Selected Poems and Prose Read Online

To me is given

The wonders of the human world to keep,

50Space, matter, time, and mind. Futurity

Exposes now its treasure; let the sight

Renew and strengthen all thy failing hope.

O human Spirit! spur thee to the goal

Where virtue fixes universal peace,

55And midst the ebb and flow of human things,

Shew somewhat stable, somewhat certain still,

A lighthouse o’er the wild of dreary waves.

The habitable earth is full of bliss;

Those wastes of frozen billows that were hurled

60By everlasting snow-storms round the poles,

Where matter dared not vegetate or live,

But ceaseless frost round the vast solitude

Bound its broad zone of stillness, are unloosed;

And fragrant zephyrs there from spicy isles

65Ruffle the placid ocean-deep, that rolls

Its broad, bright surges to the sloping sand,

Whose roar is wakened into echoings sweet

To murmur through the heaven-breathing groves

And melodize with man’s blest nature there.

70Those deserts of immeasurable sand,

Whose age-collected fervors scarce allowed

A bird to live, a blade of grass to spring,

Where the shrill chirp of the green lizard’s love

Broke on the sultry silentness alone,

75Now teem with countless rills and shady woods,

Corn-fields and pastures and white cottages;

And where the startled wilderness beheld

A savage conqueror stained in kindred blood,

A tygress sating with the flesh of lambs,

80The unnatural famine of her toothless cubs,

Whilst shouts and howlings through the desert rang,

Sloping and smooth the daisy-spangled lawn,

Offering sweet incense to the sun-rise, smiles

To see a babe before his mother’s door,

85         Sharing his morning’s meal

   With the green and golden basilisk

         That comes to lick his feet.

Those trackless deeps, where many a weary sail

Has seen above the illimitable plain,

90Morning on night, and night on morning rise,

Whilst still no land to greet the wanderer spread

Its shadowy mountains on the sun-bright sea,

Where the loud roarings of the tempest-waves

So long have mingled with the gusty wind

95In melancholy loneliness, and swept

The desert of those ocean solitudes,

But vocal to the sea-bird’s harrowing shriek,

The bellowing monster, and the rushing storm,

Now to the sweet and many-mingling sounds

100Of kindliest human impulses respond.

Those lonely realms bright garden-isles begem,

With lightsome clouds and shining seas between,

And fertile vallies, resonant with bliss,

Whilst green woods overcanopy the wave,

105Which like a toil-worn labourer leaps to shore,

To meet the kisses of the flowrets there.

All things are recreated, and the flame

Of consentaneous love inspires all life:

The fertile bosom of the earth gives suck

110To myriads, who still grow beneath her care,

Rewarding her with their pure perfectness:

The balmy breathings of the wind inhale

Her virtues, and diffuse them all abroad:

Health floats amid the gentle atmosphere,

115Glows in the fruits, and mantles on the stream:

No storms deform the beaming brow of heaven,

Nor scatter in the freshness of its pride

The foliage of the ever verdant trees;

But fruits are ever ripe, flowers ever fair,

120And autumn proudly bears her matron grace,

Kindling a flush on the fair cheek of spring,

Whose virgin bloom beneath the ruddy fruit

Reflects its tint and blushes into love.

The lion now forgets to thirst for blood:

125There might you see him sporting in the sun

Beside the dreadless kid; his claws are sheathed,

His teeth are harmless, custom’s force has made

His nature as the nature of a lamb.

Like passion’s fruit, the nightshade’s tempting bane

130Poisons no more the pleasure it bestows:

All bitterness is past; the cup of joy

Unmingled mantles to the goblet’s brim,

And courts the thirsty lips it fled before.

But chief, ambiguous man, he that can know

135More misery, and dream more joy than all;

Whose keen sensations thrill within his breast

To mingle with a loftier instinct there,

Lending their power to pleasure and to pain,

Yet raising, sharpening, and refining each;

140Who stands amid the ever-varying world,

The burthen or the glory of the earth;

He chief perceives the change, his being notes

The gradual renovation, and defines

Each movement of its progress on his mind.

145Man, where the gloom of the long polar night

Lowers o’er the snow-clad rocks and frozen soil,

Where scarce the hardiest herb that braves the frost

Basks in the moonlight’s ineffectual glow,

Shrank with the plants, and darkened with the night;

150His chilled and narrow energies, his heart,

Insensible to courage, truth, or love,

His stunted stature and imbecile frame,

Marked him for some abortion of the earth,

Fit compeer of the bears that roamed around,

155Whose habits and enjoyments were his own:

His life a feverish dream of stagnant woe,

Whose meagre wants, but scantily fulfilled,

Apprised him ever of the joyless length

Which his short being’s wretchedness had reached;

160His death a pang which famine, cold and toil

Long on the mind, whilst yet the vital spark

Clung to the body stubbornly, had brought:

All was inflicted here that earth’s revenge

Could wreak on the infringers of her law;

165One curse alone was spared—the name of God.

Nor where the tropics bound the realms of day

With a broad belt of mingling cloud and flame,

Where blue mists through the unmoving atmosphere

Scattered the seeds of pestilence, and fed

170Unnatural vegetation, where the land

Teemed with all earthquake, tempest and disease,

Was man a nobler being; slavery

Had crushed him to his country’s bloodstained dust;

Or he was bartered for the fame of power,

175Which all internal impulses destroying,

Makes human will an article of trade;

Or he was changed with Christians for their gold,

And dragged to distant isles, where to the sound

Of the flesh-mangling scourge, he does the work

180Of all-polluting luxury and wealth,

Which doubly visits on the tyrants’ heads

The long-protracted fulness of their woe;

Or he was led to legal butchery,

To turn to worms beneath that burning sun,

185Where kings first leagued against the rights of men,

And priests first traded with the name of God.

Even where the milder zone afforded man

A seeming shelter, yet contagion there,

Blighting his being with unnumbered ills,

190Spread like a quenchless fire; nor truth till late

Availed to arrest its progress, or create

That peace which first in bloodless victory waved

Her snowy standard o’er this favoured clime:

There man was long the train-bearer of slaves,

195The mimic of surrounding misery,

The jackal of ambition’s lion-rage,

The bloodhound of religion’s hungry zeal.

Here now the human being stands adorning

This loveliest earth with taintless body and mind;

200Blest from his birth with all bland impulses,

Which gently in his noble bosom wake

All kindly passions and all pure desires.

Him, still from hope to hope the bliss pursuing,

Which from the exhaustless lore of human weal

205Draws on the virtuous mind, the thoughts that rise

In time-destroying infiniteness, gift

With self-enshrined eternity, that mocks

The unprevailing hoariness of age,

And man, once fleeting o’er the transient scene

210Swift as an unremembered vision, stands

Immortal upon earth: no longer now

He slays the lamb that looks him in the face,

And horribly devours his mangled flesh,

Which still avenging nature’s broken law,

215Kindled all putrid humours in his frame,

All evil passions, and all vain belief,

Hatred, despair, and loathing in his mind,

The germs of misery, death, disease, and crime.

No longer now the winged habitants,

220That in the woods their sweet lives sing away,

Flee from the form of man; but gather round,

And prune their sunny feathers on the hands

Which little children stretch in friendly sport

Towards these dreadless partners of their play.

225All things are void of terror: man has lost

His terrible prerogative, and stands

An equal amidst equals: happiness

And science dawn though late upon the earth;

Peace cheers the mind, health renovates the frame;

230Disease and pleasure cease to mingle here,

Reason and passion cease to combat there;

Whilst each unfettered o’er the earth extend

Their all-subduing energies, and wield

The sceptre of a vast dominion there;

235Whilst every shape and mode of matter lends

Its force to the omnipotence of mind,

Which from its dark mine drags the gem of truth

To decorate its paradise of peace.

IX

O happy Earth! reality of Heaven!

To which those restless souls that ceaselessly

Throng through the human universe, aspire;

Thou consummation of all mortal hope!

5Thou glorious prize of blindly-working will!

Whose rays, diffused throughout all space and time,

Verge to one point and blend forever there:

Of purest spirits thou pure dwelling-place!

Where care and sorrow, impotence and crime,

10Languor, disease, and ignorance dare not come:

O happy Earth, reality of Heaven!

Genius has seen thee in her passionate dreams,

And dim forebodings of thy loveliness

Haunting the human heart, have there entwined

15Those rooted hopes of some sweet place of bliss

Where friends and lovers meet to part no more.

Thou art the end of all desire and will,

The product of all action; and the souls

That by the paths of an aspiring change

20Have reached thy haven of perpetual peace,

There rest from the eternity of toil

That framed the fabric of thy perfectness.

Even Time, the conqueror, fled thee in his fear;

That hoary giant, who, in lonely pride,

25So long had ruled the world, that nations fell

Beneath his silent footstep. Pyramids,

That for milleniums had withstood the tide

Of human things, his storm-breath drove in sand

Across that desert where their stones survived

30The name of him whose pride had heaped them there.

Yon monarch, in his solitary pomp,

Was but the mushroom of a summer day,

That his light-winged footstep pressed to dust:

Time was the king of earth: all things gave way

35Before him, but the fixed and virtuous will,

The sacred sympathies of soul and sense,

That mocked his fury and prepared his fall.

Yet slow and gradual dawned the morn of love;

Long lay the clouds of darkness o’er the scene,

40Till from its native heaven they rolled away:

First, crime triumphant o’er all hope careered

Unblushing, undisguising, bold and strong;

Whilst falshood, tricked in virtue’s attributes,

Long sanctified all deeds of vice and woe,

45Till done by her own venomous sting to death,

She left the moral world without a law,

No longer fettering passion’s fearless wing,

Nor searing reason with the brand of God.

Then steadily the happy ferment worked;

50Reason was free; and wild though passion went

Through tangled glens and wood-embosomed meads,

Gathering a garland of the strangest flowers,

Yet like the bee returning to her queen,

She bound the sweetest on her sister’s brow,

55Who meek and sober kissed the sportive child,

No longer trembling at the broken rod.

Mild was the slow necessity of death:

The tranquil spirit failed beneath its grasp,

Without a groan, almost without a fear,

60Calm as a voyager to some distant land,

And full of wonder, full of hope as he.

The deadly germs of languor and disease

Died in the human frame, and purity

Blest with all gifts her earthly worshippers.

65How vigorous then the athletic form of age!

How clear its open and unwrinkled brow!

Where neither avarice, cunning, pride, or care,

Had stamped the seal of grey deformity

On all the mingling lineaments of time.

70How lovely the intrepid front of youth!

Which meek-eyed courage decked with freshest grace;

Courage of soul, that dreaded not a name,

And elevated will, that journeyed on

Through life’s phantasmal scene in fearlessness,

75With virtue, love, and pleasure, hand in hand.

Then, that sweet bondage which is freedom’s self,

And rivets with sensation’s softest tie

The kindred sympathies of human souls,

Needed no fetters of tyrannic law:

80Those delicate and timid impulses

In nature’s primal modesty arose,

And with undoubting confidence disclosed

The growing longings of its dawning love,

Unchecked by dull and selfish chastity,

85That virtue of the cheaply virtuous,

Who pride themselves in senselessness and frost.

No longer prostitution’s venomed bane

Poisoned the springs of happiness and life;

Woman and man, in confidence and love,

90Equal and free and pure together trod

The mountain-paths of virtue, which no more

Were stained with blood from many a pilgrim’s feet.

Then, where, through distant ages, long in pride

The palace of the monarch-slave had mocked

95Famine’s faint groan, and penury’s silent tear,

A heap of crumbling ruins stood, and threw

Year after year their stones upon the field,

Wakening a lonely echo; and the leaves

Of the old thorn, that on the topmost tower

100Usurped the royal ensign’s grandeur, shook

In the stern storm that swayed the topmost tower

And whispered strange tales in the whirlwind’s ear.

Low through the lone cathedral’s roofless aisles

The melancholy winds a death-dirge sung:

105It were a sight of awfulness to see

The works of faith and slavery, so vast,

So sumptuous, yet so perishing withal!

Even as the corpse that rests beneath its wall.

A thousand mourners deck the pomp of death

110To-day, the breathing marble glows above

To decorate its memory, and tongues

Are busy of its life: to-morrow, worms

In silence and in darkness seize their prey.

Within the massy prison’s mouldering courts,

115Fearless and free the ruddy children played,

Weaving gay chaplets for their innocent brows

With the green ivy and the red wall-flower,

That mock the dungeon’s unavailing gloom;

The ponderous chains, and gratings of strong iron,

120There rusted amid heaps of broken stone

That mingled slowly with their native earth:

There the broad beam of day, which feebly once

Lighted the cheek of lean captivity

With a pale and sickly glare, then freely shone

125On the pure smiles of infant playfulness:

No more the shuddering voice of hoarse despair

Pealed through the echoing vaults, but soothing notes

Of ivy-fingered winds and gladsome birds

And merriment were resonant around.

130These ruins soon left not a wreck behind:

Their elements, wide-scattered o’er the globe,

To happier shapes were moulded, and became

Ministrant to all blissful impulses:

Thus human things were perfected, and earth,

135Even as a child beneath its mother’s love,

Was strengthened in all excellence, and grew

Fairer and nobler with each passing year.

Now Time his dusky pennons o’er the scene

Closes in stedfast darkness, and the past

140Fades from our charmed sight. My task is done:

Thy lore is learned. Earth’s wonders are thine own,

With all the fear and all the hope they bring.

My spells are past: the present now recurs.

Ah me! a pathless wilderness remains

145Yet unsubdued by man’s reclaiming hand.

Yet, human Spirit, bravely hold thy course,

Let virtue teach thee firmly to pursue

The gradual paths of an aspiring change:

For birth and life and death, and that strange state

150Before the naked soul has found its home,

All tend to perfect happiness, and urge

The restless wheels of being on their way,

Whose flashing spokes, instinct with infinite life,

Bicker and burn to gain their destined goal:

155For birth but wakes the spirit to the sense

Of outward shews, whose unexperienced shape

New modes of passion to its frame may lend;

Life is its state of action, and the store

Of all events is aggregated there

160That variegate the eternal universe;

Death is a gate of dreariness and gloom,

That leads to azure isles and beaming skies

And happy regions of eternal hope.

Therefore, O Spirit! fearlessly bear on:

165Though storms may break the primrose on its stalk,

Though frosts may blight the freshness of its bloom,

Yet spring’s awakening breath will woo the earth,

To feed with kindliest dews its favorite flower,

That blooms in mossy banks and darksome glens,

170Lighting the green wood with its sunny smile.

Fear not then, Spirit, death’s disrobing hand,

So welcome when the tyrant is awake,

So welcome when the bigot’s hell-torch burns;

’Tis but the voyage of a darksome hour,

175The transient gulph-dream of a startling sleep.

Death is no foe to virtue: earth has seen

Love’s brightest roses on the scaffold bloom,

Mingling with freedom’s fadeless laurels there,

And presaging the truth of visioned bliss.

180Are there not hopes within thee, which this scene

Of linked and gradual being has confirmed?

Whose stingings bade thy heart look further still,

When to the moonlight walk by Henry led,

Sweetly and sadly thou didst talk of death?

185And wilt thou rudely tear them from thy breast,

Listening supinely to a bigot’s creed,

Or tamely crouching to the tyrant’s rod,

Whose iron thongs are red with human gore?

Never: but bravely bearing on, thy will

190Is destined an eternal war to wage

With tyranny and falshood, and uproot

The germs of misery from the human heart.

Thine is the hand whose piety would soothe

The thorny pillow of unhappy crime,

195Whose impotence an easy pardon gains,

Watching its wanderings as a friend’s disease:

Thine is the brow whose mildness would defy

Its fiercest rage, and brave its sternest will,

When fenced by power and master of the world.

200Thou art sincere and good; of resolute mind,

Free from heart-withering custom’s cold control,

Of passion lofty, pure and unsubdued.

Earth’s pride and meanness could not vanquish thee,

And therefore art thou worthy of the boon

205Which thou hast now received: virtue shall keep

Thy footsteps in the path that thou hast trod,

And many days of beaming hope shall bless

Thy spotless life of sweet and sacred love.

Go, happy one, and give that bosom joy

210   Whose sleepless spirit waits to catch

   Light, life and rapture from thy smile.

   The fairy waves her wand of charm.

Speechless with bliss the Spirit mounts the car,

   That rolled beside the battlement,

215Bending her beamy eyes in thankfulness.

   Again the enchanted steeds were yoked,

   Again the burning wheels inflame

The steep descent of heaven’s untrodden way.

   Fast and far the chariot flew:

220   The vast and fiery globes that rolled

   Around the Fairy’s palace-gate

Lessened by slow degrees, and soon appeared

Such tiny twinklers as the planet orbs

That there attendant on the solar power

225With borrowed light pursued their narrower way.

         Earth floated then below:

   The chariot paused a moment there;

         The Spirit then descended:

The restless coursers pawed the ungenial soil,

230Snuffed the gross air, and then, their errand done,

Unfurled their pinions to the winds of heaven.

   The Body and the Soul united then,

A gentle start convulsed Ianthe’s frame:

Her veiny eyelids quietly unclosed;

235Moveless awhile the dark blue orbs remained:

She looked around in wonder and beheld

Henry, who kneeled in silence by her couch,

Watching her sleep with looks of speechless love,

         And the bright beaming stars

240         That through the casement shone.

[SHELLEY’S] NOTES

[1] I.242–3

The sun’s unclouded orb

Rolled through the black concave.

Beyond our atmosphere the sun would appear a rayless orb of fire in the midst of a black concave. The equal diffusion of its light on earth is owing to the refraction of the rays by the atmosphere, and their reflection from other bodies. Light consists either of vibrations propagated through a subtle medium, or of numerous minute particles repelled in all directions from the luminous body. Its velocity greatly exceeds that of any substance with which we are acquainted: observations on the eclipses of Jupiter’s satellites have demonstrated that light takes up no more than 8' 7'' in passing from the sun to the earth, a distance of 95,000,000 miles.—Some idea may be gained of the immense distance of the fixed stars, when it is computed that many years would elapse before light could reach this earth from the nearest of them; yet in one year light travels 5,422,400,000,000 miles, which is a distance 5,707,600 times greater than that of the sun from the earth.

[2] I.252–3

Whilst round the chariot’s way

Innumerable systems rolled.

The plurality of worlds,—the indefinite immensity of the universe is a most awful subject of contemplation. He who rightly feels its mystery and grandeur, is in no danger of seduction from the falshoods of religious systems, or of deifying the principle of the universe. It is impossible to believe that the Spirit that pervades this infinite machine, begat a son upon the body of a Jewish woman; or is angered at the consequences of that necessity, which is a synonime of itself. All that miserable tale of the Devil, and Eve, and an Intercessor, with the childish mummeries of the God of the Jews, is irreconcileable with the knowledge of the stars. The works of his fingers have borne witness against him.

The nearest of the fixed stars is inconceivably distant from the earth, and they are probably proportionably distant from each other. By a calculation of the velocity of light, Sirius is supposed to be at least 54,224,000,000,000 miles from the earth.* That which appears only like a thin and silvery cloud streaking the heaven, is in effect composed of innumerable clusters of suns, each shining with its own light, and illuminating numbers of planets that revolve around them. Millions and millions of suns are ranged around us, all attended by innumerable worlds, yet calm, regular, and harmonious, all keeping the paths of immutable necessity.

[3] IV.178–9

These are the hired bravos who defend

The tyrant’s throne.

To employ murder as a means of justice, is an idea which a man of an enlightened mind will not dwell upon with pleasure. To march forth in rank and file, and all the pomp of streamers and trumpets, for the purpose of shooting at our fellow-men as a mark; to inflict upon them all the variety of wound and anguish; to leave them weltering in their blood; to wander over the field of desolation, and count the number of the dying and the dead,—are employments which in thesis we may maintain to be necessary, but which no good man will contemplate with gratulation and delight. A battle we suppose is won:—thus truth is established, thus the cause of justice is confirmed! It surely requires no common sagacity to discern the connection between this immense heap of calamities and the assertion of truth or the maintenance of justice.

Kings, and ministers of state, the real authors of the calamity, sit unmolested in their cabinet, while those against whom the fury of the storm is directed are, for the most part, persons who have been trepanned into the service, or who are dragged unwillingly from their peaceful homes into the field of battle. A soldier is a man whose business it is to kill those who never offended him, and who are the innocent martyrs of other men’s iniquities. Whatever may become of the abstract question of the justifiableness of war, it seems impossible that the soldier should not be a depraved and unnatural being.

To these more serious and momentous considerations it may be proper to add a recollection of the ridiculousness of the military character. Its first constituent is obedience: a soldier is, of all descriptions of men, the most completely a machine; yet his profession inevitably teaches him something of dogmatism, swaggering, and self-consequence: he is like the puppet of a showman, who, at the very time he is made to strut and swell and display the most farcical airs, we perfectly know cannot assume the most insignificant gesture, advance either to the right or the left, but as he is moved by his exhibitor.—Godwin’s Enquirer, Essay V.

I will here subjoin a little poem, so strongly expressive of my abhorrence of despotism and falshood, that I fear lest it never again may be depictured so vividly. This opportunity is perhaps the only one that ever will occur of rescuing it from oblivion.

FALSHOOD AND VICE:

A DIALOGUE

Whilst monarchs laughed upon their thrones

To hear a famished nation’s groans,

And hugged the wealth wrung from the woe

That makes its eyes and veins o’erflow,—

Those thrones, high built upon the heaps

Of bones where frenzied famine sleeps,

Where slavery wields her scourge of iron,

Red with mankind’s unheeded gore,

And war’s mad fiends the scene environ,

Mingling with shrieks a drunken roar,

There Vice and Falshood took their stand,

High raised above the unhappy land.

FALSHOOD

Brother! arise from the dainty fare,

Which thousands have toiled and bled to bestow;

A finer feast for thy hungry ear

Is the news that I bring of human woe.

VICE

And, secret one, what hast thou done,

To compare, in thy tumid pride, with me?

I, whose career, through the blasted year,

Has been tracked by despair and agony.

FALSHOOD

What have I done!—I have torn the robe

From baby truth’s unsheltered form,

And round the desolated globe

Borne safely the bewildering charm:

My tyrant-slaves to a dungeon-floor

Have bound the fearless innocent,

And streams of fertilizing gore

Flow from her bosom’s hideous rent,

Which this unfailing dagger gave …

I dread that blood!—no more—this day

Is ours, though her eternal ray

   Must shine upon our grave.

Yet know, proud Vice, had I not given

To thee the robe I stole from heaven,

Thy shape of ugliness and fear

Had never gained admission here.

VICE

And know, that had I disdained to toil,

But sate in my loathsome cave the while,

And ne’er to these hateful sons of heaven,

GOLD, MONARCHY, and MURDER, given;

Hadst thou with all thine art essayed

One of thy games then to have played,

With all thine overweening boast,

Falshood! I tell thee thou hadst lost!—

Yet wherefore this dispute?—we tend,

Fraternal, to one common end;

In this cold grave beneath my feet,

Will our hopes, our fears, and our labours, meet.

FALSHOOD

I brought my daughter, RELIGION, on earth:

She smothered Reason’s babes in their birth;

But dreaded their mother’s eye severe,—

So the crocodile slunk off slily in fear,

And loosed her bloodhounds from the den …

They started from dreams of slaughtered men,

And, by the light of her poison eye,

Did her work o’er the wide earth frightfully:

The dreadful stench of her torches’ flare,

Fed with human fat, polluted the air:

The curses, the shrieks, the ceaseless cries

Of the many-mingling miseries,

As on she trod, ascended high

And trumpeted my victory!—

Brother, tell what thou hast done.

VICE

I have extinguished the noon-day sun,

In the carnage-smoke of battles won:

Famine, murder, hell and power

Were glutted in that glorious hour

Which searchless fate had stamped for me

With the seal of her security …

For the bloated wretch on yonder throne

Commanded the bloody fray to rise.

Like me he joyed at the stifled moan

Wrung from a nation’s miseries;

While the snakes, whose slime even him defiled,

In ecstacies of malice smiled:

They thought ’twas theirs,—but mine the deed!

Theirs is the toil, but mine the meed—

Ten thousand victims madly bleed.

They dream that tyrants goad them there

With poisonous war to taint the air:

These tyrants, on their beds of thorn,

Swell with the thoughts of murderous fame,

And with their gains to lift my name.

Restless they plan from night to morn:

I—I do all; without my aid

Thy daughter, that relentless maid,

Could never o’er a death-bed urge

The fury of her venomed scourge.

FALSHOOD

Brother, well:—the world is ours;

And whether thou or I have won,

The pestilence expectant lowers

On all beneath yon blasted sun.

Our joys, our toils, our honors meet

In the milk-white and wormy winding-sheet:

A short-lived hope, unceasing care,

Some heartless scraps of godly prayer,

A moody curse, and a frenzied sleep

Ere gapes the grave’s unclosing deep,

A tyrant’s dream, a coward’s start,

The ice that clings to a priestly heart,

A judge’s frown, a courtier’s smile,

Make the great whole for which we toil;

And, brother, whether thou or I

Have done the work of misery,

It little boots: thy toil and pain,

Without my aid, were more than vain;

And but for thee I ne’er had sate

The guardian of heaven’s palace gate.

[4] V.1–2

Thus do the generations of the earth

Go to the grave, and issue from the womb.

One generation passeth away and another generation cometh, but the earth abideth for ever. The sun also ariseth and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose. The wind goeth toward the south and turneth about unto the north, it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits. All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full; unto the place whence the rivers come, thither shall they return again.

Ecclesiastes, chap. i.

[5] V.4–6

                                 Even as the leaves

   Which the keen frost-wind of the waning year

   Has scattered on the forest soil.

[Shelley’s note quotes in Greek Homer’s Iliad VI.146–9.]

[6] V.58

   The mob of peasants, nobles, priests, and kings.

[Shelley’s note quotes in Latin Lucretius, De Rerum Natura II.1–14.]

[7] V. 93–4

               And statesmen boast

      Of wealth!

[Shelley’s note, which begins, ‘There is no real wealth but the labour of man’, draws largely on the work of William Godwin to deplore the inequality in contemporary England and the legal system and social customs that perpetuate it, arguing that the taste for luxury and display and the unequal distribution of labour deny to rich and poor alike the benefits of that ‘cultivated leisure’ which promotes ‘moral improvement’.]

[8] V.112–13

                  or religion

Drives his wife raving mad.

I am acquainted with a lady of considerable accomplishments, and the mother of a numerous family, whom the Christian religion has goaded to incurable insanity. A parallel case is, I believe, within the experience of every physician.

Nam iam saepe homines patriam, carosque parentes

Prodiderunt, vitare Acherusia templa petentes.

Lucretius.       

[9] V.189

Even love is sold.

Not even the intercourse of the sexes is exempt from the despotism of positive institution. Law pretends even to govern the indisciplinable wanderings of passion, to put fetters on the clearest deductions of reason, and, by appeals to the will, to subdue the involuntary affections of our nature. Love is inevitably consequent upon the perception of loveliness. Love withers under constraint: its very essence is liberty: it is compatible neither with obedience, jealousy, nor fear: it is there most pure, perfect, and unlimited, where its votaries live in confidence, equality, and unreserve.

How long then ought the sexual connection to last? what law ought to specify the extent of the grievances which should limit its duration? A husband and wife ought to continue so long united as they love each other: any law which should bind them to cohabitation for one moment after the decay of their affection, would be a most intolerable tyranny, and the most unworthy of toleration. How odious an usurpation of the right of private judgment should that law be considered, which should make the ties of friendship indissoluble, in spite of the caprices, the inconstancy, the fallibility, and capacity for improvement of the human mind.