TWO STUDIES IN SHELLEY.
JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS.
1. Sunset and San Lazzaro.
In the middle of August (1818), Shelley left his wife at the Bagni di Lucca, and paid a visit to Lord Byron at Venice. He arrived at midnight in a thunderstorm. Julian and Maddalo was the literary fruit of this excursion-a poem which has rightly been characterized by Mr. Rossetti as the most perfect specimen in our language of the "poetical treatment of ordinary things." The description of a Venetian sunset, touched to sadness amid all its splendor by the gloomy presence of the madhouse, ranks among Shelley's finest word-paintings; while the glimpse of Byron's life is interesting on a lower level. Here is the picture of the sunset and the island of San Lazzaro [Lat'sa-ro] :
How beautiful is sunset, when the glow
Of heaven descends upon a land like thee,
Thou paradise of exiles, Italy,
Thy mountains, seas, and vineyards, and the towers
Of cities they encircle!-It was ours
To stand on thee, beholding it; and then,
Just where we had dismounted, the count's men
Were waiting for us with the gondola.
As those who pause on some delightful way,
Though bent on pleasant pilgrimage, we stood
Looking upon the evening, and the flood
Which lay between the city and the shore,
Paved with the image of the sky. The hoar
And airy Alps, towards the north, appeared,
Through mist, a heaven-sustaining bulwark, reared
Between the east and west; and half the sky
Was roofed with clouds of rich emblazonry,
Dark purple at the zenith, which still grew
Down the steep west into a wondrous hue
Brighter than burning gold, even to the rent
Where the swift sun yet paused in his descent
Among the many-folded hills. They were
Those famous Euganean* hills, which bear,
As seen from Lido through the harbor piles,
The likeness of a clump of peaked isles ;-
* Eugăn'ean Hills, near Padua and Verona in Northern Italy. The name has come down from classical antiquity which connected the hills with the refugees that founded Padua and Verona. In 1370 the poet Petrarch took up his residence at Arquà in the Euganean Hills, and was found dead in his library, July 19, 1374.
And then, as if the earth and sea had been
Dissolved into one lake of fire, were seen
Those mountains towering, as from waves of flame,
Around the vaporous sun, from which there came
The inmost purple spirit of light, and made
Their very peaks transparent. 'Ere it fade,'
Said my companion, 'I will show you soon
A better station.' So o'er the lagune
We glided; and from that funereal bark
I leaned, and saw the city, and could mark
How from their many isles, in evening's gleam,
Its temples and its palaces did seem
Like fabrics of enchantment piled to heaven.
I was about to speak, when-'We are even
Now at the point I meant,' said Maddalo,
And bade the gondolieri cease to row.
'Look, Julian, on the west, and listen well
If you hear not a deep and heavy bell.'
I looked, and saw between us and the sun
A building on an island, such a one
As age to age might add, for uses vile,--
A windowless, deformed, and dreary pile;
And on the top an open tower, where hung
A bell, which in the radiance swayed and swung,-
We could just hear its coarse and iron tongue:
The broad sun sank behind it, and it tolled
In strong and black relief. 'What we behold
Shall be the madhouse and its belfry tower,'
Said Maddalo; and ever at this hour,
Those who may cross the water hear that bell,
Which calls the maniacs, each one from his cell,
To vespers."
Julian and Maddalo (1818).
It may be parenthetically observed that one of the few familiar quotations from Shelley's poems occurs in Julian and Maddalo :"Most wretched men
Are cradled into poetry by wrong:
They learn in suffering what they teach in song."
2. An Island Retreat in the Egean.
The description of this visionary isle, and of the life to be led there by the fugitives from a dull and undiscerning world, is the most beautiful that has been written this century in the rhymed heroic metre :—
"It is an isle under Ionian skies,
Beautiful as a wreck of Paradise;
And, for the harbors are not safe and good,
This land would have remained a solitude
But for some pastoral people native there,
Who from the Elysian, clear, and golden air
Draw the last spirit of the age of gold,
Simple and spirited, innocent and bold.
The blue Ægean girds this chosen home,
With ever-changing sound and light and foam
Kissing the sifted sands and caverns hoar;
And all the winds wandering along the shore,
Undulate with the undulating tide.
There are thick woods where sylvan forms abide;
And many a fountain, rivulet, and pond,
As clear as elemental diamond,
Or serene morning air. And far beyond,
The mossy tracks made by the goats and deer
(Which the rough shepherd treads but once a year),
Pierce into glades, caverns, and bowers, and halls
Built round with ivy, which the waterfalls,
Illumining, with sound that never fails
Accompany the noonday nightingales;
And all the place is peopled with sweet airs.
The light clear element which the isle wears
Is heavy with the scent of lemon-flowers,
Which floats like mist laden with unseen showers.
And falls upon the eyelids like faint sleep;
And from the moss violets and jonquils peep,
And dart their arrowy odor through the brain,
Till you might faint with that delicious pain.
And every motion, odor, beam, and tone
With that deep music is in unison-
Which is a soul within a soul; they seem
Like echoes of an antenatal dream.
It is an isle 'twixt heaven, air, earth, and sea
Cradled, and hung in clear tranquillity;
Bright as that wandering Eden, Lucifer,
Washed by the soft blue oceans of young air.
It is a favorite place. Famine or blight,
Pestilence, war, and earthquake, never light
Upon its mountain peaks; blind vultures, they
Sail onward far upon their fatal way.
The winged storms, chanting their thunder-psalm
To other lands, leave azure chasms of calm
Over this isle, or weep themselves in dew,
From which its fields and woods ever renew
Their green and golden immortality." Ep'ipsychid'ion (1820). SHELLEY, in English Men of Letters.
EMPEDOCLES ON ÆTNA.
MATTHEW ARNOLD.
[Empedocles, a native of Agrigen'tum in Sicily, flourished about the middle of the fifth century B.C. He obtained great celebrity by his knowledge of medicine and sanitary expedients. His ethical system suggested to the Roman poet Lucretius the framework of his poetical philosophy. Empedocles is said to have found his death by plunging headlong into the crater of Mount Etna. Arnold's dramatic poem appeared in 1853, but was withdrawn shortly afterwards, to be republished at the request of Robert Browning in 1869.]
ACT II.-Evening. The Summit of Ætna.
Empedocles.
Alone !
On this charred, blackened, melancholy waste,
Crowned by the awful peak, Ætna's great mouth
Round which the sullen vapor rolls-alone!
Pausanias is far hence; and that is well,
For I must henceforth speak no more with man.
He has his lesson too, and that debt's paid;
And the good, learned, friendly, quiet man,
May bravelier front his life, and in himself
Find henceforth energy and heart. But I,
The weary man, the banished citizen,
Whose banishment is not his greatest ill,
Whose weariness no energy can reach,
And for whose hurt courage is not the cure-
What should I do with life and living more?
No, thou art come too late, Empedocles !
And the world hath the day, and must break thee,
Not thou the world. With men thou canst not live,
Their thoughts, their ways, their wishes, are not thine;
And being lonely thou art miserable,
For something has impaired thy spirit's strength,
And dried its self-sufficing fount of joy.
Thou canst not live with men nor with thyself,
O sage! O sage! Take, then, the one way left;
And turn thee to the elements, thy friends,
Thy well-tried friends, thy willing ministers,
And say: Ye servants, hear Empedocles,
Who asks this final service at your hands!
Before the sophist-brood hath overlaid
The last spark of man's consciousness with words;
Ere quite the being of man, ere quite the world
Be disarrayed of their divinity;
Before the soul lose all her solemn joys,
And awe be dead, and hope impossible,
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