Page:The complete poetical works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, including materials never before printed in any edition of the poems.djvu/390

This quicksilver no gnome has drunk—within
The walnut bowl it lies, veined and thin,
In colour like the wake of light that stains
The Tuscan deep, when from the moist moon rains
The inmost shower of its white fire—the breeze70
Is still—blue Heaven smiles over the pale seas.
And in this bowl of quicksilver—for I
Yield to the impulse of an infancy
Outlasting manhood—I have made to float
A rude idealism of a paper boat:—75
A hollow screw with cogs—Henry will know
The thing I mean and laugh at me,—if so
He fears not I should do more mischief.—Next
Lie bills and calculations much perplexed,
With steam-boats, frigates, and machinery quaint80
Traced over them in Hue and yellow paint.
Then comes a range of mathematical
Instruments, for plans nautical and statical;
A heap of rosin, a queer^[1] broken glass
With ink in it;—a china cup that was85
What it will never be again, I think,—
A thing from which sweet lips were wont to drink
The liquor doctors rail at—and which I
Will quaff in spite of them—and when we die
We'll toss up who died first of drinking tea,90
And cry out,—'Heads or tails?' where'er we be.
Near that a dusty paint-box, some odd hooks^[2],
A^[3] half-burnt match, an ivory block, three books,
Where conic sections, spherics, logarithms.
To great Laplace, from Saunderson and Sims,95
Lie heaped in their harmonious disarray
Of figures,—disentangle them who may.
Baron de Tott's Memoirs beside them lie,
And some odd volumes of old chemistry.
Near those^[4] a most inexplicable thing,100
With lead^[5] in the middle—I'm conjecturing
How to make Henry understand; but no—
I'll leave, as Spenser says, with many mo,
This secret in the pregnant womb of time,
Too vast a matter for so weak a rhyme. 105

And here like some weird Archimage sit I,
Plotting dark spells, and devilish enginery,
The self-impelling steam-wheels of the mind
Which pump up oaths from clergymen, and grind
The gentle spirit of our meek reviews 110
Into a powdery foam of salt abuse,

1. queer Bos. MS.; green transcript, edd. 1824, 1839.
2. odd hooks transcript; old books edd. 1839 (an evident misprint); old hooks ed. 1824.
3. A] An ed. 1824.
4. those transcript; them edd. 1824, 1839.
5. lead Bos. MS.; least transcript, edd. 1824, 1839.