Waked by the darkest of December's hours Was raving round the chamber hushed and warm;

The birds were shivering in their leafless bowers,

The fish were frozen in the pools, the form

Of every summer plant was dead
Whilst this

LINES

Date, 1822. Published by Garnett, 1862.

1

WE meet not as we parted,

We feel more than all may see; My bosom is heavy-hearted,

And thine full of doubt for me.
One moment has bound the free.

II

That moment is gone forever,

Like lightning that flashed and died, Like a snowflake upon the river, Like a sunbeam upon the tide, Which the dark shadows hide.

III

That moment from time was singled
As the first of a life of pain;
The cup of its joy was mingled –
Delusion too sweet though vain !
Too sweet to be mine again.

IV

Sweet lips, could my heart have hidden
That its life was crushed by you,
Ye would not have then forbidden
The death which a heart so true
Sought in your briny dew.

V

Methinks too little cost

For a moment so found, so lost!

CHARLES THE FIRST

Shelley had the subject of Charles the First in mind for a tragedy as early as 1818, and desired Mrs. Shelley to attempt it. He had begun to think of it for himself in the summer of 1820 and wrote to Medwin: 'What think you of my boldness? I mean to write a play, in the spirit of human nature, without prejudice

or passion, entitled Charles the First. So vanity intoxicates people; but let those few who praise my verses, and in whose approbation I take so much delight, answer for the sin.'

Later, he wrote to Ollier: 'I doubt about Charles the First; but, if I do write it, it shall be the birth of severe and high feelings. You are very welcome to it, on the terms you mention, and, when once I see and feel that I can write it, it is already written. My thoughts aspire to a production of a far higher character; but the execution of it will require some years. I write what I write chiefly to enquire, by the reception which my writings meet with, how far I am fit for so great a task, or not.'

By the summer of 1821 he had done some shaping-out thought on it, and in September wrote again to Öllier: Charles the First is conceived, but not born. Unless I am sure of making something good, the play will not be written. Pride, that ruined Satan, will kill Charles the First, for his midwife would be only less than him whom thunder has made greater. I am full of great plans; and if I should tell you them, I should add to the list of these riddles.'

He began seriously upon it about January 1, 1822, and wrote to Ollier it would be ready by spring, saying that it promises to be good, as tragedies go,' and that it is not colored by the party-spirit of the author;' to Hunt he confided his hope that it would hold a higher rank than The Cenci as a work of art.' He apparently soon discontinued the work, and in answer to Hunt wrote, in March: So you think I can make nothing of Charles the First. Tanto peggio. Indeed, I have written nothing for this last two months: a slight circumstance gave a new train to my ideas, and shattered the fragile edifice when half built. What motives have I to write? I had motives, and I thank the God of my own heart they were totally different from those of the other apes of humanity who make mouths in the glass of the time. But what are those motives now? The only inspiration of an ordinary kind I could descend to acknowledge would be the earning £100 for you; and that it seems I cannot.' In the same strain he wrote in April to Gisborne: 'I have done some of Charles the First; but although the poetry succeeded very well, I cannot seize on the conception of the subject as a whole, and seldom now touch the canvas;' and again, in June: I write little now. It is impossible to compose except under the strong excitement of an assurance of finding sympathy in what you write. Imagine Demosthenes reciting a Philippic to the waves of the Atlantic. Lord Byron is in this respect fortunate. He touched the chord to which a million hearts

responded, and the coarse music which he produced to please them, disciplined him to the perfection to which he now approaches. I do not go on with Charles the First. I feel too little certainty of the future, and too little satisfaction with regard to the past to undertake any subject seriously and deeply. I stand, as it were, upon a precipice, which I have ascended with great, and cannot descend without greater peril, and I am content if the heaven above me is calm for the passing moment.'

Medwin adds some details: 'I must now speak of his Charles the First. He had designed to write a tragedy on this ungrateful subject as far back as 1818, and had begun it at the end of the following year, when he asked me to obtain for him that well-known pamphlet, which was in my father's library Killing no Murder. He was, however, in limine, diverted at that time to more attractive subjects, and now resumed his abandoned labors, of which he has left a very unsatisfactory, though valuable, bozzo. The task seemed to him an irksome one. His progress was slow; one day he expunged what he had written the day before. He occasionally showed and read to me his MS., which was lined and interlined and interworded, so as to render it almost illegible. The scenes were disconnected, and intended to be interwoven in the tissue of the drama. He did not thus compose The Cenci. He seemed tangled in an inextricable web of difficulties, as to the treatment of his subject; and it was clear that he had formed no definite plan in his own mind, how to connect the links of the complicated yarn of events that led to that frightful catastrophe, or to justify it. Shelley meant to have made the last of King's fools, Archy, a more than subordinate among his dramatis person, as Calderon had done in his Cisma de l'Inglaterra, a fool sui generis, who talks in fable, "weaving a world of mirth out of the wreck of all around." . . . Other causes, besides doubt as to the manner of treating the subject, operated to impede its progress. The ever-growing fastidiousness of his taste had, I have often thought, begun to cramp his genius. The opinion of the world, too, at times shook his confidence in himself. I have often been shown the scenes of this tragedy in which he was engaged; like the MSS. of Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata, in the library at Ferrara, his were larded with word on word, till they were scarcely decipherable.'

...

Mrs. Shelley writes: Whether the subject proved more difficult than he anticipated, or whether in fact he could not bend his mind away from the broodings and wanderings of thought divested from human interest, which