This most familiar scene, my pain,
These tombs, - alone remain.

Misery, my sweetest friend, oh, weep no more!
Thou wilt not be consoled - I wonder not!
For I have seen thee from thy dwelling's door
Watch the calm sunset with them, and this spot
Was even as bright and calm, but transitory, —
And now thy hopes are gone, thy hair is hoary;
This most familiar scene, my pain,
These tombs, - alone remain.

SONNET. - OZYMANDIAS

I MET a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless

things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.

And on the pedestal these words appear -
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings :
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

Sonnet. Ozymandias. Published by Hunt in The Examiner, January 11, 1818, with Rosalind and Helen, 1819.

LINES TO A CRITIC

I

HONEY from silkworms who can gather,
Or silk from the yellow bee?

The grass may grow in winter weather
As soon as hate in me.

II

Hate men who cant, and men who pray,
And men who rail like thee;

An equal passion to repay

They are not coy like me.

III

Or seek some slave of power and gold,
To be thy dear heart's mate;

Thy love will move that bigot cold
Sooner than me thy hate.

IV

A passion like the one I prove
Cannot divided be;

I hate thy want of truth and love
How should I then hate thee?

Lines to a Critic. Published by Hunt in The Liberal, No. III. 1823.

POEMS WRITTEN IN 1818

SONNET: TO THE NILE

MONTH after month the gathered rains descend
Drenching yon secret Æthiopian 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;

Girt there with blasts and meteors, Tempest

dwells

By Nile's aërial 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, O Nile ! - and well thou

knowest

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

LISTEN, listen, Mary mine,

To the whisper of the Apennine,

It bursts on the roof like the thunder's roar,

Or like the sea on a northern shore,

Heard in its raging ebb and flow

By the captives pent in the cave below.
The Apennine in the light of day
Is a mighty mountain dim and gray,
Which between the earth and sky doth lay;
But when night comes, a chaos dread
On the dim starlight then is spread,

And the Apennine walks abroad with the storm.

THE PAST

WILT thou forget the happy hours
Which we buried in Love's sweet bowers,
Heaping over their corpses cold
Blossoms and leaves instead of mould?

Blossoms which were the joys that fell,

And leaves, the hopes that yet remain.

Forget the dead, the past? Oh, yet
There are ghosts that may take revenge for it;
Memories that make the heart a tomb,
Regrets which glide through the spirit's gloom,
And with ghastly whispers tell
That joy, once lost, is pain.

Passage of the Apennines. Published by Mrs. Shelley, 1824. Composed May 4.

The Past. Published by Mrs. Shelley, 1824.

ON A FADED VIOLET

I

THE odor from the flower is gone,

Which like thy kisses breathed on me ;

The color from the flower is flown,

Which glowed of thee, and only thee!

II

A shrivelled, lifeless, vacant form,

It lies on my abandoned breast,

And mocks the heart, which yet is warm, With cold and silent rest.

III

I weep - my tears revive it not ;

I sigh - it breathes no more on me;