That blessed smile of thine,

Though still on me it turns most sweet, I scarce can call it mine :

But when to me alone

Your secret tears you show,
Oh! then I feel those tears my own,
And claim them as they flow.

Then still with bright looks bless

The gay, the cold, the free;

Give smiles to those who love you less,

But keep your tears for me.

The snow on Jura's steep

Can smile with many a beam,

Yet still in chains of coldness sleep,
How bright soe'er it seem.

But, when some deep-felt ray,

Whose touch is fire, appears,

Oh! then the smile is warm'd away,
And, melting, turns to tears.

Then still with bright looks bless
The gay, the cold, the free;

Give smiles to those who love you less,

But keep your tears for me.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, eldest son of Sir Timothy Shelley, Bart. of Castle Goring, was born at Field Place, Sussex, on the 4th of August, 1792. He was educated at Eton, and at University College, Oxford, was twice married, and has left two children, a daughter by the first wife, and a son-who is heir to the title-by the second. His widow, the daughter of William Godwin, is well known as the author of Frankenstein, and other novels. Mr. Shelley was cut off in the flower of his years and genius, on the 8th of July, 1822; he was drowned in a storm on the Genoese coast, whither he was hastening, to his abode near the town of Lerici.

It is within the scope neither of the limits nor the object of this work, to enter upon those controversial points, which so occupied the attention, and coloured the existence of this extraordinary man. Suffice it to say (for the man's NATURE can never be left out, where the Poet is concerned), that whether his speculations were well or ill grounded, he is acknowledged on all hands to have been sincere in his pursuit of them; and that his friends entertain the most enthusiastic regard for his memory.

Mr. Shelley was tall, and slight of figure, with a singular union of general delicacy of organization and muscular strength. His hair was brown, prematurely touched with grey; his complexion fair and glowing; his eyes grey and extremely vivid; his face small and delicately featured, especially about the lower part; and he had an expression of countenance, when he was talking in his usual earnest fashion, which has been described elsewhere, as giving you the idea of something " seraphical."

Mr. Shelley's poetry resembles that creation, for the moral harmony of which he was so anxious. It is wonderfully flowing and energetic, round and harmonious as the orb, no less conversant with seas and mountains, than with flowers and the minutest beauty, and it hungers and thirsts after a certain beauty of perfection, as the orb rolls in loving attraction round the sun. He is remarkable for mixing a scholarly grandiosity of style with the most unaffected feeling and the most impulsive expression, and for being alike supernatural and human in his enthusiasm, -that is to say, he is equally fond of soaring away into the most ethereal abstractions, as if he were spirit; and of sympathizing with every-day flesh and blood, as though he had done nothing but suffer and enjoy with the most earth-bound of his fellow-creatures. Whether interrogating Nature in the icy solitudes of Chamouny, or thrilling with the lark in the sunshine, or shedding indignant tears with sorrow and poverty, or pulling flowers like a child in a field, or pitching himself back into the depths of time and space, and discoursing with the first forms and gigantic shadows of creation; he is alike in earnest, and AT HOME. His faults arise from the very excess of his sympathies with all things. He is sometimes obscure in the remoteness of his abstractions, and sometimes so impatient with the forms of error, as to seem contradictory to his own tolerant doctrine. He not only

"Relishes all things sharply, Passioned as we"

He is far more passioned, and relishes them with a sharpness that makes him cry out like one constituted almost too delicately for existence. The cry is useful, because it begets attention to what might be otherwise too dully endured; but it leaves his genius with a certain charge of impatience and excess upon it, that hazards, meanwhile, that very enjoyment of the beautiful which he longed for, and which it is the more peculiar business of poetry to produce.

THE EDITOR is indebted for this Memoir of Shelley, and also for that of Keats, to the friend of both, Leigh Hunt. The dangerous tendency of Shelley's writings, his mistakes, theoretical and practical, acknowledged in some instances by himself,-will not find from others the excuse they have found from those who had personal regard for the man, as well as admiration of the Poet. Shelley may have been, as it is contended he was, SINCERE in his schemes for re-modelling society; but his doctrines are not, therefore, the less pernicious. Unhappily he died before judgment had arrived to the aid of genius: it is impossible to doubt that a mind so naturally generous would have atoned for many of the errors he had assisted to propagate, if he had lived to be convinced of them. He publicly disavowed (in the "Examiner") the republication of "Queen Mab;" and regretted that he had written it. It was the work of a youth

SEA-GIRT City! thou hast been
Ocean's child, and then his queen;
Now is come a darker day,
And thou soon must be his prey,
If the power that raised thee here
Hallow so thy watery bier.

A less drear ruin then than now,
With thy conquest-branded brow
Stooping to the slave of slaves
From thy throne, among the waves
Wilt thou be, when the sea-mew
Flies, as once before it flew,
O'er thine isles depopulate,
And all is in its ancient state,

Save where many a palace-gate
With green sea-flowers overgrown
Like a rock of ocean's own,
Topples o'er the abandon'd sea
As the tides change sullenly.
The fisher on his watery way,
Wandering at the close of day,
Will spread his sail and seize his oar
Till he pass the gloomy shore,
Lest thy dead should, from their sleep
Bursting o'er the starlit deep,
Lead a rapid masque of death
O'er the waters of his path.

I BRING fresh showers for the thirsting flowers From the seas and the streams;

I bear light shade for the leaves when laid

In their noon-day dreams.

From my wings are shaken the dews that waken

The sweet birds every one,

When rock'd to rest on their mother's breast,

As she dances about the sun.
I wield the flail of the lashing hail,

And whiten the green plains under;
And then again I dissolve it in rain,
And laugh as I pass in thunder.

I sift the snow on the mountains below,
And their great pines groan aghast;
And all the night 'tis my pillow white,

While I sleep in the arms of the blast.
Sublime on the towers of my skiey bowers,
Lightning, my pilot, sits,

In a cavern under is fetter'd the thunder,
It struggles and howls at fits;
Over earth and ocean, with gentle motion,
This pilot is guiding me,

Lured by the love of the genii that move

Over the rills, and the crags, and the hills,
Over the lakes and the plains,

Wherever he dream, under mountain or stream,

The Spirit he loves remains;
And I all the while bask in heaven's blue smile,
Whilst he is dissolving in rains.

The sanguine sunrise, with his meteor eyes,
And his burning plumes outspread,
Leaps on the back of my sailing rack,
When the morning-star shines dead.
As on the jag of a mountain crag,
Which an earthquake rocks and swings,

An eagle alit one moment may sit

In the light of its golden wings.

And when sunset may breathe, from the lit sea beneath,

Its ardours of rest and of love,

And the crimson pall of eve may fall

From the depth of heaven above,

With wings folded I rest, on mine airy nest,
As still as a brooding dove.

That orbed maiden, with white fire laden,
Whom mortals call the moon,
Glides glimmering o'er my fleece-like floor,
By the midnight breezes strewn ;
And wherever the beat of her unseen feet,
Which only the angels hear,

May have broken the woof of my tent's thin roof,
The stars peep behind her and peer;
And I laugh to see them whirl and flee,
Like a swarm of golden bees,

When I widen the rent in my wind-built tent,
Till the calm rivers, lakes, and seas,

Like strips of the sky fallen through me on high,
Are each paved with the moon and these.

I bind the sun's throne with a burning zone,
And the moon's with a girdle of pearl;
The volcanoes are dim, and the stars reel and swim,
When the whirlwinds my banner unfurl.
From cape to cape, with a bridge-like shape,

Over a torrent sea,