Page:The complete poetical works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, including materials never before printed in any edition of the poems.djvu/411

lxxi

And there the body lay, age after age,

Mute, breathing, beating, warm, and undecaying, 610
Like one asleep in a green hermitage,
With gentle smiles^[1] about its eyelids playing,
And living in its dreams beyond the rage
Of death or life; while they were still arraying
In liveries ever new, the rapid, blind 615
And fleeting generations of mankind.
 

lxxii

And she would write strange dreams upon the brain

Of those who were less beautiful, and make
All harsh and crooked purposes more vain
Than in the desert is the serpent's wake 620
Which the sand covers—all his evil gain
The miser in such dreams would rise and shake
Into a beggar's lap;—the lying scribe
Would his own lies betray without a bribe.

lxxiii

The priests would write an explanation full, 625

Translating hieroglyphics into Greek,
How the God Apis really was a bull,
And nothing more; and bid the herald stick
The same against the temple doors, and pull
The old cant down; they licensed all to speak 630
Whate'er they thought of hawks, and cats, and geese,
By pastoral letters to each diocese.

lxxiv

The king would dress an ape up in his crown

And robes, and seat him on his glorious seat,
And on the right hand of the sunlike throne 635
Would place a gaudy mock-bird to repeat
The chatterings of the monkey.—Every one
Of the prone courtiers crawled to kiss the feet
Of their great Emperor, when the morning came,
And kissed—alas, how many kiss the same! 640

lxxv

The soldiers dreamed that they were blacksmiths, and

Walked out of quarters in somnambulism;
Round the red anvils you might see them stand
Like Cyclopses in Vulcan's sooty abysm,
Beating their swords to ploughshares;—in a band 645
The gaolers sent those of the liberal schism
Free through the streets of Memphis, much, I wis,
To the annoyance of king Amasis.

1. smiles transcript, B.; sleep ed. 1824.