Its charge to each; and if the seal is set,
Here, on one fountain of a mourning mind,
Break it not thou! too surely shalt thou find
Thine own well full, if thou returnest home,
Of tears and gall. From the world's bitter

wind

Seek shelter in the shadow of the tomb. What Adonais is, why fear we to become?

The One remains, the many change and

pass:

Heaven's light for ever shines, Earth's
shadows fly;

Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,

Until Death tramples it to fragments.-Die,
If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost
seek!

Follow where all is fled!-Rome's azure sky, Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words, are weak The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak.

Why linger, why turn back, why shrink, my
Heart?

Thy hopes are gone before: from all things
here

They have departed; thou should'st now depart !

A light is past from the revolving year,

And man, and woman; and what still is dear
Attracts to crush, repels to make thee wither.
The soft sky smiles,—the low wind whispers

near:

'Tis Adonais calls! O hasten thither;

No more let Life divide what Death can join to

gether!

That Light whose smile kindles the Universe,
That Beauty in which all things work and
move,

That Benediction which the eclipsing Curse
Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love
Which through the web of being, blindly wove
By man and beast and earth and air and sea,
Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of
The fire for which all thirst; now beams on
me,

Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality.

The breath whose might I have invoked in song

Descends on me; my spirit's bark is driven
Far from the shore, far from the trembling
throng

Whose sails were never to the tempest given ;
The massy earth and spherèd skies are riven !
I am borne darkly, fearfully afar;

Whilst, burning through the inmost veil of
Heaven,

The soul of Adonais, like a star,

Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.1

P. B. SHELLEY

1 A year after Shelley wrote this stanza, it was literally fulfilled in his death at sea. "In another's fate," as he says himself, he "wept his own."

15.-ODE ON INTIMATIONS OF IMMOR

TALITY FROM

RECOLLECTIONS OF

EARLY CHILDHOOD

THERE was a time when meadow, grove and stream,

The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem

Apparelled in celestial light,

The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore ;-
Turn wheresoe'er I may,

By night or day,

The things that I have seen I now can see no more. The rainbow comes and goes,

And lovely is the rose;

The moon doth with delight

Look round her when the heavens are bare ;
Waters on a starry night

Are beautiful and fair;

The sunshine is a glorious birth :

But yet I know, where'er I go,

That there hath passed away a glory from the earth.

Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song, And while the young lambs bound

As to the tabor's sound,

To me alone there came a thought of grief:
A timely utterance gave that thought relief,
And I again am strong.

The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep:
No more shall grief of mine the season wrong :

I hear the echoes through the mountains throng; The winds come to me from the fields of sleep, And all the world is gay;

Land and sea

Give themselves up to jollity,

And with the heart of May

Doth every beast keep holiday :—

Thou child of joy,

Shout round me; let me hear thy shouts, thou happy shepherd-boy!

Ye blessed creatures, I have heard the call
Ye to each other make; I see

The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee ;
My heart is at your festival,

My head hath its coronal;

The fulness of your bliss, I feel-I feel it all. O evil day! if I were sullen

While the Earth herself is adorning

This sweet May morning,

And the children are culling

On every side,

In a thousand valleys far and wide,

Fresh flowers; while the sun shines warm, And the babe leaps up on his mother's arm :I hear, I hear, with joy I hear!

--

-But there's a tree,-of many, one,A single field which I have looked upon : Both of them speak of something that is gone : The pansy at my feet

Doth the same tale repeat.

Whither is fled the visionary gleam?

Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar.

Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home.
Heaven lies about us in our infancy :
Shades of the prison-home begin to close
Upon the growing boy,

But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy ;

The youth, who daily further from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's priest,
And by the vision splendid

Is on his way attended;

At length the man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.

Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own;
Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind,
And even with something of a mother's mind,
And no unworthy aim,

The homely nurse doth all she can
To make her foster-child, her inmate Man,
Forget the glories he hath known,

And that imperial palace whence he came.

Behold the child among his new-born blisses,
A six years' darling of a pigmy size!

See, where 'mid work of his own hand he lies,
Fretted by sallies of his mother's kisses,
With light upon him from his father's eyes!