
 The last, when it had sunk ; and thro' the night 
 The charioteers of Arctos wheeled round 
 Its glittering point, as seen from Helen's home, 
 Whose sad inhabitants each year would come, 
 With willing steps climbing that rugged height, 
 And hang long locks of hair, and garlands bound 
 With amaranth flowers, which, in the clime's 
 
 despite, 
 Filled the frore air with unaccustomed light : 
 Such flowers, as in the wintry memory bloom 
 Of one friend left, adorned that frozen tomb. 
 
 Helen, whose spirit was of softer mould, 
 
68 ROSALIND AND HELEN. 
 
 Whose sufferings too were less, death slowlier 
 
 led 
 Into the peace of his dominion cold : 
 She died among her kindred, being old. 
 And know, that if love die not in the dead 
 As in the living, none of mortal kind 
 Are blest, as now Helen and Rosalind. 
 
69 
 
 LINES 
 
 WRITTEN AMONG THE EUGANEA.N HILLS, 
 
 OCTOBER, 1818. 
 
 Many a green isle needs must be 
 In the deep wide sea of misery, 
 Or the mariner, worn and wan, 
 Never thus could voyage on 
 Day and night, and night and day, 
 Drifting on his dreary way, 
 With the solid darkness black 
 Closing round his vessel's track ; 
 Whilst above the sunless sky, 
 Big with clouds, hangs heavily, 
 And behind the tempest fleet 
 Hurries on with lightning feet, 
 Riving sail, and cord, and plank, 
 Till the ship has almost drank 
 
70 LINES WRITTEN AMONG 
 
 Death from the o'er-brimming deep ; 
 
 And sinks down, down, like that sleep 
 
 When the dreamer seems to be 
 
 Weltering through eternity ; 
 
 And the dim low line before 
 
 Of a dark and distant shore 
 
 Still recedes, as ever still 
 
 Longing with divided will, 
 
 But no power to seek or shun, 
 
 He is ever drifted on 
 
 O'er the unreposing wave 
 
 To the haven of the grave. 
 
 What, if there no friends will greet ; 
 
 What, if there no heart will meet 
 
 His with love's impatient beat ; 
 
 Wander wheresoe'er he may, 
 
 Can he dream before that day 
 
 To find refuge from distress 
 
 In friendship's smile, in love's caress ? 
 
 Then 'twill wreak him little woe 
 
 Whether such there be or no : 
 
 Senseless is the breast, and cold, 
 
THE EUGANEAN HILLS. 71 
 
 Which relenting love would fold ; 
 Bloodless are the veins and chill 
 Which the pulse of pain did fill ; 
 Every little living nerve 
 That from bitter words did swerve 
 Round the tortured lips and brow, 
 Are like sapless leaflets now 
 Frozen upon December's bough. 
 On the beach of a northern sea 
 Which tempests shake eternally, 
 As once the wretch there lay to sleep, 
 Lies a solitary heap, 
 One white skull and seven dry bones, 
 On the margin of the stones, 
 Where a few grey rushes stand, 
 Boundaries of the sea and land : 
 Nor is heard one voice of wail 
 But the sea-mews, as they sail 
 O'er the billows of the gale ; 
 Or the whirlwind up and down 
 Howling, like a slaughtered town, 
 When a king in glory rides 
 
72 LINES WRITTEN AMONG 
 
 Through the pomp of fratricides : 
 
 Those unburied bones around 
 
 There is many a mournful sound ; 
 
 There is no lament for him, 
 
 Like a sunless vapour, dim, 
 
 Who once clothed with life and thought 
 
 What now moves nor murmurs not. 
 
 Aye, many flowering islands lie 
 
 In the waters of wide Agony : 
 
 To such a one this morn was led, 
 
 My bark by soft winds piloted : 
 
 Mid the mountains Euganean 
 
 I stood listening to the psean, 
 
 With which the legioned rooks did hail 
 
 The sun's uprise majestical ; 
 
 Gathering round with wings all hoar, 
 
 Thro' the dewy mist they soar 
 
 Like grey shades, till th' eastern heaven 
 
 Bursts, and then, as clouds of even, 
 
 Flecked with fire and azure, lie 
 
 In the unfathomable sky 
 
THE EUGANEAN HILLS. 73 
 
 So their plumes of purple grain, 
 Starred with drops of golden rain, 
 Gleam above the sunlight woods, 
 As in silent multitudes 
 On the morning's fitful gale 
 Thro' the broken mist they sail, 
 And the vapours cloven and gleaming 
 Follow down the dark steep streaming, 
 Till all is bright, and clear, and still, 
 Round the solitary hill. 
 
 Beneath is spread like a green sea 
 The waveless plain of Lombardy, 
 Bounded by the vaporous air, 
 Islanded by cities fair ; 
 Underneath day's azure eyes 
 Ocean's nursling, Venice lies, 
 A peopled labyrinth of walls, 
 Amphitrite's destined halls, 
 Which her hoary sire now paves 
 With his blue and beaming waves. 
 Lo ! the sun upsprings behind, 
 
74 LINES WRITTEN AMONG 
 
 Broad, red, radiant, half reclined 
 On the level quivering line 
 Of the waters chrystalline ; 
 And before that chasm of light, 
 As within a furnace bright, 
 Column, tower, and dome, and spire, 
 Shine like obelisks of fire, 
 Pointing with inconstant motion 
 From the altar of dark ocean 
 To the sapphire-tinted skies ; 
 As the flames of sacrifice 
 From the marble shrines did rise, 
 As to pierce the dome of gold 
 Where Apollo spoke of old. 
 
 Sun-girt City, thou hast been 
 Ocean's child, and then his queen ; 
 Now is come a darker day, 
 And thou soon must be his prey, 
 If the power that raised thee here 
 Hallow so thy watery bier. 
 A less drear ruin then than now, 
 
THE EUGANEAN HILLS. 75 
 
 With thy conquest-branded brow 
 Stooping to the slave of slaves 
 From thy throne, among the waves 
 Wilt thou be, when the sea-mew 
 Flies, as once before it flew, 
 O'er thine isles depopulate, 
 And all is in its antient state, 
 Save where many a palace gate 
 With green sea-flowers overgrown 
 Like a rock of ocean's own, 
 Topples o'er the abandoned sea 
 As the tides change sullenly. 
 The fisher on his watery way, 
 Wandering at the close of day, 
 Will spread his sail and seize his oar 
 Till he pass the gloomy shore, 
 Lest thy dead should, from their sleep 
 Bursting o'er the starlight deep, 
 Lead a rapid masque of death 
 O'er the waters of his path. 
 
 Those who alone thy towers behold 
 Quivering through aerial gold, 
 
76 LINES WRITTEN AMONG 
 
 As I now behold them here, 
 Would imagine not they were 
 Sepulchres, where human forms, 
 Like pollution-nourished worms 
 To the corpse of greatness cling, 
 Murdered, and now mouldering : 
 But if Freedom should awake 
 In her omnipotence, and shake 
 From the Celtic Anarch's hold 
 All the keys of dungeons cold, 
 Where a hundred cities lie 
 Chained like thee, ingloriously, 
 Thou and all thy sister band 
 Might adorn this sunny land, 
 Twining memories of old time 
 With new virtues more sublime ; 
 If not, perish thou and they, 
 Clouds which stain truth's rising day 
 By her sun consumed away, 
 Earth can spare ye : while like flowers, 
 In the waste of years and hours, 
 From your dust new nations spring 
 With more kindly blossoming. 
 
THE EUGANEAN HILLS. 77 
 
 Perish ! let there only be 
 Floating o'er thy hearthless sea, 
 As the garment of thy sky 
 Clothes the world immortally, 
 One remembrance, more sublime 
 Than the tattered pall of time, 
 Which scarce hides thy visage wan ; 
 That a tempest-cleaving swan 
 Of the songs of Albion, 
 Driven from his ancestral streams 
 By the might of evil dreams, 
 Found a nest in thee ; and Ocean 
 Welcomed him with such emotion 
 That its joy grew his, and sprung 
 From his lips like music flung 
 O'er a mighty thunder-fit, 
 Chastening terror : what though yet 
 Poesy's unfailing river, 
 Which thro' Albion winds for ever, 
 Lashing with melodious wave 
 Many a sacred poet's grave, 
 Mourn its latest nursling fled ! 
 
78 LINES WRITTEN AMONG 
 
 What though thou with all thy dead 
 Scarce can for this fame repay 
 Aught thine own, — oh, rather say, 
 Though thy sins and slaveries foul 
 Overcloud a sunlike soul ! 
 As the ghost of Homer clings 
 Round Scamander's wasting springs ; 
 As divinest Shakespeare's might 
 Fills Avon and the world with light 
 Like omniscient power, which he 
 Imaged 'mid mortality ; 
 As the love from Petrarch's urn, 
 Yet amid yon hills doth burn, 
 A quenchless lamp, by which the heart 
 Sees things unearthly ; so thou art, 
 Mighty spirit : so shall be 
 The city that did refuge thee. 
 
 Lo, the sun floats up the sky 
 Like thought-winged Liberty, 
 Till the universal light 
 Seems to level plain and height ; 
 
THE EUGANEAN HILLS. 79 
 
 From the sea a mist has spread, 
 And the beams of morn lie dead 
 On the towers of Venice now, 
 Like its glory long ago. 
 By the skirts of that grey cloud 
 Many-domed Padua proud 
 Stands, a peopled solitude, 
 'Mid the harvest shining plain, 
 Where the peasant heaps his grain 
 In the garner of his foe, 
 And the milk-white oxen slow 
 With the purple vintage strain, 
 Heaped upon the creaking wain, 
 That the brutal Celt may swill 
 Drunken sleep with savage will ; 
 And the sickle to the sword 
 Lies unchanged, though many a lord, 
 Like a weed whose shade is poison, 
 Overgrows this region's foizon, 
 Sheaves of whom are ripe to come 
 To destruction's harvest home : 
 Men must reap the things they sow, 
 
80 LINES WKITTEN AMONG 
 
 Force from force must ever flow, 
 Or worse ; but 'tis a bitter woe 
 That love or reason cannot change 
 The despot's rage, the slave's revenge. 
 
 Padua, thou within whose walls 
 Those mute guests at festivals, 
 Son and Mother, Death and Sin, 
 Played at dice for Ezzelin, 
 Till Death cried, " I win, I win ! " 
 And Sin cursed to lose the wager, 
 But Death promised, to assuage her, 
 That he would petition for 
 Her to be made Vice-Emperor, 
 When the destined years were o'er, 
 Over all between the Po 
 And the eastern Alpine snow, 
 Under the mighty Austrian. 
 Sin smiled so as Sin only can, 
 And since that time, aye, long before, 
 Both have ruled from shore to shore, 
 
THE EUGANEAN HILLS. 81 
 
 Tyrants as the sun the swallow, 
 As Repentance follows Crime, 
 And as changes follow Time. 
 
 In thine halls the lamp of learning, 
 Padua, now no more is burning ; 
 Like a meteor, whose wild way 
 Is lost over the grave of day, 
 It gleams betrayed and to betray ; 
 Once remotest nations came 
 To adore that sacred flame, 
 When it lit not many a hearth 
 On this cold and gloomy earth : 
 Now new fires from antique light 
 Spring beneath the wide world's might J 
 But their spark lies dead in thee, 
 Trampled out by tyranny. 
 As the Norway woodman quells, 
 In the depth of piny dells, 
 One light flame among the brakes 
 While the boundless forest shakes, 
 And its mighty trunks are torn 
 G 
 
82 LINES WRITTEN AMONG 
 
 By the fire thus lowly born : 
 
 The spark beneath his feet is dead, 
 
 He starts to see the flames it fed 
 
 Howling through the darkened sky 
 
 With a myriad tongues victoriously, 
 
 And sinks down in fear : so thou, 
 
 O tyranny, beholdest now 
 
 Light around thee, and thou hearest 
 
 The loud flames ascend, and fearest : 
 
 Grovel on the earth : aye, hide 
 
 In the dust thy purple pride ! 
 
 Noon descends around me now : 
 'Tis the noon of autumn's glow, 
 When a soft and purple mist 
 Like a vaporous amethyst, 
 Or an air-dissolved star 
 Mingling light and fragrance, far 
 From the curved horizon's bound 
 To the point of heaven's profound, 
 Fills the overflowing sky ; 
 And the plains that silent lie 
 
THE EUGANEAN HILLS. 83 
 
 Underneath, the leaves unsodden 
 Where the infant frost has trodden 
 With his morning- winged feet, 
 Whose bright print is gleaming yet ; 
 And the red and golden vines, 
 Piercing with their trellised lines 
 The rough, dark-skirted wilderness ; 
 The dun and bladed grass no less, 
 Pointing from this hoary tower 
 In the windless air ; the flower 
 Glimmering at my feet ; the line 
 Of the olive-sandalled Apennine 
 In the south dimly islanded ; 
 And the Alps, whose snows are spread 
 High between the clouds and sun ; 
 And of living things each one ; 
 And my spirit which so long 
 Darkened this swift stream of song, 
 Interpenetrated lie 
 By the glory of the sky : 
 Be it love, light, harmony, 
 Odour, or the soul of all 
 
84 LINES WRITTEN AMONG 
 
 Which from heaven like dew doth fall, 
 Or the niind which feeds this verse 
 Peopling the lone universe. 
 
 Noon descends, and after noon 
 
 Autumn's evening meets me soon, 
 
 Leading the infantine moon, 
 
 And that one star, which to her 
 
 Almost seems to minister 
 
 Half the crimson light she brings 
 
 From the sunset's radiant springs : 
 
 And the soft dreams of the morn, 
 
 (Which like winged winds had borne 
 
 To that silent isle, which lies 
 
 'Mid remembered agonies, 
 
 The frail bark of this lone being,) 
 
 Pass, to other sufferers fleeing, 
 
 And its antient pilot, Pain, 
 
 Sits beside the helm again. 
 
 Other flowering isles must be 
 In the sea of life and agony : 
 
THE EUGANEAN HILLS. 85 
 
 Other spirits float and flee 
 
 O'er that gulph : even now, perhaps, 
 
 On some rock the wild wave wraps, 
 
 With folded wings they waiting sit 
 
 For my bark, to pilot it 
 
 To some calm and blooming cove, 
 
 Where for me, and those I love, 
 
 May a windless bower be built, 
 
 Far from passion, pain, and guilt, 
 
 In a dell 'mid lawny hills, 
 
 Which the wild sea-murmur fills, 
 
 And soft sunshine, and the sound 
 
 Of old forests echoing round, 
 
 And the light and smell divine 
 
 Of all flowers that breathe and shine : 
 
 We may live so happy there, 
 
 That the spirits of the air, 
 
 Envying us, may even entice 
 
 To our healing paradise 
 
 The polluting multitude ; 
 
 But their rage would be subdued 
 
 By that clime divine and calm, 
 
86 LINES WRITTEN AMONG 
 
 And the winds whose wings rain balm 
 On the uplifted soul, and leaves 
 Under which the bright sea heaves : 
 While each breathless interval 
 In their whisperings musical 
 The inspired soul supplies 
 With its own deep melodies, 
 And the love which heals all strife 
 Circling, like the breath of life, 
 All things in that sweet abode 
 With its own mild brotherhood ; 
 They, not it would change ; and soon 
 Every sprite beneath the moon 
 Would repent its envy vain, 
 And the earth grow young again. 
 
87 
 
 HYMN 
 
 INTELLECTUAL BEAUTY. 
 
 The awful shadow of some unseen Power 
 Floats tho' unseen among us ; visiting 
 This various world with as inconstant wing 
 As summer winds that creep from flower to 
 
 flower ; 
 Like moonbeams that behind some piny moun- 
 tain shower, 
 It vjsits with inconstant glance 
 Each human heart and countenance ; 
 Like hues and harmonies of evening, 
 
 Like clouds in starlight widely spread, 
 Like memory of music fled, 
 Like aught that for its grace may be 
 Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery. 
 
88 HYMN TO INTELLECTUAL BEAUTY. 
 
 Spirit of Beauty, that dost consecrate 
 
 With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon 
 Of human thought or form, where art thou 
 gone ? 
 Why dost thou pass away and leave our state, 
 This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate ? 
 Ask why the sunlight not forever 
 Weaves rainbows o'er yon mountain river 
 Why aught should fail and fade that once is 
 shewn ; 
 Why fear and dream and death and birth 
 Cast on the daylight of this earth 
 Such gloom, why man has such a scope 
 For love and hate, despondency and hope ? 
 
 No voice from some sublimer world hath ever 
 To sage or poet these responses given : 
 Therefore the names of Demon, Ghost, and 
 Heaven, 
 Eemain the records of their vain endeavour : 
 Frail spells, whose uttered charm might not 
 avail to sever, 
 
HYMN TO INTELLECTUAL BEAUTY. 89 
 
 From all we hear and all we see, 
 Doubt, chance, and mutability. 
 
 Thy light alone, like mist o'er mountains driven 
 Or music by the night wind sent 
 Thro' strings of some still instrument, 
 Or moonlight on a midnight stream, 
 
 Gives grace and truth to life's unquiet dream. 
 
 Love, Hope, and Self-esteem, like clouds, depart 
 And come, for some uncertain moments lent. 
 Man were immortal, and omnipotent, 
 Didst thou, unknown and awful as thou art, 
 Keep with thy glorious train firm state within 
 his heart. 
 Thou messenger of sympathies 
 That wax and wane in lover's eyes ; 
 Thou, that to human thought are nourishment, 
 Like darkness to a dying flame ! 
 Depart not as thy shadow came : 
 Depart not, lest the grave should be, 
 Like life and fear, a dark reality. 
 
90 HYMN TO INTELLECTUAL BEAUTY. 
 
 While yet a boy I sought for ghosts, and sped 
 Thro' many a listening chamber, cave and ruin, 
 And starlight wood, with fearful steps pur- 
 suing 
 Hopes of high talk with the departed dead. 
 I called on poisonous names with which our 
 youth is fed : 
 I was not heard : I saw them not : 
 When musing deeply on the lot 
 Of life, at that sweet time when winds are wooing 
 All vital things that wake to bring 
 News of birds and blossoming, 
 Sudden, thy shadow fell on me 
 I shrieked, and clasped my hands in extacy ! 
 
 I vowed that I would dedicate my powers 
 
 To thee and thine : have I not kept the vow ? 
 With beating heart and streaming eyes, even 
 
 now 
 I call the phantoms of a thousand hours 
 Each from his voiceless grave : they have in 
 
 visioned bowers 
 
HYMN TO INTELLECTUAL BEAUTY. 91 
 
 Of studious zeal or loves delight 
 Outwatched with me the envious night : 
 
 They know that never joy illumed my brow, 
 Unlinked with hope that thou wouldst free 
 This world from its dark slavery, 
 That thou O awful Loveliness, 
 
 Wouldst give whate'er these words cannot ex- 
 press. 
 
 The day becomes more solemn and serene 
 When noon is past : there is a harmony 
 In autumn, and a lustre in its sky, 
 
 Which thro' the summer is not heard or seen, 
 
 As if it could not be, as if it had not been ! 
 Thus let thy power, which like the truth 
 Of nature on my passive youth 
 
 Descended, to my onward life supply 
 Its calm, to one who worships thee, 
 And every form containing thee, 
 Whom, Spirit fair, thy spells did bind 
 
 To fear himself, and love all human kind. 
 
02 
 
 SONNET. 
 
 OZYMANDTAS. 
 
 I MET a traveller from an antique land 
 Who said : Two vast and trunkless legs of stone 
 Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand, 
 Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, 
 And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, 
 Tell that its sculptor well those passions read 
 Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless 
 
 things, 
 The hand that mocked them and the heart that 
 
 fed: 
 And on the pedestal these words appear : 
 " My name is Ozymandias, king of kings : 
 Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair ! " 
 Nothing beside remains. Kound the decay 
 Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare 
 The lone and level sands stretch far away. 
 
 FINIS. 
 
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