would be torn from us. He did not hesitate to resolve, if such were menaced, to abandon country, fortune, everything, and to escape with his child; and I find some unfinished stanzas addressed to this son, whom afterwards we lost at Rome, written under the idea that we might suddenly be forced to cross the sea, so to preserve him. This poem, as well as the one previously quoted, were not written to exhibit the pangs of distress to the public; they were the spontaneous outbursts of a man who brooded over his wrongs and woes, and was impelled to shed the grace of his genius over the uncontrollable emotions of his heart. I ought to observe that the fourth verse of this effusion is introduced in Rosalind and Helen. When afterwards this child died at Rome, he wrote, à propos of the English burying-ground in that city: 'This spot is the repository of a sacred loss, of which the yearnings of a parent's heart are now prophetic; he is rendered immortal by love, as his memory is by death. My beloved child lies buried here. I envy death the body far less than the oppressors the minds of those whom they have torn from me. The one can only kill the body, the other crushes the affections.'
POEMS WRITTEN IN 1818
TO THE NILE
['Found by Mr. Townshend Meyer among the papers of Leigh Hunt, [and] published in the St. James's Magazine for March, 1876.' (Mr. H. Buxton Forman, C.B.; P. W. of P. B. S., Library Edition, 1876, vol. iii, p. 410.) First included among Shelley's poetical works in Mr. Forman's Library Edition, where a facsimile of the MS. is given. Composed February 4, 1818. See Complete Works of John Keats, ed. H. Buxton Forman, Glasgow, 1901, vol. iv, p. 76.]
Drenching yon secret Aethiopian dells,
And from, the desert's ice-girt pinnacles
Where Frost and Heat in strange embraces blend
On Atlas, fields of moist snow half depend. 5
Girt there with blasts and meteors Tempest dwells
By Nile's aëreal urn, with rapid spells
Urging those waters to their mighty end.
O'er Egypt's land of Memory floods are level
And they are thine, Nile—and well thou knowest 10
That soul-sustaining airs and blasts of evil
And fruits and poisons spring where'er thou flowest.
Beware, O Man—for knowledge must to thee,
Like the great flood to Egypt, ever be.
PASSAGE OF THE APENNINES
[Composed May 4, 1818. Published by Mrs. Shelley, Posthumous Poems, 1824. There is a copy amongst the Shelley MSS. at the Bodleian Library, which supplies the last word of the fragment.]
To the whisper of the Apennine,
It bursts on the roof like the thunder's roar,
Or like the sea on a northern shore,
