THE SUNSET.1

THERE late was One within whose subtle being,
As light and wind within some delicate cloud
That fades amid the blue noon's burning sky,
Genius and death2 contended. None may know
The sweetness of the joy which made his breath
Fail, like the trances of the summer air,
When, with the Lady of his love, who then
First knew the unreserve of mingled being,
He walked along the pathway of a field
Which to the east a hoar wood shadowed o'er,
But to the west was open to the sky.
There now the sun had sunk, but lines of gold
Hung on the ashen clouds, and on the points
Of the far level grass and nodding flowers
And the old dandelion's hoary beard,
And, mingled with the shades of twilight, lay
On the brown massy woods-and in the east
The broad and burning moon lingeringly rose
Between the black trunks of the crowded trees,
While the faint stars were gathering overhead.-
"Is it not strange, Isabel," said the youth,
"I never saw the sun? We will walk here
To-morrow; thou shalt look on it with me."

That night the youth and lady mingled lay In love and sleep-but when the morning came

1 Mrs. Shelley says this poem was written in the Spring of the year 1816, while Shelley was residing at Bishopgate, near Windsor Forest. It first occurs in the Posthumous Poems.

2 So in the collected editions; but youth in the Posthumous Poems.

3 Although I cannot venture to interfere with the text without authority, I feel sure this line is very much cor

The lady found her lover dead and cold.
Let none believe that God in mercy gave
That stroke. The lady died not, nor grew wild,
But year by year lived on-in truth I think
Her gentleness and patience and sad smiles,
And that she did not die, but lived to tend
Her aged father, were a kind of madness,
If madness 'tis to be unlike the world.
For but to see her were to read the tale

Woven by some subtlest bard, to make hard hearts
Dissolve away in wisdom-working grief;-

Her eyelashes were worn away with tears,

Her lips and cheeks were like things dead-so pale;
Her hands were thin, and through their wandering veins
And weak articulations might be seen

Day's ruddy light. The tomb of thy dead self
Which one vexed ghost inhabits, night and day,
Is all, lost child, that now remains of thee!

Inheritor of more than earth can give,
Passionless calm and silence unreproved,

Whether the dead find, oh, not sleep! but rest,
And are the uncomplaining things they seem,
Or live, or drop in the deep sea of Love;
Oh, that like thine, mine epitaph were-Peace!"
This was the only moan she ever made.

rupted, and that we should read

I never saw the sun-rise? We will wake here...

As the passage stands the youth's statement and proposal both seem preposterous,-one by reason of improbability, the other by reason of tameness as leading up to the violent close. That two young people should take it into their heads to sleep out of doors to see the sun-rise would be an idea likely to commend itself to

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Shelley; and that he within whose being "genius and death contended " should die in the cold night air is eminently probable.

1 In the Posthumous Poems, worn; but in the first edition of 1839 and onwards, torn,-certainly a misprint, but followed by Mr. Rossetti.

There is a comma at Passionless in the Posthumous Poems; but not in later editions.

FRAGMENT ON HOME.1

DEAR home, thou scene of earliest hopes and joys,
The least of which wronged Memory ever makes
Bitterer than all thine unremembered tears.

FRAGMENT OF A GHOST-STORY.2

A SHOVEL of his ashes took
From the hearth's obscurest nook,
Muttering mysteries as she went.
Helen and Henry knew that Granny
Was as much afraid of ghosts as any,
And so they followed hard-

But Helen clung to her brother's arm,
And her own spasm made her shake.

1 From Relics of Shelley (p. 74). "Remarkable," says Mr. Garnett, in assigning the lines to the year 1816, as the only passage in which Shelley alludes to his home."

2 This is also from the Relics, where it appears with the date 1816, and the note, "Apparently a fragment of a ghost-story. Shelley was partial to

the name of 'Helen,' as that of his favourite sister. Henry' is the name of Ianthe's lover in 'Queen Mab." The lines strike me as being very much like a relic of the pieces said to be of a similar character to Peter Bell the Third, sent to Hunt for Mr. Ollier to publish, and referred to in the letter quoted at P. 178 of this volume.

POEMS WRITTEN IN 1817.

[It will be remembered that, to this eventful year 1817 belong Laon and Cythna and a portion of Rosalind and Helen, and that, during the same period, Shelley was occupied with his Chancery case, and with the two prose pamphlets published under the pseudonym of The Hermit of Marlow," namely A Proposal for Putting Reform to the Vote throughout the United Kingdom, and An Address to the People on the Death of the Princess Charlotte (usually, and incorrectly, designated We Pity the Plumage, but Forget the Dying Bird,-which words are an epigraph, not a title); so that it was altogether a year of great productiveness.-H. B. F.]