Come male buona notte si suona E mai non di dir la buona notte. 1821. ADONAIS. (FRAGMENTS ORIGINALLY INTENDED FOR THAT POEM). [SHELLEY]. AND ever as he went he swept a lyre Of unaccustomed shape, and . . . strings Which shakes the forest with its murmurings, And dying on the streams of dew serene [MOORE]. And the green paradise which western waves A record of the wrongs which, though they sleep, His hymns, and echoing them from steep to steep, Kept [LEIGH HUNT]. And then came one of sweet and earnest looks, Were as the clear and ever-living brooks Are to the obscure fountains whence they rise, Lay, making wisdom lovely, in the guise 1821. His song, though very sweet, was low and faint, A mighty Phantasm, half concealed In darkness of his own exceeding light, Which clothed his awful presence unrevealed, Charioted on the night Of thunder-smoke, whose skirts were chrysolite. eclipse The armies of the golden stars, each one HELLAS. (FRAGMENTS SUPPOSED TO HAVE BEEN ORIGINALLY INTENDED FOR THAT POEM). FAIREST of the Destinies, Disarray thy dazzling eyes: Keener far their lightnings are Than the winged [bolts] thou bearest ; And the smile thou wearest Wraps thee, as a star Is wrapped in light. COULD Arethuse to her forsaken urn From Alpheus and the bitter Doris run, Or could the morning shafts of purest light Again into the quivers of the sun Be gathered-could one thought from its wild flight Return into the temple of the brain Without a change, without a stain— Could aught that is ever again Be what it once has ceased to be Greece might again be free. 1821. A STAR has fallen upon the earth A quenchless atom of immortal light, A cresset shaken from the constellations,— To the heart of earth, the well Guides the sphere which is its prison, In a form of mortal birth ; Till, as a spirit half arisen Shatters its charnel, it has rent, In the rapture of its mirth, The thin and painted garment of the earth, 1821. 1822. THE INDIAN SERENADE. (LINES APPARENTLY BELONGING TO THAT POEM). O PILLOW cold and wet with tears! Thou breathest sleep no more! TO JANE-THE RECOLLECTION. (OMITTED PASSage). WERE not the crocuses that grew Under that ilex-tree As beautiful in scent and hue As ever fed the bee? NOTES BY W. M. ROSSETTI. P. 1. "Is it a party in a parlour, &c. [Peter Bell, by W. Wordsworth.]" The reader will not need to be assured that no such lines as these are to be found in "Peter Bell, by W. Wordsworth:" whether they are to be found in the other Peter Bell which has to be taken count of I cannot say for certain, but I presume not, and that the real author's name is "P. B. Shelley." The meaning of the title Peter Bell THE THIRD, and of some allusions in the course of the poem, is left wholly unelucidated in Mrs. Shelley's note: I must therefore explain it as well as I canwhich, however, is not well, as I have not succeeded in setting eyes upon that now very rare squib, Peter Bell, a Lyrical Ballad, referred to by Shelley as Peter Bell "the first." There is no copy of it in the British Museum Library. Wordsworth's poem of Peter Bell (relating, as we all know, to a blackguardly potter, who gets converted to propriety of life by a jackass and a methodist,) was notified as about to appear, and poetical readers were on the alert for it, when a brochure entitled Peter Bell, a Lyrical Ballad, issued from the press, being in fact a satire on certain traits of Wordsworth's mind and poetry. It was written, as I am informed, by John Hamilton Reynolds, author of the Garden of Florence, &c., a verse-writer of much more than common talent and point, now more nearly forgotten than he ought to be: but of course his name was not given on the title-page. Soon after this "Peter Bell the first," came out "Peter Bell the second "-i.e. the genuine poem by Wordsworth; some commotion and bewilderment being caused in the minds of readers by this rapid and conflicting Petrine succession. Both poems were reviewed in the Examiner, (26 April and 3 May 1819); and the line adopted by the reviewer in criticizing Wordsworth's poem was to deprecate his exhibiting a moral conversion as the result of terror, partly semi-superstitious and partly religious, especially the fear of damnation. This, I imagine, may have served as the starting-point for Shelley's motto, ending "All silent, and all-damned!" At any rate, knowing something of the poems from the Examiner critique (“Mr. Examiner Hunt.. presented me to two of the Mr. Bells"), and presumably something more from the poems themselves, Shelley seized upon the subject, and produced his Peter Bell the Third. The reader acquainted with Wordsworth's poem will perceive that the story indicated (such as it is) in Shelley's has really nothing to do with that of the poet of Rydal Mount: and I should doubt whether it had much consecutive connexion with that of Mr. Reynolds. Seven stanzas from the latter, extracted in the Examiner, are merely sarcastic hits at Wordsworth, under the name of "Peter Bell": they begin and end "He hath a noticeable look," "Peter Bell hath brother none." P. I. "Thomas Brown Esq. the Younger, H. F." This is the pseudonym which Moore used in his satirical poems, The Twopenny Postbag and The Fudge Family. "H. F." remains to be accounted for: Mr. Garnett suggests to me that it may possibly stand for "Historian of the Fudges." P. 2. "To occupy a permanent station in the literature of my country." These words are quoted (not with strict verbal correctness) from Wordsworth's dedication, addressed to Southey, of his Peter Bell. P. 8. "There is a Castles, and a Canning." Castles was a government spy, much loathed in those days; so also Oliver, mentioned on p. 24.-I am unable to fill up the name left blank in the succeeding stanza (iii). The statement that the personage "has lost his wits, or sold them," might be supposed to indicate Southey; but the ensuing assertion that he "ever grows more grim and rich" seems to point to some renegade more conspicuous for worldly station. P. 12. "To bully out another's guilt." This had got into print before I could avail myself of the quite indisputable cor rection pointed out to me by Mr. Fleay-"one another's." P. 13. "Thus-although unimaginative." I have substituted "although" for "though:" conceiving that the metre requires this change. P. 14 "Bocca baciata" &c. These lines from Boccaccio mean: "A mouth that has been kissed loses not its charm, but renews like the moon.' Α passage from a letter addressed by Shelley to Leigh Hunt (27 Sept. 1819), much about the time when he wrote Peter Bell the Third, may be appropriately quoted here. "I have been lately reading this most divine writer [Boccaccio]. He is, in a high sense of the word, a poet, and his language has the rhythm and harmony of verse. I think him not equal certainly to Dante or Petrarch, but far superior to Tasso and Ariosto, the children of a later and of a colder day. I consider the three first as the productions of the vigour of the infancy of a new nation-as rivulets from the same spring as that which fed the greatness of the Republics of Florence and Pisa.... How much do I admire Boccaccio! What descriptions of Nature are those in his little introductions to every new day!it is the morning of life stripped of that mist of familiarity which makes it obscure to us. Boccaccio seems to me to have possessed a deep sense of the fair ideal of human life, considered in its social relations: his more serious theories of love agree especially with mine. He often expresses things lightly too which have serious meanings |