William H. Ryus - "The Second William Penn"

Tobias Smollett - "The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Part II."

Benjamin Harrison - "State of the Union Addresses of Benjamin Harrison"

Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.) - "Short Stories for English Courses"

The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I

P >> Percy Bysshe Shelley >> The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I




COTTINGTON:
Meanwhile
We must begin first where your Grace leaves off.
Gold must give power, or--

LAUD:
I am not averse _340
From the assembling of a parliament.
Strong actions and smooth words might teach them soon
The lesson to obey. And are they not
A bubble fashioned by the monarch's mouth,
The birth of one light breath? If they serve no purpose, _345
A word dissolves them.

STRAFFORD:
The engine of parliaments
Might be deferred until I can bring over
The Irish regiments: they will serve to assure
The issue of the war against the Scots.
And, this game won--which if lost, all is lost-- _350
Gather these chosen leaders of the rebels,
And call them, if you will, a parliament.

KING:
Oh, be our feet still tardy to shed blood.
Guilty though it may be! I would still spare
The stubborn country of my birth, and ward _355
From countenances which I loved in youth
The wrathful Church's lacerating hand.
[TO LAUD.]
Have you o'erlooked the other articles?

[ENTER ARCHY.]

LAUD:
Hazlerig, Hampden, Pym, young Harry Vane,
Cromwell, and other rebels of less note, _360
Intend to sail with the next favouring wind
For the Plantations.

ARCHY:
Where they think to found
A commonwealth like Gonzalo's in the play,
Gynaecocoenic and pantisocratic.

NOTE:
_363 Gonzalo's 1870; Gonzaga Boscombe manuscript.

KING:
What's that, sirrah?

ARCHY:
New devil's politics. _365
Hell is the pattern of all commonwealths:
Lucifer was the first republican.
Will you hear Merlin's prophecy, how three [posts?]
'In one brainless skull, when the whitethorn is full,
Shall sail round the world, and come back again: _370
Shall sail round the world in a brainless skull,
And come back again when the moon is at full:'--
When, in spite of the Church,
They will hear homilies of whatever length
Or form they please. _375

[COTTINGTON?]:
So please your Majesty to sign this order
For their detention.

ARCHY:
If your Majesty were tormented night and day by fever, gout,
rheumatism, and stone, and asthma, etc., and you found these diseases
had secretly entered into a conspiracy to abandon you, should you
think it necessary to lay an embargo on the port by which they meant
to dispeople your unquiet kingdom of man? _383

KING:
If fear were made for kings, the Fool mocks wisely;
But in this case--[WRITING]. Here, my lord, take the warrant,
And see it duly executed forthwith.--
That imp of malice and mockery shall be punished. _387

[EXEUNT ALL BUT KING, QUEEN, AND ARCHY.]

ARCHY:
Ay, I am the physician of whom Plato prophesied, who was to be accused
by the confectioner before a jury of children, who found him guilty
without waiting for the summing-up, and hanged him without benefit of
clergy. Thus Baby Charles, and the Twelfth-night Queen of Hearts, and
the overgrown schoolboy Cottington, and that little urchin Laud--who
would reduce a verdict of 'guilty, death,' by famine, if it were
impregnable by composition--all impannelled against poor Archy for
presenting them bitter physic the last day of the holidays. _397

QUEEN:
Is the rain over, sirrah?

KING:
When it rains
And the sun shines, 'twill rain again to-morrow:
And therefore never smile till you've done crying. _400

ARCHY:
But 'tis all over now: like the April anger of woman, the gentle sky
has wept itself serene.

QUEEN:
What news abroad? how looks the world this morning?

ARCHY:
Gloriously as a grave covered with virgin flowers. There's a rainbow
in the sky. Let your Majesty look at it, for

'A rainbow in the morning _407
Is the shepherd's warning;'

and the flocks of which you are the pastor are scattered among the
mountain-tops, where every drop of water is a flake of snow, and the
breath of May pierces like a January blast. _411

KING:
The sheep have mistaken the wolf for their shepherd, my poor boy; and
the shepherd, the wolves for their watchdogs.

QUEEN:
But the rainbow was a good sign, Archy: it says that the waters of the
deluge are gone, and can return no more.

ARCHY:
Ay, the salt-water one: but that of tears and blood must yet come
down, and that of fire follow, if there be any truth in lies.--The
rainbow hung over the city with all its shops,...and churches, from
north to south, like a bridge of congregated lightning pieced by the
masonry of heaven--like a balance in which the angel that distributes
the coming hour was weighing that heavy one whose poise is now felt in
the lightest hearts, before it bows the proudest heads under the
meanest feet. _424

QUEEN:
Who taught you this trash, sirrah?

ARCHY:
A torn leaf out of an old book trampled in the dirt.--But for the
rainbow. It moved as the sun moved, and...until the top of the
Tower...of a cloud through its left-hand tip, and Lambeth Palace look
as dark as a rock before the other. Methought I saw a crown figured
upon one tip, and a mitre on the other. So, as I had heard treasures
were found where the rainbow quenches its points upon the earth, I set
off, and at the Tower-- But I shall not tell your Majesty what I found
close to the closet-window on which the rainbow had glimmered.

KING:
Speak: I will make my Fool my conscience. _435

ARCHY:
Then conscience is a fool.--I saw there a cat caught in a rat-trap. I
heard the rats squeak behind the wainscots: it seemed to me that the
very mice were consulting on the manner of her death.

QUEEN:
Archy is shrewd and bitter.

ARCHY:
Like the season, _440
So blow the winds.--But at the other end of the rainbow, where the
gray rain was tempered along the grass and leaves by a tender
interfusion of violet and gold in the meadows beyond Lambeth, what
think you that I found instead of a mitre?

KING:
Vane's wits perhaps. _445

ARCHY:
Something as vain. I saw a gross vapour hovering in a stinking ditch
over the carcass of a dead ass, some rotten rags, and broken
dishes--the wrecks of what once administered to the stuffing-out and
the ornament of a worm of worms. His Grace of Canterbury expects to
enter the New Jerusalem some Palm Sunday in triumph on the ghost of
this ass. _451

QUEEN:
Enough, enough! Go desire Lady Jane
She place my lute, together with the music
Mari received last week from Italy,
In my boudoir, and--

[EXIT ARCHY.]

KING:
I'll go in.

NOTE:
_254-_455 For by...I'll go in 1870; omitted 1824.

QUEEN:
MY beloved lord, _455
Have you not noted that the Fool of late
Has lost his careless mirth, and that his words
Sound like the echoes of our saddest fears?
What can it mean? I should be loth to think
Some factious slave had tutored him.

KING:
Oh, no! _460
He is but Occasion's pupil. Partly 'tis
That our minds piece the vacant intervals
Of his wild words with their own fashioning,--
As in the imagery of summer clouds,
Or coals of the winter fire, idlers find _465
The perfect shadows of their teeming thoughts:
And partly, that the terrors of the time
Are sown by wandering Rumour in all spirits;
And in the lightest and the least, may best
Be seen the current of the coming wind. _470

NOTES:
_460, _461 Oh...pupil 1870; omitted 1824.
_461 Partly 'tis 1870; It partly is 1824.
_465 of 1870; in 1824.

QUEEN:
Your brain is overwrought with these deep thoughts.
Come, I will sing to you; let us go try
These airs from Italy; and, as we pass
The gallery, we'll decide where that Correggio
Shall hang--the Virgin Mother _475
With her child, born the King of heaven and earth,
Whose reign is men's salvation. And you shall see
A cradled miniature of yourself asleep,
Stamped on the heart by never-erring love;
Liker than any Vandyke ever made, _480
A pattern to the unborn age of thee,
Over whose sweet beauty I have wept for joy
A thousand times, and now should weep for sorrow,
Did I not think that after we were dead
Our fortunes would spring high in him, and that _485
The cares we waste upon our heavy crown
Would make it light and glorious as a wreath
Of Heaven's beams for his dear innocent brow.

NOTE:
_473-_477 and, as...salvation 1870; omitted 1824.

KING:
Dear Henrietta!


SCENE 3:
THE STAR CHAMBER.
LAUD, JUXON, STRAFFORD, AND OTHERS, AS JUDGES.
PRYNNE AS A PRISONER, AND THEN BASTWICK.

LAUD:
Bring forth the prisoner Bastwick: let the clerk
Recite his sentence.

CLERK:
'That he pay five thousand
Pounds to the king, lose both his ears, be branded
With red-hot iron on the cheek and forehead,
And be imprisoned within Lancaster Castle _5
During the pleasure of the Court.'

LAUD:
Prisoner,
If you have aught to say wherefore this sentence
Should not be put into effect, now speak.

JUXON:
If you have aught to plead in mitigation,
Speak.

BASTWICK:
Thus, my lords. If, like the prelates, I _10
Were an invader of the royal power
A public scorner of the word of God,
Profane, idolatrous, popish, superstitious,
Impious in heart and in tyrannic act,
Void of wit, honesty, and temperance; _15
If Satan were my lord, as theirs,--our God
Pattern of all I should avoid to do;
Were I an enemy of my God and King
And of good men, as ye are;--I should merit
Your fearful state and gilt prosperity, _20
Which, when ye wake from the last sleep, shall turn
To cowls and robes of everlasting fire.
But, as I am, I bid ye grudge me not
The only earthly favour ye can yield,
Or I think worth acceptance at your hands,-- _25
Scorn, mutilation, and imprisonment.
even as my Master did,
Until Heaven's kingdom shall descend on earth,
Or earth be like a shadow in the light
Of Heaven absorbed--some few tumultuous years _30
Will pass, and leave no wreck of what opposes
His will whose will is power.

NOTE:
_27-_32 even...power printed as a fragment, Garnett, 1862; inserted
here conjecturally, Rossetti, 1870.

LAUD:
Officer, take the prisoner from the bar,
And be his tongue slit for his insolence.

BASTWICK:
While this hand holds a pen--

LAUD:
Be his hands--

JUXON:
Stop! _35
Forbear, my lord! The tongue, which now can speak
No terror, would interpret, being dumb,
Heaven's thunder to our harm;...
And hands, which now write only their own shame,
With bleeding stumps might sign our blood away. _40

LAUD:
Much more such 'mercy' among men would be,
Did all the ministers of Heaven's revenge
Flinch thus from earthly retribution. I
Could suffer what I would inflict.
[EXIT BASTWICK GUARDED.]
Bring up
The Lord Bishop of Lincoln.--
[TO STRATFORD.]
Know you not _45
That, in distraining for ten thousand pounds
Upon his books and furniture at Lincoln,
Were found these scandalous and seditious letters
Sent from one Osbaldistone, who is fled?
I speak it not as touching this poor person; _50
But of the office which should make it holy,
Were it as vile as it was ever spotless.
Mark too, my lord, that this expression strikes
His Majesty, if I misinterpret not.

[ENTER BISHOP WILLIAMS GUARDED.]

STRAFFORD:
'Twere politic and just that Williams taste _55
The bitter fruit of his connection with
The schismatics. But you, my Lord Archbishop,
Who owed your first promotion to his favour,
Who grew beneath his smile--

LAUD:
Would therefore beg
The office of his judge from this High Court,-- _60
That it shall seem, even as it is, that I,
In my assumption of this sacred robe,
Have put aside all worldly preference,
All sense of all distinction of all persons,
All thoughts but of the service of the Church.-- _65
Bishop of Lincoln!

WILLIAMS:
Peace, proud hierarch!
I know my sentence, and I own it just.
Thou wilt repay me less than I deserve,
In stretching to the utmost

...

NOTE:
Scene 3. _1-_69 Bring...utmost 1870; omitted 1824.


SCENE 4:
HAMPDEN, PYM, CROMWELL, HIS DAUGHTER, AND YOUNG SIR HARRY VANE.

HAMPDEN:
England, farewell! thou, who hast been my cradle,
Shalt never be my dungeon or my grave!
I held what I inherited in thee
As pawn for that inheritance of freedom
Which thou hast sold for thy despoiler's smile: _5
How can I call thee England, or my country?--
Does the wind hold?

VANE:
The vanes sit steady
Upon the Abbey towers. The silver lightnings
Of the evening star, spite of the city's smoke,
Tell that the north wind reigns in the upper air. _10
Mark too that flock of fleecy-winged clouds
Sailing athwart St. Margaret's.

NOTE:
_11 flock 1824; fleet 1870.

HAMPDEN:
Hail, fleet herald
Of tempest! that rude pilot who shall guide
Hearts free as his, to realms as pure as thee,
Beyond the shot of tyranny, _15
Beyond the webs of that swoln spider...
Beyond the curses, calumnies, and [lies?]
Of atheist priests! ... And thou
Fair star, whose beam lies on the wide Atlantic,
Athwart its zones of tempest and of calm, _20
Bright as the path to a beloved home
Oh, light us to the isles of the evening land!
Like floating Edens cradled in the glimmer
Of sunset, through the distant mist of years
Touched by departing hope, they gleam! lone regions, _25
Where Power's poor dupes and victims yet have never
Propitiated the savage fear of kings
With purest blood of noblest hearts; whose dew
Is yet unstained with tears of those who wake
To weep each day the wrongs on which it dawns; _30
Whose sacred silent air owns yet no echo
Of formal blasphemies; nor impious rites
Wrest man's free worship, from the God who loves,
To the poor worm who envies us His love!
Receive, thou young ... of Paradise. _35
These exiles from the old and sinful world!

...

This glorious clime, this firmament, whose lights
Dart mitigated influence through their veil
Of pale blue atmosphere; whose tears keep green
The pavement of this moist all-feeding earth; _40
This vaporous horizon, whose dim round
Is bastioned by the circumfluous sea,
Repelling invasion from the sacred towers,
Presses upon me like a dungeon's grate,
A low dark roof, a damp and narrow wall. _45
The boundless universe
Becomes a cell too narrow for the soul
That owns no master; while the loathliest ward
Of this wide prison, England, is a nest
Of cradling peace built on the mountain tops,-- _50
To which the eagle spirits of the free,
Which range through heaven and earth, and scorn the storm
Of time, and gaze upon the light of truth,
Return to brood on thoughts that cannot die
And cannot be repelled. _55
Like eaglets floating in the heaven of time,
They soar above their quarry, and shall stoop
Through palaces and temples thunderproof.

NOTES:
_13 rude 1870; wild 1824.
_16-_18 Beyond...priests 1870; omitted 1824.
_25 Touched 1870; Tinged 1824.
_34 To the poor 1870; Towards the 1824.
_38 their 1870; the 1824.
_46 boundless 1870; mighty 1824.
_48 owns no 1824; owns a 1870. ward 1870; spot 1824.
_50 cradling 1870; cradled 1824.
_54, _55 Return...repelled 1870;
Return to brood over the [ ] thoughts
That cannot die, and may not he repelled 1824.
_56-_58 Like...thunderproof 1870; omitted 1824.


SCENE 5:

ARCHY:
I'll go live under the ivy that overgrows the terrace, and count the
tears shed on its old [roots?] as the [wind?] plays the song of

'A widow bird sate mourning
Upon a wintry bough.' _5
[SINGS]
Heigho! the lark and the owl!
One flies the morning, and one lulls the night:--
Only the nightingale, poor fond soul,
Sings like the fool through darkness and light.

'A widow bird sate mourning for her love _10
Upon a wintry bough;
The frozen wind crept on above,
The freezing stream below.

There was no leaf upon the forest bare.
No flower upon the ground, _15
And little motion in the air
Except the mill-wheel's sound.'

NOTE:
Scene 5. _1-_9 I'll...light 1870; omitted 1824.

***


THE TRIUMPH OF LIFE.

[Composed at Lerici on the Gulf of Spezzia in the spring and early
summer of 1822--the poem on which Shelley was engaged at the time of
his death. Published by Mrs. Shelley in the "Posthumous Poems" of
1824, pages 73-95. Several emendations, the result of Dr. Garnett's
examination of the Boscombe manuscript, were given to the world by
Miss Mathilde Blind, "Westminster Review", July, 1870. The poem was,
of course, included in the "Poetical Works", 1839, both editions. See
Editor's Notes.]

Swift as a spirit hastening to his task
Of glory and of good, the Sun sprang forth
Rejoicing in his splendour, and the mask

Of darkness fell from the awakened Earth--
The smokeless altars of the mountain snows _5
Flamed above crimson clouds, and at the birth

Of light, the Ocean's orison arose,
To which the birds tempered their matin lay.
All flowers in field or forest which unclose

Their trembling eyelids to the kiss of day, _10
Swinging their censers in the element,
With orient incense lit by the new ray

Burned slow and inconsumably, and sent
Their odorous sighs up to the smiling air;
And, in succession due, did continent, _15

Isle, ocean, and all things that in them wear
The form and character of mortal mould,
Rise as the Sun their father rose, to bear

Their portion of the toil, which he of old
Took as his own, and then imposed on them: _20
But I, whom thoughts which must remain untold

Had kept as wakeful as the stars that gem
The cone of night, now they were laid asleep
Stretched my faint limbs beneath the hoary stem

Which an old chestnut flung athwart the steep _25
Of a green Apennine: before me fled
The night; behind me rose the day; the deep

Was at my feet, and Heaven above my head,--
When a strange trance over my fancy grew
Which was not slumber, for the shade it spread _30

Was so transparent, that the scene came through
As clear as when a veil of light is drawn
O'er evening hills they glimmer; and I knew

That I had felt the freshness of that dawn
Bathe in the same cold dew my brow and hair, _35
And sate as thus upon that slope of lawn

Under the self-same bough, and heard as there
The birds, the fountains and the ocean hold
Sweet talk in music through the enamoured air,
And then a vision on my train was rolled. _40

...

As in that trance of wondrous thought I lay,
This was the tenour of my waking dream:--
Methought I sate beside a public way

Thick strewn with summer dust, and a great stream
Of people there was hurrying to and fro, _45
Numerous as gnats upon the evening gleam,

All hastening onward, yet none seemed to know
Whither he went, or whence he came, or why
He made one of the multitude, and so

Was borne amid the crowd, as through the sky _50
One of the million leaves of summer's bier;
Old age and youth, manhood and infancy,

Mixed in one mighty torrent did appear,
Some flying from the thing they feared, and some
Seeking the object of another's fear; _55

And others, as with steps towards the tomb,
Pored on the trodden worms that crawled beneath,
And others mournfully within the gloom

Of their own shadow walked, and called it death;
And some fled from it as it were a ghost, _60
Half fainting in the affliction of vain breath:

But more, with motions which each other crossed,
Pursued or shunned the shadows the clouds threw,
Or birds within the noonday aether lost,

Upon that path where flowers never grew,--
And, weary with vain toil and faint for thirst,
Heard not the fountains, whose melodious dew

Out of their mossy cells forever burst;
Nor felt the breeze which from the forest told
Of grassy paths and wood-lawns interspersed _70

With overarching elms and caverns cold,
And violet banks where sweet dreams brood, but they
Pursued their serious folly as of old.

And as I gazed, methought that in the way
The throng grew wilder, as the woods of June _75
When the south wind shakes the extinguished day,

And a cold glare, intenser than the noon,
But icy cold, obscured with blinding light
The sun, as he the stars. Like the young moon--

When on the sunlit limits of the night _80
Her white shell trembles amid crimson air,
And whilst the sleeping tempest gathers might--

Doth, as the herald of its coming, bear
The ghost of its dead mother, whose dim form
Bends in dark aether from her infant's chair,-- _85

So came a chariot on the silent storm
Of its own rushing splendour, and a Shape
So sate within, as one whom years deform,

Beneath a dusky hood and double cape,
Crouching within the shadow of a tomb; _90
And o'er what seemed the head a cloud-like crape

Was bent, a dun and faint aethereal gloom
Tempering the light. Upon the chariot-beam
A Janus-visaged Shadow did assume

The guidance of that wonder-winged team; _95
The shapes which drew it in thick lightenings
Were lost:--I heard alone on the air's soft stream

The music of their ever-moving wings.
All the four faces of that Charioteer
Had their eyes banded; little profit brings _100

Speed in the van and blindness in the rear,
Nor then avail the beams that quench the sun,--
Or that with banded eyes could pierce the sphere

Of all that is, has been or will be done;
So ill was the car guided--but it passed _105
With solemn speed majestically on.

The crowd gave way, and I arose aghast,
Or seemed to rise, so mighty was the trance,
And saw, like clouds upon the thunder-blast,

The million with fierce song and maniac dance _110
Raging around--such seemed the jubilee
As when to greet some conqueror's advance

Imperial Rome poured forth her living sea
From senate-house, and forum, and theatre,
When ... upon the free _115

Had bound a yoke, which soon they stooped to bear.
Nor wanted here the just similitude
Of a triumphal pageant, for where'er

The chariot rolled, a captive multitude
Was driven;--all those who had grown old in power _120
Or misery,--all who had their age subdued

By action or by suffering, and whose hour
Was drained to its last sand in weal or woe,
So that the trunk survived both fruit and flower;--

All those whose fame or infamy must grow _125
Till the great winter lay the form and name
Of this green earth with them for ever low;--

All but the sacred few who could not tame
Their spirits to the conquerors--but as soon
As they had touched the world with living flame, _130

Fled back like eagles to their native noon,
Or those who put aside the diadem
Of earthly thrones or gems...

Were there, of Athens or Jerusalem.
Were neither mid the mighty captives seen, _135
Nor mid the ribald crowd that followed them,

Nor those who went before fierce and obscene.
The wild dance maddens in the van, and those
Who lead it--fleet as shadows on the green,

Outspeed the chariot, and without repose _140
Mix with each other in tempestuous measure
To savage music, wilder as it grows,

They, tortured by their agonizing pleasure,
Convulsed and on the rapid whirlwinds spun
Of that fierce Spirit, whose unholy leisure _145

Was soothed by mischief since the world begun,
Throw back their heads and loose their streaming hair;
And in their dance round her who dims the sun,

Maidens and youths fling their wild arms in air
As their feet twinkle; they recede, and now _150
Bending within each other's atmosphere,

Kindle invisibly--and as they glow,
Like moths by light attracted and repelled,
Oft to their bright destruction come and go,

Copyright (c) 2007. topbookz.net. All rights reserved.