chastened, and not in itself so pellucid as Shelley can be A lone wood walk, where meeting branches lean This scrap taken with the second stanza of our Anacreontic indicates that, among the scientific furniture of Shelley's mind, which was not inconsiderable, was some knowledge of the propagation of plants. He seems to have noticed a peculiarly fertile copse and jotted his observation down for poetic use. Facing our Anacreontic and occupying the upper part of page II 3 r., is one of those scraps of verse published by Mary in her second edition of Shelley's Poems (1839): How sweet it is to sit and read the tales Of mightiest poets, & to hear the while In line 2 Mary reads mighty poets. Shelley wrote mightest, but of course meant mightiest. Mary ends with a dash instead of the word with. In the shadow of a tiny pen and ink tree, Shelley has left the word Distress close to this fragment; but there is no reason to suspect any connexion between that word and the unfinished verses. The lower part of II 3 r. contains the avowal in verse and prose with which my account of these volumes in the Ninth Year Book ends: Rome has fallen, ye see it lying Heaped in undistinguished ruin: and I have drunk that & that makes me live forever & converse with immortal spirits. The three lines of verse, but not the words in prose, were published by Mary in her second edition of 1839. There are very few of these drafts and jottings to which the poet has put any kind of title or heading; but our next is one of the few, for on page II 3 v. we have a fragment of the Essay on Friendship, duly headed: FRIENDSHIP I once had a friend whom an inextricable multitude of circumstances has forced me to treat with apparent neglect. To him I ded. this essay. If he finds that my own words condemn me will he not forgive [? Here Shelley broke off for the time being to make a jotting for the "down, down" lyric immediately under forgive. See Part I, under Prometheus Unbound. The "Mighty Eagle" lines to Godwin come next in order,-on page II 4 r. [TO WILLIAM GODWIN] And when night descends defiest On the verge of desolation [. The auction catalogue describes this little composition thus: "Lines-'Mighty eagle, thou that soarest', &c. Has been incorrectly printed." If the reference is to my version of 1882, the first published version of the scrap, followed by other editors ever since, the suggestion of incorrectness is not justified. The version of Note Book II is very roughly written in pencil; and I did not use it in 1882. I found the first six lines well written by Shelley on a letter addressed to him by Godwin, proposing an investment for the poet which was to benefit the philosopher, and suggesting a subscription for the payment of a fine inflicted on the Hunts. In that version of the poem Shelley wrote light of morning, not blaze of morning, and ended with warning!-not adding the uncompleted fourth couplet, which he may be presumed to have thought not worth putting to rights. I suspect it was at all events only a jotting for a couplet to be added after something else that he was going to write about Godwin, whose intellectual qualities he still respected greatly at a later date than that of the letter mentioned above, which was headed "Skinner Street, Apr. 29, 1817." On July 1, 1820, he wrote, in the renowned Letter to Maria GisborneYou will see That which was Godwin,-greater none than he Though fallen-and fallen on evil times-to stand Among the spirits of our age and land, Before the dread tribunal of to come The foremost,-while Rebuke cowers pale and dumb. There is but one verbal variation between the six lines that are common to the text of 1882 and that of Note Book II, namely light for blaze; and it seems likely that Shelley wrote the lines fairly on the letter after scribbling them in the Note Book. Before blaze in the Book are the letters cl, cancelled, as if he had been going to write clouds of morning. Compare Hellas (76-7) — As an eagle fed with morning Scorns the embattled tempests' warning. Between two pages devoted to the "down, down" lyric, already dealt with in our First Part with the rest of the matter related to Prometheus Unbound, we find a page (II 5 r.) on which Mary Shelley drew in 1839. Here there is first a single line which she passed over And from a wilderness of human Crimes [. For this line there is a cancelled opening, A wilderness, as well as the indication of a second line in the cancelled syllable Bet; and below it the fragment "Wake the serpent not" is drafted in pencil and then rewritten in ink, but not so that the ink covers the pencil: Wake the serpent not-lest he From its cradling bluebell shaken Thro the grass with silent gliding [. Lines 7 and 8 do not occur in the pencil draft, wherein line 6 is written with the word see left out, thus: Nor a worm shall his shadow; and line 9 reads, In the starlight. Mary Shelley, in giving this fragment as No. XVI in a group in her second collected edition of 1839, takes, in the main, the ink version, substituting the way for which way in line 2, and which yet lies for while yet he's in line 3. At the head of page II 6 r., which is, for the rest, devoted to the "down, down" lyric, are these lines written in pencil |