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SONG OF PROSERPINE.

WHILE GATHERING FLOWERS ON THE PLAIN OF ENNA.

SACRED Goddess, Mother Earth,

Thou from whose immortal bosom,
Gods, and men, and beasts have birth,
Leaf and blade, and bud and blossom,
Breathe thine influence most divine
On thine own child, Proserpine.

If with mists of evening dew

Thou dost nourish these young flowers Till they grow, in scent and hue,

Fairest children of the hours, Breathe thine influence most divine On thine own child, Proserpine.

Poems of Home Life.

TO MARY SHELLEY.

O MARY dear, that you were here
With your brown eyes bright and clear,
And your sweet voice, like a bird

Singing love to its lone mate
In the ivy bower disconsolate;
Voice the sweetest ever heard!
And your brow more

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Mary dear, come to me soon,
I am not well whilst thou art far;
As sunset to the spherèd moon,
As twilight to the western star,
Thou, beloved, art to me.

O Mary dear, that you were here;
The Castle echo whispers "Here!"

TO WILLIAM SHELLEY.

(With what truth I may say-
Roma! Roma! Roma!

Non è più come era prima!)

My lost William, thou in whom
Some bright spirit lived, and did
That decaying robe consume
Which its lustre faintly hid,
Here its ashes find a tomb,
But beneath this pyramid

Thou art not-if a thing divine
Like thee can die, thy funeral shrine
Is thy mother's grief and mine.

Where art thou, my gentle child?
Let me think thy spirit feeds,
With its life intense and mild,

The love of living leaves and weeds,
Among these tombs and ruins wild ;—

Let me think that through low seeds
Of the sweet flowers and sunny grass,
Into their hues and scents may pass
A portion-

1819.

TO WILLIAM SHELLEY.

THY little footsteps on the sands
Of a remote and lonely shore;

The twinkling of thine infant hands,
Where now the worm will feed no more:

Thy mingled look of love and glee

When we returned to gaze on thee.

LETTER TO MARIA GISBORNE.

LEGHORN, July 1, 1820.

THE spider spreads her webs, whether she be
In poet's tower, cellar, or barn, or tree;

The silkworm in the dark green mulberry leaves
His winding sheet and cradle ever weaves;
So I, a thing whom moralists call worm,
Sit spinning still round this decaying form,
From the fine threads of rare and subtle thought-
No net of words in garish colours wrought
To catch the idle buzzers of the day—
But a soft cell, where when that fades away,
Memory may clothe in wings my living name
And feed it with the asphodels of fame,

Which in those hearts which must remember me
Grow, making love an immortality.

Whoever should behold me now, I wist,
Would think I were a mighty mechanist,
Bent with sublime Archimedean art
To breathe a soul into the iron heart

Of some machine portentous, or strange gin,
Which by the force of figured spells might win
Its way over the sea, and sport therein;

For round the walls are hung dread engines, such
As Vulcan never wrought for Jove to clutch
Ixion or the Titan ;- -or the quick
Wit of that man of God, St. Dominic,

To convince Atheist, Turk, or Heretic,

Or those in philanthropic council met,

Who thought to pay some interest for the debt
They owed to Jesus Christ for their salvation,
By giving a faint foretaste of damnation
To Shakespeare, Sidney, Spenser and the rest
Who made our land an island of the blest,

When lamp-like Spain, who now relumes her fire
On Freedom's hearth, grew dim with Empire :-
With thumbscrews, wheels, with tooth and spike and
jag,

Which fishers found under the utmost crag

Of Cornwall and the storm-encompassed isles,
Where to the sky the rude sea rarely smiles
Unless in treacherous wrath, as on the morn
When the exulting elements in scorn
Satiated with destroyed destruction, lay
Sleeping in beauty on their mangled prey,
As panthers sleep ;—and other strange and dread
Magical forms the brick floor overspread-
Proteus transformed to metal did not make
More figures, or more strange; nor did he take
Such shapes of unintelligible brass,

Or heap himself in such a horrid mass
Of tin and iron not to be understood;
And forms of unimaginable wood,

To puzzle Tubal Cain and all his brood:

Great screws, and cones, and wheels, and groovèd blocks,

The elements of what will stand the shocks

Of wave and wind and time.-Upon the table
More knacks and quips there be than I am able

To catalogize in this verse of mine :

A pretty bowl of wood-not full of wine,

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