And raise thy sons, as o'er the prone horizon
Thy lamp feeds every twilight wave with fire !
Be man's high hope and unextinct desire
The instrument to work thy will divine !
Then clouds from sunbeams, antelopes from

leopards,
And frowns and fears from Thee,

Would not more swiftly flee,
Than Celtic wolves from the Ausonian shep-

herds.
Whatever, Spirit, from thy starry shrine
Thou yieldest or withholdest, oh, let be
This city of thy worship, ever free!

AUTUMN;

A DIRGE

THE warm sun is failing, the bleak wind is wailing, The bare boughs are sighing, the pale flowers are dying,

And the year On the earth, her death-bed, in a shroud of leaves dead,

Is lying.
Come, Months, come away,
From November to May,
In your saddest array ;
Follow the bier

Of the dead cold year,
And like dim shadows watch by her sepulchre.

Autumn. Published by Mrs. Shelley, 1824.

The chill rain is falling, the nipped worm is crawl

ing, The rivers are swelling, the thunder is knelling

For the year ; The blithe swallows are flown, and the lizards each gone

To his dwelling;
Come, Months, come away ;
Put on white, black, and gray ;
Let your light sisters play
Ye, follow the bier

Of the dead cold year,
And make her grave green with tear on tear.

DEATH

I

DEATH is here, and death is there,
Death is busy everywhere,
All around, within, beneath,
Above, is death - and we are death.

II
Death has set his mark and seal
On all we are and all we feel,
On all we know and all we fear,

III
First our pleasures die — and then
Our hopes, and then our fears -- and when

Death. Published by Mrs. Shelley, 1824.

These are dead, the debt is due,
Dust claims dust and we die too.

IV

All things that we love and cherish,
Like ourselves, must fade and perish;
Such is our rude mortal lot
Love itself would, did they not.

LIBERTY

I

The fiery mountains answer each other,
Their thunderings are echoed from zone to zone ;
The tempestuous oceans awake one another,
And the ice-rocks are shaken round Winter's throne,

When the clarion of the Typhoon is blown.

II

From a single cloud the lightning flashes,
Whilst a thousand isles are illumined around ;
Earthquake is trampling one city to ashes,
An hundred are shuddering and tottering; the sound,

Is bellowing underground.

III

But keener thy gaze than the lightning's glare, And swifter thy step than the earthquake’s tramp; Thou deafenest the rage of the ocean ; thy stare Makes blind the volcanoes; the sun's bright lamp

To thine is a fen-fire damp.

Liberty. Published by Mrs. Shelley, 1824.

IV From billow and mountain and exhalation The sunlight is darted through vapor and blast; From spirit to spirit, from nation to nation, From city to hamlet, thy dawning is cast, And tyrants and slaves are like shadows of night

In the van of the morning light.

SUMMER AND WINTER

It was a bright and cheerful afternoon
Towards the end of the sunny month of June,
When the north wind congregates in crowds
The floating mountains of the silver clouds
From the horizon — and the stainless sky
Opens beyond them like eternity.
All things rejoiced beneath the sun; the weeds,
The river, and the cornfields, and the reeds;
The willow leaves that glanced in the light breeze,
And the firm foliage of the larger trees.

It was a winter such as when birds die
In the deep forests; and the fishes lie
Stiffened in the translucent ice, which makes
Even the mud and slime of the warm lakes
A wrinkled clod as hard as brick; and when
Among their children comfortable men
Gather about great fires, and yet feel cold :
Alas, then, for the homeless beggar old !

Summer and Winter. Published by Mrs. Shelley, in The Keepsake, 1829.

THE TOWER OF FAMINE

AMID the desolation of a city,
Which was the cradle and is now the grave
Of an extinguished people, — so that pity

Weeps o'er the shipwrecks of oblivion's wave,
There stands the Tower of Famine. It is built
Upon some prison-homes, whose dwellers rave

For bread, and gold, and blood; pain, linked to guilt,
Agitates the light flame of their hours,
Until its vital oil is spent or spilt.

There stands the pile, a tower amid the towers
And sacred domes, - each marble-ribbed roof,
The brazen-gated temples and the bowers

Of solitary wealth; the tempest-proof
Pavilions of the dark Italian air
Are by its presence dimmed — they stand aloof,

And are withdrawn so that the world is bare; As if a spectre, wrapped in shapeless terror, Amid a company of ladies fair

Should glide and glow, till it became a mirror
Of all their beauty, - and their hair and hue,

The Tower of Famine. Published by Mrs. Shelley, in The Keepsake, 1829.