And marking Cleodamus there, Tell the glad tidings; how his son, For him, hath crown'd his youthful hair For those who prefer fine prose to any but the finest verse, let Mr. Myers be consulted again : Fly, Echo, to Persephone's dark-walled home, and to his father bear the noble tidings, that seeing him thou mayest speak to him of his son, saying that for his father's honour in Pisa's famous valley he hath crowned his boyish hair with garlands from the glorious games. On page II* 36 r. is a trial scrap about the Spade, the Plough, and the Loom. I give the words as they occur (in ink); but they are all struck out and left stranded among some pencilled crescent moons and an addition sum: From the Spade & the Leave If the Spade & the Plough & the Loom This may have been connected with the composition of The Mask of Anarchy (stanzas XL and XLI) or of the Song to the Men of Englanditself much like a cancelled passage of the Mask. It is likelier, however, that it represents another attempt to make a popular song on the subject. There is a different metrical impulse discernible in it. On the verso are two lines of the "down, down" lyric in Prometheus, already dealt with. The only connexion I can see between the fragment From the Spade &c. and the next, on page II* 37 v. (of which the recto is blank), is that these lines also were left stranded among pencilled crescent moons, from which Mary liberated the quatrain yielded by the drafting, and published it among the fragments given in her first collected edition of 1839: He wanders, like a day-appearing dream The above are Shelley's words and his punctuation, which brings out the right sense. Mary damaged a fine thing by putting a comma after dream and a semicolon after mind. Shelley meant that the hero of the snatch of authentic poetry wandered through desert woods, and through tracts which seemed as homeless, boundless, and unconfined as Ocean, just as "a-day-appearing dream" wanders through "the dim wildernesses of the mind." Mary's punctuation makes the hero himself wander, first through the dim wildernesses of the mind, and next through lonely woods and vast tracts; and please let it be noted once for all that it is only the tracts which have this illimitable vastness attributed to them, not the woods also. The cancellings contain indications of more than ordinary interest, the most valuable consisting of two letters, pa, only. But let us proceed in order. Line 1 is followed by a cancelled opening for line 2, Over the desarts of. Thro is accidentally cancelled, or half cancelled, in the ultimate line 2. His and The are struck out before the initial Thro of line 3, where heaths stands cancelled in favour of woods and pa in favour of tracts. For line 4, Like Ocean homeless was written and rejected, and then, after all, Like Ocean, homeless, boundless, unconfined was written and left. Finally another line was added and rejected Him have I met in savage woods as one but there is nothing to explain what that one was "as". Of course it was Shelley's own soul arrayed in Greek garments to enact some such part as that of Edipus Tyrannus-the real dipus of Sopho- . cles (not his own grotesque Swellfoot the Tyrant, who stood for George IV). The fragment, indeed, supplies a poetic illustration of the prose remarks on the single line of Sophocles πολλὰς δ ̓ ὁδοὺς ἐλθοντα φροντίδος πλάνοις— so finely illuminated in the excursus on imagery in tragic composition. See ante, page 101. Æschylus also must be taken into account in connexion with this beautiful fragment. The first page of the Notes on Agamemnon shows that Shelley had considered particularly the passage uttered by the Chorus of Old Men, lines 72 to 82-I copy again from Sidgwick's text ἡμεῖς δ ̓ ἀτίται σαρκὶ παλαιᾷ ισόπαιδα νέμοντες ἐπὶ σκήπτροις and so on down to παιδὸς δ ̓ οὐδὲν ἀρείων ὄναρ ἡμερόφαντον ἀλαίνει. In Medwin's version-and the point is significant -the whole passage stands thus: But we who stay at home; heavy with years Our sole support is a stout staff, to rest On which our out-worn frame, Weak as some child's, for on1 the tender breast, No martial spirit flows; For poor weak miserable man, When on his vital trunk grow sere The leaves, is little better here Than a second infant, and he goes 1 Sic in orig.-probably a misprint for in. Crawling and tottering underneath his load, And roams about, about, and seems As day-appearing ghosts in dreams. Sidgwick's "He strays, a mid-day dream" (Agamemnon, 1905, Notes, p. 9) has really much more likeness to Shelley's "He wanders like a dayappearing dream" than Medwin's "As day-appearing ghosts in dreams" has; and yet the occurrence of the fine Shelleyan compound day-appearing tends to support that tale of Medwin's how any graces which his versions of the Prometheus and Agamemnon might possess were attributable to his readings of the plays with Shelley, who often translated to his cousin as he went along. It is on account of this connexion of Medwin's translation with the life of Shelley that I am giving to it in this present book more prominence than it would command as a translated classic; and it may interest the members of The Bibliophile Society to know that the copy lying before me as I write was formerly Thomas Jefferson Hogg's, in whose writing inside the wrapper it is recorded that it was the gift of Medwin. There are of course many better versions of the Agamemnon; but this contains in truth passages above the usual level of Medwin's craftsmanship,-passages which certainly read as |