Page:The complete poetical works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, including materials never before printed in any edition of the poems.djvu/656

With the sweet dance your heart must keep to-night.
What! would you take all beauty and delight
Back to the Paradise from which you sprung,
And leave to grosser mortals?——— 75
And say, sweet lamb, would you not learn the sweet
And subtle mystery by which spirits meet?
Who knows whether the loving game is played,
When, once of mortal [vesture] disarrayed,
The naked soul goes wandering here and there 80
Through the wide deserts of Elysian air?
The violet dies not till it'———

 

TIME LONG PAST

[Published by Rossetti, Complete P. W. of P. B. S., 1870. This is one of three poems (cf. Love's Philosophy and Good-Night) transcribed by Shelley in a copy of Leigh Hunt's Literary Pocket-Book for 1819 presented by him to Miss Sophia Stacey, December 29, 1820.]

I
Like the ghost of a dear friend dead
Is Time long past.
A tone which is now forever fled,
A hope which is now forever past,
A love so sweet it could not last, 5
Was Time long past.

II
There were sweet dreams in the night
Of Time long past:
And, was it sadness or delight,
Each day a shadow onward cast 10
Which made us wish it yet might last—
That Time long past.

III
There is regret, almost remorse,
For Time long past.
'Tis like a child's belovèd corse 15
A father watches, till at last
Beauty is like remembrance, cast
From Time long past.

 

FRAGMENT: THE DESERTS OF DIM SLEEP

[Published by Rossetti, Complete P. W. of P. B. S., 1870.]

I went into the deserts of dim sleep—
That world which, like an unknown wilderness,
Bounds this with its recesses wide and deep—

 

FRAGMENT: 'THE VIEWLESS AND INVISIBLE CONSEQUENCE'

[Published by Rossetti, Complete P. W. of P. B. S., 1870.]

The viewless and invisible Consequence
Watches thy goings-out, and comings-in,
And . . . hovers o'er thy guilty sleep,
Unveiling every new-born deed, and thoughts
More ghastly than those deeds—