Queen Mab

Percy Bysshe Shelley 1813

Queen Mab

A Philosophical Poem (in 9 parts)

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First Published: in parts, 1813, dedicated to his young wife, Harriet Westbook;

Publisher: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co., New York, circa 1910;

Editor: Edward Dowden;

Transcribed: by Paul Lamplugh.

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To Harriet ****

Whose is the love that, gleaming through the world,

Wards off the poisonous arrow of its scorn?

      Whose is the warm and partial praise,

      Virtue’s most sweet reward?

Beneath whose looks did my reviving soul

Riper in truth and virtuous daring grow?

      Whose eyes have I gazed fondly on,

      And loved mankind the more?

Harriet! on thine: – thou wert my purer mind;

Thou wert the inspiration of my song;

      Thine are these early wilding flowers,

      Though garlanded by me.

Then press into thy breast this pledge of love;

And know, though time may change and years may roll,

      Each floweret gathered in my heart

      It consecrates to thine.

I

How wonderful is Death,

Death, and his brother Sleep!

One, pale as yonder waning moon

With lips of lurid blue;

The other, rosy as the morn

When throned on ocean’s wave

It blushes o'er the world;

Yet both so passing wonderful!

Hath then the gloomy Power

Whose reign is in the tainted sepulchres 

Seized on her sinless soul?

Must then that peerless form

Which love and admiration cannot view

Without a beating heart, those azure veins

Which steal like streams along a field of snow,

That lovely outline which is fair

As breathing marble, perish?

Must putrefaction’s breath

Leave nothing of this heavenly sight

But loathsomeness and ruin? 

Spare nothing but a gloomy theme,

On which the lightest heart might moralize?

Or is it only a sweet slumber

Stealing o'er sensation,

Which the breath of roseate morning

Chaseth into darkness?

Will Ianthe wake again,

And give that faithful bosom joy

Whose sleepless spirit waits to catch

Light, life and rapture, from her smile?

Yes! she will wake again,

Although her glowing limbs are motionless,

And silent those sweet lips,

Once breathing eloquence

That might have soothed a tiger’s rage

Or thawed the cold heart of a conqueror.

Her dewy eyes are closed,

And on their lids, whose texture fine

Scarce hides the dark blue orbs beneath,

The baby Sleep is pillowed; 

Her golden tresses shade

The bosom’s stainless pride,

Curling like tendrils of the parasite

Around a marble column.

Hark! whence that rushing sound?

’t is like the wondrous strain

That round a lonely ruin swells,

Which, wandering on the echoing shore,

The enthusiast hears at evening;

’t is softer than the west wind’s sigh; 

’t is wilder than the unmeasured notes

Of that strange lyre whose strings

The genii of the breezes sweep;

Those lines of rainbow light

Are like the moonbeams when they fall

Through some cathedral window, but the tints

Are such as may not find

Comparison on earth.

Behold the chariot of the Fairy Queen!

Celestial coursers paw the unyielding air; 

Their filmy pennons at her word they furl,

And stop obedient to the reins of light;

These the Queen of Spells drew in;

She spread a charm around the spot,

And, leaning graceful from the ethereal car,

Long did she gaze, and silently,

Upon the slumbering maid.

Oh! not the visioned poet in his dreams,

When silvery clouds float through the wildered brain,

When every sight of lovely, wild and grand 

Astonishes, enraptures, elevates,

When fancy at a glance combines

The wondrous and the beautiful,-

So bright, so fair, so wild a shape

Hath ever yet beheld,

As that which reined the coursers of the air

And poured the magic of her gaze

Upon the maiden’s sleep.

The broad and yellow moon

Shone dimly through her form – 

That form of faultless symmetry;

The pearly and pellucid car

Moved not the moonlight’s line.

’t was not an earthly pageant.

Those, who had looked upon the sight

Passing all human glory,

Saw not the yellow moon,

Saw not the mortal scene,

Heard not the night-wind’s rush,

Heard not an earthly sound, 

Saw but the fairy pageant,

Heard but the heavenly strains

That filled the lonely dwelling.

The Fairy’s frame was slight -yon fibrous cloud,

That catches but the palest tinge of even,

And which the straining eye can hardly seize

When melting into eastern twilight’s shadow,

Were scarce so thin, so slight; but the fair star

That gems the glittering coronet of morn,

Sheds not a light so mild, so powerful, 

As that which, bursting from the Fairy’s form,

Spread a purpureal halo round the scene,

Yet with an undulating motion,

Swayed to her outline gracefully.

From her celestial car

The Fairy Queen descended,

And thrice she waved her wand

Circled with wreaths of amaranth;

Her thin and misty form

Moved with the moving air, 

And the clear silver tones,

As thus she spoke, were such

As are unheard by all but gifted ear.

FAIRY

‘Stars! your balmiest influence shed!

Elements! your wrath suspend!

Sleep, Ocean, in the rocky bounds

That circle thy domain!

Let not a breath be seen to stir

Around yon grass-grown ruin’s height!

Let even the restless gossamer 

Sleep on the moveless air!

Soul of Ianthe! thou,

Judged alone worthy of the envied boon

That waits the good and the sincere; that waits

Those who have struggled, and with resolute will

Vanquished earth’s pride and meanness, burst the chains,

The icy chains of custom, and have shone

The day-stars of their age; -Soul of

Ianthe!

Awake! arise!’

Sudden arose 

Ianthe’s Soul; it stood

All beautiful in naked purity,

The perfect semblance of its bodily frame;

Instinct with inexpressible beauty and grace -

Each stain of earthliness

Had passed away -it reassumed

Its native dignity and stood

Immortal amid ruin.

Upon the couch the body lay,

Wrapt in the depth of slumber; 

Its features were fixed and meaningless,

Yet animal life was there,

And every organ yet performed

Its natural functions; ‘twas a sight

Of wonder to behold the body and the soul.

The self-same lineaments, the same

Marks of identity were there;

Yet, oh, how different! One aspires to Heaven,

Pants for its sempiternal heritage,

And, ever changing, ever rising still, 

Wantons in endless being:

The other, for a time the unwilling sport

Of circumstance and passion, struggles on;

Fleets through its sad duration rapidly;

Then like an useless and worn-out machine,

Rots, perishes, and passes.

FAIRY

‘Spirit! who hast dived so deep;

Spirit! who hast soared so high;

Thou the fearless, thou the mild,

Accept the boon thy worth hath earned, 

Ascend the car with me!’

SPIRIT

‘Do I dream? Is this new feeling

But a visioned ghost of slumber?

If indeed I am a soul,

A free, a disembodied soul,

Speak again to me.’

FAIRY

‘I am the Fairy Mab: to me ‘tis given

The wonders of the human world to keep;

The secrets of the immeasurable past,

In the unfailing consciences of men, 

Those stern, unflattering chroniclers, I find;

The future, from the causes which arise

In each event, I gather; not the sting

Which retributive memory implants

In the hard bosom of the selfish man,

Nor that ecstatic and exulting throb

Which virtue’s votary feels when he sums up

The thoughts and actions of a well-spent day,

Are unforeseen, unregistered by me;

And it is yet permitted me to rend 

The veil of mortal frailty, that the spirit,

Clothed in its changeless purity, may know

How soonest to accomplish the great end

For which it hath its being, and may taste

That peace which in the end all life will share.

This is the meed of virtue; happy Soul,

Ascend the car with me!’

The chains of earth’s immurement

Fell from Ianthe’s spirit;

They shrank and brake like bandages of straw 

Beneath a wakened giant’s strength.

She knew her glorious change,

And felt in apprehension uncontrolled

New raptures opening round;

Each day-dream of her mortal life,

Each frenzied vision of the slumbers

That closed each well-spent day,

Seemed now to meet reality.

The Fairy and the Soul proceeded;

The silver clouds disparted; 

And as the car of magic they ascended,

Again the speechless music swelled,

Again the coursers of the air

Unfurled their azure pennons, and the Queen,

Shaking the beamy reins,

Bade them pursue their way.

The magic car moved on.

The night was fair, and countless stars

Studded heaven’s dark blue vault;

Just o'er the eastern wave 

Peeped the first faint smile of morn.

The magic car moved on -

From the celestial hoofs

The atmosphere in flaming sparkles flew,

And where the burning wheels

Eddied above the mountain’s loftiest peak,

Was traced a line of lightning.

Now it flew far above a rock,

The utmost verge of earth,

The rival of the Andes, whose dark brow 

Lowered o'er the silver sea.

Far, far below the chariot’s path,

Calm as a slumbering babe,

Tremendous Ocean lay.

The mirror of its stillness showed

The pale and waning stars,

The chariot’s fiery track,

And the gray light of morn

Tinging those fleecy clouds

That canopied the dawn.

Seemed it that the chariot’s way

Lay through the midst of an immense concave

Radiant with million constellations, tinged

With shades of infinite color,

And semicircled with a belt

Flashing incessant meteors.

The magic car moved on.

As they approached their goal,

The coursers seemed to gather speed;

The sea no longer was distinguished; earth 

Appeared a vast and shadowy sphere;

The sun’s unclouded orb

Rolled through the black concave;

Its rays of rapid light

Parted around the chariot’s swifter course,

And fell, like ocean’s feathery spray

Dashed from the boiling surge

Before a vessel’s prow.

The magic car moved on.

Earth’s distant orb appeared 

The smallest light that twinkles in the heaven;

Whilst round the chariot’s way

Innumerable systems rolled

And countless spheres diffused

An ever-varying glory.

It was a sight of wonder: some

Were hornèd like the crescent moon;

Some shed a mild and silver beam

Like Hesperus o'er the western sea;

Some dashed athwart with trains of flame, 

Like worlds to death and ruin driven;

Some shone like suns, and as the chariot passed,

Eclipsed all other light.

Spirit of Nature! here -

In this interminable wilderness

Of worlds, at whose immensity

Even soaring fancy staggers,

Here is thy fitting temple!

Yet not the lightest leaf

That quivers to the passing breeze 

Is less instinct with thee;

Yet not the meanest worm

That lurks in graves and fattens on the dead,

Less shares thy eternal breath!

Spirit of Nature! thou,

Imperishable as this scene -

Here is thy fitting temple!

II

If solitude hath ever led thy steps

To the wild ocean’s echoing shore,

And thou hast lingered there,

Until the sun’s broad orb

Seemed resting on the burnished wave,

Thou must have marked the lines

Of purple gold that motionless

Hung o'er the sinking sphere;

Thou must have marked the billowy clouds,

Edged with intolerable radiancy, 

Towering like rocks of jet

Crowned with a diamond wreath;

And yet there is a moment,

When the sun’s highest point

Peeps like a star o'er ocean’s western edge,

When those far clouds of feathery gold,

Shaded with deepest purple, gleam

Like islands on a dark blue sea;

Then has thy fancy soared above the earth

And furled its wearied wing 

Within the Fairy’s fane.

Yet not the golden islands

Gleaming in yon flood of light,

Nor the feathery curtains

Stretching o'er the sun’s bright couch,

Nor the burnished ocean-waves

Paving that gorgeous dome,

So fair, so wonderful a sight

As Mab’s ethereal palace could afford.

Yet likest evening’s vault, that faëry Hall! 

As Heaven, low resting on the wave, it spread

Its floors of flashing light,

Its vast and azure dome,

Its fertile golden islands

Floating on a silver sea;

Whilst suns their mingling beamings darted

Through clouds of circumambient darkness,

And pearly battlements around

Looked o'er the immense of Heaven.

The magic car no longer moved. 

The Fairy and the Spirit

Entered the Hall of Spells.

Those golden clouds

That rolled in glittering billows

Beneath the azure canopy,

With the ethereal footsteps trembled not;

The light and crimson mists,

Floating to strains of thrilling melody

Through that unearthly dwelling,

Yielded to every movement of the will; 

Upon their passive swell the Spirit leaned,

And, for the varied bliss that pressed around,

Used not the glorious privilege

Of virtue and of wisdom.

‘Spirit!’ the Fairy said,

And pointed to the gorgeous dome,

’this is a wondrous sight

And mocks all human grandeur;

But, were it virtue’s only meed to dwell

In a celestial palace, all resigned 

To pleasurable impulses, immured

Within the prison of itself, the will

Of changeless Nature would be unfulfilled.

Learn to make others happy. Spirit, come!

This is thine high reward: -the past shall rise;

Thou shalt behold the present; I will teach

The secrets of the future.’

The Fairy and the Spirit

Approached the overhanging battlement.

Below lay stretched the universe! 

There, far as the remotest line

That bounds imagination’s flight,

Countless and unending orbs

In mazy motion intermingled,

Yet still fulfilled immutably

Eternal Nature’s law.

Above, below, around,

The circling systems formed

A wilderness of harmony;

Each with undeviating aim, 

In eloquent silence, through the depths of space

Pursued its wondrous way.

There was a little light

That twinkled in the misty distance.

None but a spirit’s eye

Might ken that rolling orb.

None but a spirit’s eye,

And in no other place

But that celestial dwelling, might behold

Each action of this earth’s inhabitants. 

But matter, space, and time,

In those aërial mansions cease to act;

And all-prevailing wisdom, when it reaps

The harvest of its excellence, o'erbounds

Those obstacles of which an earthly soul

Fears to attempt the conquest.

The Fairy pointed to the earth.

The Spirit’s intellectual eye

Its kindred beings recognized.

The thronging thousands, to a passing view, 

Seemed like an ant-hill’s citizens.

How wonderful! that even

The passions, prejudices, interests,

That sway the meanest being -the weak touch

That moves the finest nerve

And in one human brain

Causes the faintest thought, becomes a link

In the great chain of Nature!

‘Behold,’ the Fairy cried,

'Palmyra’s ruined palaces! 

Behold where grandeur frowned!

Behold where pleasure smiled!

What now remains? -the memory

Of senselessness and shame.

What is immortal there?

Nothing -it stands to tell

A melancholy tale, to give

An awful warning; soon

Oblivion will steal silently

The remnant of its fame. 

Monarchs and conquerors there

Proud o'er prostrate millions trod -

The earthquakes of the human race;

Like them, forgotten when the ruin

That marks their shock is past.

‘Beside the eternal Nile

The Pyramids have risen.

Nile shall pursue his changeless way;

Those Pyramids shall fall.

Yea! not a stone shall stand to tell 

The spot whereon they stood;

Their very site shall be forgotten,

As is their builder’s name!

‘Behold yon sterile spot,

Where now the wandering Arab’s tent

Flaps in the desert blast!

There once old Salem’s haughty fane

Reared high to heaven its thousand golden domes,

And in the blushing face of day

Exposed its shameful glory. 

Oh! many a widow, many an orphan cursed

The building of that fane; and many a father,

Worn out with toil and slavery, implored

The poor man’s God to sweep it from the earth

And spare his children the detested task

Of piling stone on stone and poisoning

The choicest days of life

To soothe a dotard’s vanity.

There an inhuman and uncultured race

Howled hideous praises to their Demon-God; 

They rushed to war, tore from the mother’s womb

The unborn child -old age and infancy

Promiscuous perished; their victorious arms

Left not a soul to breathe. Oh! they were fiends!

But what was he who taught them that the God

Of Nature and benevolence had given

A special sanction to the trade of blood?

His name and theirs are fading, and the tales

Of this barbarian nation, which imposture

Recites till terror credits, are pursuing 

Itself into forgetfulness.

‘Where Athens, Rome, and Sparta stood,

There is a moral desert now.

The mean and miserable huts,

The yet more wretched palaces,

Contrasted with those ancient fanes

Now crumbling to oblivion, -

The long and lonely colonnades

Through which the ghost of Freedom stalks, -

Seem like a well-known tune, 

Which in some dear scene we have loved to hear,

Remembered now in sadness.

But, oh! how much more changed,

How gloomier is the contrast

Of human nature there!

Where Socrates expired, a tyrant’s slave,

A coward and a fool, spreads death around -

Then, shuddering, meets his own.

Where Cicero and Antoninus lived,

A cowled and hypocritical monk 

Prays, curses and deceives.

‘Spirit! ten thousand years

Have scarcely passed away,

Since in the waste, where now the savage drinks

His enemy’s blood, and, aping Europe’s sons,

Wakes the unholy song of war,

Arose a stately city,

Metropolis of the western continent.

There, now, the mossy column-stone,

Indented by time’s unrelaxing grasp, 

Which once appeared to brave

All, save its country’s ruin, -

There the wide forest scene,

Rude in the uncultivated loveliness

Of gardens long run wild, -

Seems, to the unwilling sojourner whose steps

Chance in that desert has delayed,

Thus to have stood since earth was what it is.

Yet once it was the busiest haunt,

Whither, as to a common centre, flocked 

Strangers, and ships, and merchandise;

Once peace and freedom blest

The cultivated plain;

But wealth, that curse of man,

Blighted the bud of its prosperity;

Virtue and wisdom, truth and liberty,

Fled, to return not, until man shall know

That they alone can give the bliss

Worthy a soul that claims

Its kindred with eternity.

‘There ‘s not one atom of yon earth

But once was living man;

Nor the minutest drop of rain,

That hangeth in its thinnest cloud,

But flowed in human veins;

And from the burning plains

Where Libyan monsters yell,

From the most gloomy glens

Of Greenland’s sunless clime,

To where the golden fields 

Of fertile England spread

Their harvest to the day,

Thou canst not find one spot

Whereon no city stood.

‘How strange is human pride!

I tell thee that those living things,

To whom the fragile blade of grass

That springeth in the morn

And perisheth ere noon,

Is an unbounded world; 

I tell thee that those viewless beings,

Whose mansion is the smallest particle

Of the impassive atmosphere,

Think, feel and live like man;

That their affections and antipathies,

Like his, produce the laws

Ruling their moral state;

And the minutest throb

That through their frame diffuses

The slightest, faintest motion, 

Is fixed and indispensable

As the majestic laws

That rule yon rolling orbs.’

The Fairy paused. The Spirit,

In ecstasy of admiration, felt

All knowledge of the past revived; the events

Of old and wondrous times,

Which dim tradition interruptedly

Teaches the credulous vulgar, were unfolded

In just perspective to the view; 

Yet dim from their infinitude.

The Spirit seemed to stand

High on an isolated pinnacle;

The flood of ages combating below,

The depth of the unbounded universe

Above, and all around

Nature’s unchanging harmony.

III

‘Fairy!’ the Spirit said,

And on the Queen of Spells

Fixed her ethereal eyes,

'I thank thee. Thou hast given

A boon which I will not resign, and taught

A lesson not to be unlearned. I know

The past, and thence I will essay to glean

A warning for the future, so that man

May profit by his errors and derive

Experience from his folly; 

For, when the power of imparting joy

Is equal to the will, the human soul

Requires no other heaven.’

MAB

‘Turn thee, surpassing Spirit!

Much yet remains unscanned.

Thou knowest how great is man,

Thou knowest his imbecility;

Yet learn thou what he is;

Yet learn the lofty destiny

Which restless Time prepares 

For every living soul.

‘Behold a gorgeous palace that amid

Yon populous city rears its thousand towers

And seems itself a city. Gloomy troops

Of sentinels in stern and silent ranks

Encompass it around; the dweller there

Cannot be free and happy; hearest thou not

The curses of the fatherless, the groans

Of those who have no friend? He passes on -

The King, the wearer of a gilded chain 

That binds his soul to abjectness, the fool

Whom courtiers nickname monarch, whilst a slave

Even to the basest appetites -that man

Heeds not the shriek of penury; he smiles

At the deep curses which the destitute

Mutter in secret, and a sullen joy

Pervades his bloodless heart when thousands groan

But for those morsels which his wantonness

Wastes in unjoyous revelry, to save

All that they love from famine; when he hears 

The tale of horror, to some ready-made face

Of hypocritical assent he turns,

Smothering the glow of shame, that, spite of him,

Flushes his bloated cheek.

Now to the meal

Of silence, grandeur and excess he drags

His palled unwilling appetite. If gold,

Gleaming around, and numerous viands culled

From every clime could force the loathing sense

To overcome satiety, -if wealth

The spring it draws from poisons not, -or vice, 

Unfeeling, stubborn vice, converteth not

Its food to deadliest venom; then that king

Is happy; and the peasant who fulfils

His unforced task, when he returns at even

And by the blazing fagot meets again

Her welcome for whom all his toil is sped,

Tastes not a sweeter meal.

Behold him now

Stretched on the gorgeous couch; his fevered brain

Reels dizzily awhile; but ah! too soon

The slumber of intemperance subsides, 

And conscience, that undying serpent, calls

Her venomous brood to their nocturnal task.

Listen! he speaks! oh! mark that frenzied eye -

Oh! mark that deadly visage!’

KING

‘No cessation!

Oh! must this last forever! Awful death,

I wish, yet fear to clasp thee! -Not one moment

Of dreamless sleep! O dear and blessèd Peace,

Why dost thou shroud thy vestal purity

In penury and dungeons? Wherefore lurkest

With danger, death, and solitude; yet shun’st 

The palace I have built thee? Sacred Peace!

Oh, visit me but once, -but pitying shed

One drop of balm upon my withered soul!’

THE FAIRY

‘Vain man! that palace is the virtuous heart,

And Peace defileth not her snowy robes

In such a shed as thine. Hark! yet he mutters;

His slumbers are but varied agonies;

They prey like scorpions on the springs of life.

There needeth not the hell that bigots frame

To punish those who err; earth in itself 

Contains at once the evil and the cure;

And all-sufficing Nature can chastise

Those who transgress her law; she only knows

How justly to proportion to the fault

The punishment it merits.

Is it strange

That this poor wretch should pride him in his woe?

Take pleasure in his abjectness, and hug

The scorpion that consumes him? Is it strange

That, placed on a conspicuous throne of thorns,

Grasping an iron sceptre, and immured 

Within a splendid prison whose stern bounds

Shut him from all that’s good or dear on earth,

His soul asserts not its humanity?

That man’s mild nature rises not in war

Against a king’s employ? No -’tis not strange.

He, like the vulgar, thinks, feels, acts, and lives

Just as his father did; the unconquered powers

Of precedent and custom interpose

Between a king and virtue. Stranger yet,

To those who know not Nature nor deduce 

The future from the present, it may seem,

That not one slave, who suffers from the crimes

Of this unnatural being, not one wretch,

Whose children famish and whose nuptial bed

Is earth’s unpitying bosom, rears an arm

To dash him from his throne!

Those gilded flies

That, basking in the sunshine of a court,

Fatten on its corruption! what are they? -

The drones of the community; they feed

On the mechanic’s labor; the starved hind 

For them compels the stubborn glebe to yield

Its unshared harvests; and yon squalid form,

Leaner than fleshless misery, that wastes

A sunless life in the unwholesome mine,

Drags out in labor a protracted death

To glut their grandeur; many faint with toil

That few may know the cares and woe of sloth.

Whence, thinkest thou, kings and parasites arose?

Whence that unnatural line of drones who heap

Toil and unvanquishable penury 

On those who build their palaces and bring

Their daily bread? -From vice, black loathsome vice;

From rapine, madness, treachery, and wrong;

From all that genders misery, and makes

Of earth this thorny wilderness; from lust,

Revenge, and murder. -And when reason’s voice,

Loud as the voice of Nature, shall have waked

The nations; and mankind perceive that vice

Is discord, war and misery; that virtue

Is peace and happiness and harmony; 

When man’s maturer nature shall disdain

The playthings of its childhood; -kingly glare

Will lose its power to dazzle, its authority

Will silently pass by; the gorgeous throne

Shall stand unnoticed in the regal hall,

Fast falling to decay; whilst falsehood’s trade

Shall be as hateful and unprofitable

As that of truth is now.

Where is the fame

Which the vain-glorious mighty of the earth

Seek to eternize? Oh! the faintest sound 

From time’s light footfall, the minutest wave

That swells the flood of ages, whelms in nothing

The unsubstantial bubble. Ay! to-day

Stern is the tyrant’s mandate, red the gaze

That flashes desolation, strong the arm

That scatters multitudes. To-morrow comes!

That mandate is a thunder-peal that died

In ages past; that gaze, a transient flash

On which the midnight closed; and on that arm

The worm has made his meal.

The virtuous man, 

Who, great in his humility as kings

Are little in their grandeur; he who leads

Invincibly a life of resolute good

And stands amid the silent dungeon-depths

More free and fearless than the trembling judge

Who, clothed in venal power, vainly strove

To bind the impassive spirit; -when he falls,

His mild eye beams benevolence no more;

Withered the hand outstretched but to relieve;

Sunk reason’s simple eloquence that rolled 

But to appall the guilty. Yes! the grave

Hath quenched that eye and death’s relentless frost

Withered that arm; but the unfading fame

Which virtue hangs upon its votary’s tomb,

The deathless memory of that man whom kings

Call to their minds and tremble, the remembrance

With which the happy spirit contemplates

Its well-spent pilgrimage on earth,

Shall never pass away.

‘Nature rejects the monarch, not the man; 

The subject, not the citizen; for kings

And subjects, mutual foes, forever play

A losing game into each other’s hands,

Whose stakes are vice and misery. The man

Of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys.

Power, like a desolating pestilence,

Pollutes whate'er it touches; and obedience,

Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,

Makes slaves of men, and of the human frame

A mechanized automaton.

When Nero 

High over flaming Rome with savage joy

Lowered like a fiend, drank with enraptured ear

The shrieks of agonizing death, beheld

The frightful desolation spread, and felt

A new-created sense within his soul

Thrill to the sight and vibrate to the sound, -

Thinkest thou his grandeur had not overcome

The force of human kindness? And when Rome

With one stern blow hurled not the tyrant down,

Crushed not the arm red with her dearest blood, 

Had not submissive abjectness destroyed

Nature’s suggestions?

Look on yonder earth:

The golden harvests spring; the unfailing sun

Sheds light and life; the fruits, the flowers, the trees,

Arise in due succession; all things speak

Peace, harmony and love. The universe,

In Nature’s silent eloquence, declares

That all fulfil the works of love and joy, -

All but the outcast, Man. He fabricates

The sword which stabs his peace; he cherisheth 

The snakes that gnaw his heart; he raiseth up

The tyrant whose delight is in his woe,

Whose sport is in his agony. Yon sun,

Lights it the great alone? Yon silver beams,

Sleep they less sweetly on the cottage thatch

Than on the dome of kings? Is mother earth

A step-dame to her numerous sons who earn

Her unshared gifts with unremitting toil;

A mother only to those puling babes

Who, nursed in ease and luxury, make men 

The playthings of their babyhood and mar

In self-important childishness that peace

Which men alone appreciate?

‘Spirit of Nature, no!

The pure diffusion of thy essence throbs

Alike in every human heart.

Thou aye erectest there

Thy throne of power unappealable;

Thou art the judge beneath whose nod

Man’s brief and frail authority 

Is powerless as the wind

That passeth idly by;

Thine the tribunal which surpasseth

The show of human justice

As God surpasses man!

‘Spirit of Nature! thou

Life of interminable multitudes;

Soul of those mighty spheres

Whose changeless paths through Heaven’s deep silence lie;

Soul of that smallest being, 

The dwelling of whose life

Is one faint April sun-gleam; -

Man, like these passive things,

Thy will unconsciously fulfilleth;

Like theirs, his age of endless peace,

Which time is fast maturing,

Will swiftly, surely, come;

And the unbounded frame which thou pervadest,

Will be without a flaw

Marring its perfect symmetry!

IV

‘How beautiful this night! the balmiest sigh,

Which vernal zephyrs breathe in evening’s ear,

Were discord to the speaking quietude

That wraps this moveless scene. Heaven’s ebon vault,

Studded with stars unutterably bright,

Through which the moon’s unclouded grandeur rolls,

Seems like a canopy which love had spread

To curtain her sleeping world. Yon gentle hills.

Robed in a garment of untrodden snow;

Yon darksome rocks, whence icicles depend 

So stainless that their white and glittering spires

Tinge not the moon’s pure beam; yon castled steep

Whose banner hangeth o'er the time-worn tower

So idly that rapt fancy deemeth it

A metaphor of peace; -all form a scene

Where musing solitude might love to lift

Her soul above this sphere of earthliness;

Where silence undisturbed might watch alone -

So cold, so bright, so still.

The orb of day

In southern climes o'er ocean’s waveless field 

Sinks sweetly smiling; not the faintest breath

Steals o'er the unruffled deep; the clouds of eve

Reflect unmoved the lingering beam of day;

And Vesper’s image on the western main

Is beautifully still. To-morrow comes:

Cloud upon cloud, in dark and deepening mass,

Roll o'er the blackened waters; the deep roar

Of distant thunder mutters awfully;

Tempest unfolds its pinion o'er the gloom

That shrouds the boiling surge; the pitiless fiend, 

With all his winds and lightnings, tracks his prey;

The torn deep yawns, -the vessel finds a grave

Beneath its jagged gulf.

Ah! whence yon glare

That fires the arch of heaven? that dark red smoke

Blotting the silver moon? The stars are quenched

In darkness, and the pure and spangling snow

Gleams faintly through the gloom that gathers round.

Hark to that roar whose swift and deafening peals

In countless echoes through the mountains ring,

Startling pale Midnight on her starry throne! 

Now swells the intermingling din; the jar

Frequent and frightful of the bursting bomb;

The falling beam, the shriek, the groan, the shout,

The ceaseless clangor, and the rush of men

Inebriate with rage: -loud and more loud

The discord grows; till pale Death shuts the scene

And o'er the conqueror and the conquered draws

His cold and bloody shroud. -Of all the men

Whom day’s departing beam saw blooming there

In proud and vigorous health; of all the hearts 

That beat with anxious life at sunset there;

How few survive, how few are beating now!

All is deep silence, like the fearful calm

That slumbers in the storm’s portentous pause;

Save when the frantic wail of widowed love

Comes shuddering on the blast, or the faint moan

With which some soul bursts from the frame of clay

Wrapt round its struggling powers.

The gray morn

Dawns on the mournful scene; the sulphurous smoke

Before the icy wind slow rolls away, 

And the bright beams of frosty morning dance

Along the spangling snow. There tracks of blood

Even to the forest’s depth, and scattered arms,

And lifeless warriors, whose hard lineaments

Death’s self could change not, mark the dreadful path

Of the outsallying victors; far behind

Black ashes note where their proud city stood.

Within yon forest is a gloomy glen -

Each tree which guards its darkness from the day,

Waves o'er a warrior’s tomb.

I see thee shrink, 

Surpassing Spirit! -wert thou human else?

I see a shade of doubt and horror fleet

Across thy stainless features; yet fear not;

This is no unconnected misery,

Nor stands uncaused and irretrievable.

Man’s evil nature, that apology

Which kings who rule, and cowards who crouch, set up

For their unnumbered crimes, sheds not the blood

Which desolates the discord-wasted land.

From kings and priests and statesmen war arose, 

Whose safety is man’s deep unbettered woe,

Whose grandeur his debasement. Let the axe

Strike at the root, the poison-tree will fall;

And where its venomed exhalations spread

Ruin, and death, and woe, where millions lay

Quenching the serpent’s famine, and their bones

Bleaching unburied in the putrid blast,

A garden shall arise, in loveliness

Surpassing fabled Eden.

Hath Nature’s soul, -

That formed this world so beautiful, that spread 

Earth’s lap with plenty, and life’s smallest chord

Strung to unchanging unison, that gave

The happy birds their dwelling in the grove,

That yielded to the wanderers of the deep

The lovely silence of the unfathomed main,

And filled the meanest worm that crawls in dust

With spirit, thought and love, -on Man alone,

Partial in causeless malice, wantonly

Heaped ruin, vice, and slavery; his soul

Blasted with withering curses; placed afar 

The meteor-happiness, that shuns his grasp,

But serving on the frightful gulf to glare

Rent wide beneath his footsteps?

Nature! -no!

Kings, priests and statesmen blast the human flower

Even in its tender bud; their influence darts

Like subtle poison through the bloodless veins

Of desolate society. The child,

Ere he can lisp his mother’s sacred name,

Swells with the unnatural pride of crime, and lifts

His baby-sword even in a hero’s mood. 

This infant arm becomes the bloodiest scourge

Of devastated earth; whilst specious names,

Learnt in soft childhood’s unsuspecting hour,

Serve as the sophisms with which manhood dims

Bright reason’s ray and sanctifies the sword

Upraised to shed a brother’s innocent blood.

Let priest-led slaves cease to proclaim that man

Inherits vice and misery, when force

And falsehood hang even o'er the cradled babe,

Stifling with rudest grasp all natural good.

‘Ah! to the stranger-soul, when first it peeps

From its new tenement and looks abroad

For happiness and sympathy, how stern

And desolate a tract is this wide world!

How withered all the buds of natural good!

No shade, no shelter from the sweeping storms

Of pitiless power! On its wretched frame

Poisoned, perchance, by the disease and woe

Heaped on the wretched parent whence it sprung

By morals, law and custom, the pure winds 

Of heaven, that renovate the insect tribes,

May breathe not. The untainting light of day

May visit not its longings. It is bound

Ere it has life; yea, all the chains are forged

Long ere its being; all liberty and love

And peace is torn from its defencelessness;

Cursed from its birth, even from its cradle doomed

To abjectness and bondage!

‘Throughout this varied and eternal world

Soul is the only element, the block 

That for uncounted ages has remained.

The moveless pillar of a mountain’s weight

Is active living spirit. Every grain

Is sentient both in unity and part,

And the minutest atom comprehends

A world of loves and hatreds; these beget

Evil and good; hence truth and falsehood spring;

Hence will and thought and action, all the germs

Of pain or pleasure, sympathy or hate,

That variegate the eternal universe. 

Soul is not more polluted than the beams

Of heaven’s pure orb ere round their rapid lines

The taint of earth-born atmospheres arise.

‘Man is of soul and body, formed for deeds

Of high resolve; on fancy’s boldest wing

To soar unwearied, fearlessly to turn

The keenest pangs to peacefulness, and taste

The joys which mingled sense and spirit yield;

Or he is formed for abjectness and woe,

To grovel on the dunghill of his fears, 

To shrink at every sound, to quench the flame

Of natural love in sensualism, to know

That hour as blest when on his worthless days

The frozen hand of death shall set its seal,

Yet fear the cure, though hating the disease.

The one is man that shall hereafter be;

The other, man as vice has made him now.

‘War is the statesman’s game, the priest’s delight,

The lawyer’s jest, the hired assassin’s trade,

And to those royal murderers whose mean thrones 

Are bought by crimes of treachery and gore,

The bread they eat, the staff on which they lean.

Guards, garbed in blood-red livery, surround

Their palaces, participate the crimes

That force defends and from a nation’s rage

Secures the crown, which all the curses reach

That famine, frenzy, woe and penury breathe.

These are the hired bravos who defend

The tyrant’s throne -the bullies of his fear;

These are the sinks and channels of worst vice, 

The refuse of society, the dregs

Of all that is most vile; their cold hearts blend

Deceit with sternness, ignorance with pride,

All that is mean and villainous with rage

Which hopelessness of good and self-contempt

Alone might kindle; they are decked in wealth,

Honor and power, then are sent abroad

To do their work. The pestilence that stalks

In gloomy triumph through some eastern land

Is less destroying. They cajole with gold 

And promises of fame the thoughtless youth

Already crushed with servitude; he knows

His wretchedness too late, and cherishes

Repentance for his ruin, when his doom

Is sealed in gold and blood!

Those too the tyrant serve, who, skilled to snare

The feet of justice in the toils of law,

Stand ready to oppress the weaker still,

And right or wrong will vindicate for gold,

Sneering at public virtue, which beneath 

Their pitiless tread lies torn and trampled where

Honor sits smiling at the sale of truth.

‘Then grave and hoary-headed hypocrites,

Without a hope, a passion or a love,

Who through a life of luxury and lies

Have crept by flattery to the seats of power,

Support the system whence their honors flow.

They have three words -well tyrants know their use,

Well pay them for the loan with usury

Torn from a bleeding world! -God, Hell and Heaven: 

A vengeful, pitiless, and almighty fiend,

Whose mercy is a nickname for the rage

Of tameless tigers hungering for blood;

Hell, a red gulf of everlasting fire,

Where poisonous and undying worms prolong

Eternal misery to those hapless slaves

Whose life has been a penance for its crimes;

And Heaven, a meed for those who dare belie

Their human nature, quake, believe and cringe

Before the mockeries of earthly power.

‘These tools the tyrant tempers to his work,

Wields in his wrath, and as he wills destroys,

Omnipotent in wickedness; the while

Youth springs, age moulders, manhood tamely does

His bidding, bribed by short-lived joys to lend

Force to the weakness of his trembling arm.

They rise, they fall; one generation comes

Yielding its harvest to destruction’s scythe.

It fades, another blossoms; yet behold!

Red glows the tyrant’s stamp-mark on its bloom, 

Withering and cankering deep its passive prime.

He has invented lying words and modes,

Empty and vain as his own coreless heart;

Evasive meanings, nothings of much sound,

To lure the heedless victim to the toils

Spread round the valley of its paradise.

‘Look to thyself, priest, conqueror or prince!

Whether thy trade is falsehood, and thy lusts

Deep wallow in the earnings of the poor,

With whom thy master was; or thou delight’st 

In numbering o'er the myriads of thy slain,

All misery weighing nothing in the scale

Against thy short-lived fame; or thou dost load

With cowardice and crime the groaning land,

A pomp-fed king. Look to thy wretched self!

Ay, art thou not the veriest slave that e'er

Crawled on the loathing earth? Are not thy days

Days of unsatisfying listlessness?

Dost thou not cry, ere night’s long rack is o'er,

"When will the morning come?” Is not thy youth 

A vain and feverish dream of sensualism?

Thy manhood blighted with unripe disease?

Are not thy views of unregretted death

Drear, comfortless and horrible? Thy mind,

Is it not morbid as thy nerveless frame,

Incapable of judgment, hope or love?

And dost thou wish the errors to survive,

That bar thee from all sympathies of good,

After the miserable interest

Thou hold’st in their protraction? When the grave 

Has swallowed up thy memory and thyself,

Dost thou desire the bane that poisons earth

To twine its roots around thy coffined clay,

Spring from thy bones, and blossom on thy tomb,

That of its fruit thy babes may eat and die?

V

‘Thus do the generations of the earth

Go to the grave and issue from the womb,

Surviving still the imperishable change

That renovates the world; even as the leaves

Which the keen frost-wind of the waning year

Has scattered on the forest-soil and heaped

For many seasons there -though long they choke,

Loading with loathsome rottenness the land,

All germs of promise, yet when the tall trees

From which they fell, shorn of their lovely shapes, 

Lie level with the earth to moulder there,

They fertilize the land they long deformed;

Till from the breathing lawn a forest springs

Of youth, integrity and loveliness,

Like that which gave it life, to spring and die.

Thus suicidal selfishness, that blights

The fairest feelings of the opening heart,

Is destined to decay, whilst from the soil

Shall spring all virtue, all delight, all love,

And judgment cease to wage unnatural war 

With passion’s unsubduable array.

Twin-sister of Religion, Selfishness!

Rival in crime and falsehood, aping all

The wanton horrors of her bloody play;

Yet frozen, unimpassioned, spiritless,

Shunning the light, and owning not its name,

Compelled by its deformity to screen

With flimsy veil of justice and of right

Its unattractive lineaments that scare

All save the brood of ignorance; at once 

The cause and the effect of tyranny;

Unblushing, hardened, sensual and vile;

Dead to all love but of its abjectness;

With heart impassive by more noble powers

Than unshared pleasure, sordid gain, or fame;

Despising its own miserable being,

Which still it longs, yet fears, to disenthrall.

‘Hence commerce springs, the venal interchange

Of all that human art or Nature yield;

Which wealth should purchase not, but want demand, 

And natural kindness hasten to supply

From the full fountain of its boundless love,

Forever stifled, drained and tainted now.

Commerce! beneath whose poison-breathing shade

No solitary virtue dares to spring,

But poverty and wealth with equal hand

Scatter their withering curses, and unfold

The doors of premature and violent death

To pining famine and full-fed disease,

To all that shares the lot of human life, 

Which, poisoned body and soul, scarce drags the chain

That lengthens as it goes and clanks behind.

‘Commerce has set the mark of selfishness,

The signet of its all-enslaving power,

Upon a shining ore, and called it gold;

Before whose image bow the vulgar great,

The vainly rich, the miserable proud,

The mob of peasants, nobles, priests and kings,

And with blind feelings reverence the power

That grinds them to the dust of misery. 

But in the temple of their hireling hearts

Gold is a living god and rules in scorn

All earthly things but virtue.

‘Since tyrants by the sale of human life

Heap luxuries to their sensualism, and fame

To their wide-wasting and insatiate pride,

Success has sanctioned to a credulous world

The ruin, the disgrace, the woe of war.

His hosts of blind and unresisting dupes

The despot numbers; from his cabinet 

These puppets of his schemes he moves at will,

Even as the slaves by force or famine driven,

Beneath a vulgar master, to perform

A task of cold and brutal drudgery; -

Hardened to hope, insensible to fear,

Scarce living pulleys of a dead machine,

Mere wheels of work and articles of trade,

That grace the proud and noisy pomp of wealth!

‘The harmony and happiness of man

Yields to the wealth of nations; that which lifts 

His nature to the heaven of its pride,

Is bartered for the poison of his soul;

The weight that drags to earth his towering hopes,

Blighting all prospect but of selfish gain,

Withering all passion but of slavish fear,

Extinguishing all free and generous love

Of enterprise and daring, even the pulse

That fancy kindles in the beating heart

To mingle with sensation, it destroys, -

Leaves nothing but the sordid lust of self, 

The grovelling hope of interest and gold,

Unqualified, unmingled, unredeemed

Even by hypocrisy.

And statesmen boast

Of wealth! The wordy eloquence that lives

After the ruin of their hearts, can gild

The bitter poison of a nation’s woe;

Can turn the worship of the servile mob

To their corrupt and glaring idol, fame,

From virtue, trampled by its iron tread, -

Although its dazzling pedestal be raised 

Amid the horrors of a limb-strewn field,

With desolated dwellings smoking round.

The man of ease, who, by his warm fireside,

To deeds of charitable intercourse

And bare fulfilment of the common laws

Of decency and prejudice confines

The struggling nature of his human heart,

Is duped by their cold sophistry; he sheds

A passing tear perchance upon the wreck

Of earthly peace, when near his dwelling’s door 

The frightful waves are driven, -when his son

Is murdered by the tyrant, or religion

Drives his wife raving mad. But the poor man

Whose life is misery, and fear and care;

Whom the morn wakens but to fruitless toil;

Who ever hears his famished offspring’s scream;

Whom their pale mother’s uncomplaining gaze

Forever meets, and the proud rich man’s eye

Flashing command, and the heart-breaking scene

Of thousands like himself; -he little heeds 

The rhetoric of tyranny; his hate

Is quenchless as his wrongs; he laughs to scorn

The vain and bitter mockery of words,

Feeling the horror of the tyrant’s deeds,

And unrestrained but by the arm of power,

That knows and dreads his enmity.

‘The iron rod of penury still compels

Her wretched slave to bow the knee to wealth,

And poison, with unprofitable toil,

A life too void of solace to confirm 

The very chains that bind him to his doom.

Nature, impartial in munificence,

Has gifted man with all-subduing will.

Matter, with all its transitory shapes,

Lies subjected and plastic at his feet,

That, weak from bondage, tremble as they tread.

How many a rustic Milton has passed by,

Stifling the speechless longings of his heart,

In unremitting drudgery and care!

How many a vulgar Cato has compelled 

His energies, no longer tameless then,

To mould a pin or fabricate a nail!

How many a Newton, to whose passive ken

Those mighty spheres that gem infinity

Were only specks of tinsel fixed in heaven

To light the midnights of his native town!

‘Yet every heart contains perfection’s germ.

The wisest of the sages of the earth,

That ever from the stores of reason drew

Science and truth, and virtue’s dreadless tone, 

Were but a weak and inexperienced boy,

Proud, sensual, unimpassioned, unimbued

With pure desire and universal love,

Compared to that high being, of cloudless brain,

Untainted passion, elevated will,

Which death (who even would linger long in awe

Within his noble presence and beneath

His changeless eye-beam) might alone subdue.

Him, every slave now dragging through the filth

Of some corrupted city his sad life, 

Pining with famine, swoln with luxury,

Blunting the keenness of his spiritual sense

With narrow schemings and unworthy cares,

Or madly rushing through all violent crime

To move the deep stagnation of his soul, -

Might imitate and equal.

But mean lust

Has bound its chains so tight about the earth

That all within it but the virtuous man

Is venal; gold or fame will surely reach

The price prefixed by Selfishness to all 

But him of resolute and unchanging will;

Whom nor the plaudits of a servile crowd,

Nor the vile joys of tainting luxury,

Can bribe to yield his elevated soul

To Tyranny or Falsehood, though they wield

With blood-red hand the sceptre of the world.

‘All things are sold: the very light of heaven

Is venal; earth’s unsparing gifts of love,

The smallest and most despicable things

That lurk in the abysses of the deep, 

All objects of our life, even life itself,

And the poor pittance which the laws allow

Of liberty, the fellowship of man,

Those duties which his heart of human love

Should urge him to perform instinctively,

Are bought and sold as in a public mart

Of undisguising Selfishness, that sets

On each its price, the stamp-mark of her reign.

Even love is sold; the solace of all woe

Is turned to deadliest agony, old age 

Shivers in selfish beauty’s loathing arms,

And youth’s corrupted impulses prepare

A life of horror from the blighting bane

Of commerce; whilst the pestilence that springs

From unenjoying sensualism, has filled

All human life with hydra-headed woes.

‘Falsehood demands but gold to pay the pangs

Of outraged conscience; for the slavish priest

Sets no great value on his hireling faith;

A little passing pomp, some servile souls, 

Whom cowardice itself might safely chain

Or the spare mite of avarice could bribe

To deck the triumph of their languid zeal,

Can make him minister to tyranny.

More daring crime requires a loftier meed.

Without a shudder the slave-soldier lends

His arm to murderous deeds, and steels his heart,

When the dread eloquence of dying men,

Low mingling on the lonely field of fame,

Assails that nature whose applause he sells 

For the gross blessings of the patriot mob,

For the vile gratitude of heartless kings,

And for a cold world’s good word, -viler still!

‘There is a nobler glory which survives

Until our being fades, and, solacing

All human care, accompanies its change;

Deserts not virtue in the dungeon’s gloom,

And in the precincts of the palace guides

Its footsteps through that labyrinth of crime;

Imbues his lineaments with dauntlessness, 

Even when from power’s avenging hand he takes

Its sweetest, last and noblest title -death;

-The consciousness of good, which neither gold,

Nor sordid fame, nor hope of heavenly bliss,

Can purchase; but a life of resolute good,

Unalterable will, quenchless desire

Of universal happiness, the heart

That beats with it in unison, the brain

Whose ever-wakeful wisdom toils to change

Reason’s rich stores for its eternal weal.

‘This commerce of sincerest virtue needs

No meditative signs of selfishness,

No jealous intercourse of wretched gain,

No balancings of prudence, cold and long;

In just and equal measure all is weighed,

One scale contains the sum of human weal,

And one, the good man’s heart.

How vainly seek

The selfish for that happiness denied

To aught but virtue! Blind and hardened, they,

Who hope for peace amid the storms of care, 

Who covet power they know not how to use,

And sigh for pleasure they refuse to give, -

Madly they frustrate still their own designs;

And, where they hope that quiet to enjoy

Which virtue pictures, bitterness of soul,

Pining regrets, and vain repentances,

Disease, disgust and lassitude pervade

Their valueless and miserable lives.

‘But hoary-headed selfishness has felt

Its death-blow and is tottering to the grave; 

A brighter morn awaits the human day,

When every transfer of earth’s natural gifts

Shall be a commerce of good words and works;

When poverty and wealth, the thirst of fame,

The fear of infamy, disease and woe,

War with its million horrors, and fierce hell,

Shall live but in the memory of time,

Who, like a penitent libertine, shall start,

Look back, and shudder at his younger years.’

VI

All touch, all eye, all ear,

The Spirit felt the Fairy’s burning speech.

O'er the thin texture of its frame

The varying periods painted changing glows,

As on a summer even,

When soul-enfolding music floats around,

The stainless mirror of the lake

Re-images the eastern gloom,

Mingling convulsively its purple hues

With sunset’s burnished gold. 

Then thus the Spirit spoke:

'It is a wild and miserable world!

Thorny, and full of care,

Which every fiend can make his prey at will!

O Fairy! in the lapse of years,

Is there no hope in store?

Will yon vast suns roll on

Interminably, still illuming

The night of so many wretched souls,

And see no hope for them? 

Will not the universal Spirit e'er

Revivify this withered limb of Heaven?’

The Fairy calmly smiled

In comfort, and a kindling gleam of hope

Suffused the Spirit’s lineaments.

'Oh! rest thee tranquil; chase those fearful doubts

Which ne'er could rack an everlasting soul

That sees the chains which bind it to its doom.

Yes! crime and misery are in yonder earth,

Falsehood, mistake and lust; 

But the eternal world

Contains at once the evil and the cure.

Some eminent in virtue shall start up,

Even in perversest time;

The truths of their pure lips, that never die,

Shall bind the scorpion falsehood with a wreath

Of ever-living flame,

Until the monster sting itself to death.

‘How sweet a scene will earth become!

Of purest spirits a pure dwelling-place, 

Symphonious with the planetary spheres;

When man, with changeless Nature coalescing,

Will undertake regeneration’s work,

When its ungenial poles no longer point

To the red and baleful sun

That faintly twinkles there!

‘Spirit, on yonder earth,

Falsehood now triumphs; deadly power

Has fixed its seal upon the lip of truth!

Madness and misery are there! 

The happiest is most wretched! Yet confide

Until pure health-drops from the cup of joy

Fall like a dew of balm upon the world.

Now, to the scene I show, in silence turn,

And read the blood-stained charter of all woe,

Which Nature soon with recreating hand

Will blot in mercy from the book of earth.

How bold the flight of passion’s wandering wing,

How swift the step of reason’s firmer tread,

How calm and sweet the victories of life, 

How terrorless the triumph of the grave!

How powerless were the mightiest monarch’s arm,

Vain his loud threat, and impotent his frown!

How ludicrous the priest’s dogmatic roar!

The weight of his exterminating curse

How light! and his affected charity,

To suit the pressure of the changing times,

What palpable deceit! -but for thy aid,

Religion! but for thee, prolific fiend,

Who peoplest earth with demons, hell with men, 

And heaven with slaves!

‘Thou taintest all thou lookest upon! -the stars,

Which on thy cradle beamed so brightly sweet,

Were gods to the distempered playfulness

Of thy untutored infancy; the trees,

The grass, the clouds, the mountains and the sea,

All living things that walk, swim, creep or fly,

Were gods; the sun had homage, and the moon

Her worshipper. Then thou becamest, a boy,

More daring in thy frenzies; every shape, 

Monstrous or vast, or beautifully wild,

Which from sensation’s relics fancy culls;

The spirits of the air, the shuddering ghost,

The genii of the elements, the powers

That give a shape to Nature’s varied works,

Had life and place in the corrupt belief

Of thy blind heart; yet still thy youthful hands

Were pure of human blood. Then manhood gave

Its strength and ardor to thy frenzied brain;

Thine eager gaze scanned the stupendous scene, 

Whose wonders mocked the knowledge of thy pride;

Their everlasting and unchanging laws

Reproached thine ignorance. Awhile thou stood’st

Baffled and gloomy; then thou didst sum up

The elements of all that thou didst know;

The changing seasons, winter’s leafless reign,

The budding of the heaven-breathing trees,

The eternal orbs that beautify the night,

The sunrise, and the setting of the moon,

Earthquakes and wars, and poisons and disease, 

And all their causes, to an abstract point

Converging thou didst bend, and called it God!

The self-sufficing, the omnipotent,

The merciful, and the avenging God!

Who, prototype of human misrule, sits

High in heaven’s realm, upon a golden throne,

Even like an earthly king; and whose dread work,

Hell, gapes forever for the unhappy slaves

Of fate, whom he created in his sport

To triumph in their torments when they fell! 

Earth heard the name; earth trembled as the smoke

Of his revenge ascended up to heaven,

Blotting the constellations; and the cries

Of millions butchered in sweet confidence

And unsuspecting peace, even when the bonds

Of safety were confirmed by wordy oaths

Sworn in his dreadful name, rung through the land;

Whilst innocent babes writhed on thy stubborn spear,

And thou didst laugh to hear the mother’s shriek

Of maniac gladness, as the sacred steel 

Felt cold in her torn entrails!

‘Religion! thou wert then in manhood’s prime;

But age crept on; one God would not suffice

For senile puerility; thou framedst

A tale to suit thy dotage and to glut

Thy misery-thirsting soul, that the mad fiend

Thy wickedness had pictured might afford

A plea for sating the unnatural thirst

For murder, rapine, violence and crime,

That still consumed thy being, even when 

Thou heard’st the step of fate; that flames might light

Thy funeral scene; and the shrill horrent shrieks

Of parents dying on the pile that burned

To light their children to thy paths, the roar

Of the encircling flames, the exulting cries

Of thine apostles loud commingling there,

Might sate thine hungry ear

Even on the bed of death!

‘But now contempt is mocking thy gray hairs;

Thou art descending to the darksome grave, 

Unhonored and unpitied but by those

Whose pride is passing by like thine, and sheds,

Like thine, a glare that fades before the sun

Of truth, and shines but in the dreadful night

That long has lowered above the ruined world.

‘Throughout these infinite orbs of mingling light

Of which yon earth is one, is wide diffused

A Spirit of activity and life,

That knows no term, cessation or decay;

That fades not when the lamp of earthly life, 

Extinguished in the dampness of the grave,

Awhile there slumbers, more than when the babe

In the dim newness of its being feels

The impulses of sublunary things,

And all is wonder to unpractised sense;

But, active, steadfast and eternal, still

Guides the fierce whirlwind, in the tempest roars,

Cheers in the day, breathes in the balmy groves,

Strengthens in health, and poisons in disease;

And in the storm of change, that ceaselessly 

Rolls round the eternal universe and shakes

Its undecaying battlement, presides,

Apportioning with irresistible law

The place each spring of its machine shall fill;

So that, when waves on waves tumultuous heap

Confusion to the clouds, and fiercely driven

Heaven’s lightnings scorch the uprooted ocean-fords -

Whilst, to the eye of shipwrecked mariner,

Lone sitting on the bare and shuddering rock,

All seems unlinked contingency and chance – 

No atom of this turbulence fulfils

A vague and unnecessitated task

Or acts but as it must and ought to act.

Even the minutest molecule of light,

That in an April sunbeam’s fleeting glow

Fulfils its destined though invisible work,

The universal Spirit guides; nor less

When merciless ambition, or mad zeal,

Has led two hosts of dupes to battle-field,

That, blind, they there may dig each other’s graves 

And call the sad work glory, does it rule

All passions; not a thought, a will, an act,

No working of the tyrant’s moody mind,

Nor one misgiving of the slaves who boast

Their servitude to hide the shame they feel,

Nor the events enchaining every will,

That from the depths of unrecorded time

Have drawn all-influencing virtue, pass

Unrecognized or unforeseen by thee,

Soul of the Universe! eternal spring 

Of life and death, of happiness and woe,

Of all that chequers the phantasmal scene

That floats before our eyes in wavering light,

Which gleams but on the darkness of our prison

Whose chains and massy walls

We feel but cannot see.

‘Spirit of Nature! all-sufficing Power,

Necessity! thou mother of the world!

Unlike the God of human error, thou

Requirest no prayers or praises; the caprice 

Of man’s weak will belongs no more to thee

Than do the changeful passions of his breast

To thy unvarying harmony; the slave,

Whose horrible lusts spread misery o'er the world,

And the good man, who lifts with virtuous pride

His being in the sight of happiness

That springs from his own works; the poison-tree,

Beneath whose shade all life is withered up,

And the fair oak, whose leafy dome affords

A temple where the vows of happy love 

Are registered, are equal in thy sight;

No love, no hate thou cherishest; revenge

And favoritism, and worst desire of fame

Thou knowest not; all that the wide world contains

Are but thy passive instruments, and thou

Regard’st them all with an impartial eye,

Whose joy or pain thy nature cannot feel,

Because thou hast not human sense,

Because thou art not human mind.

‘Yes! when the sweeping storm of time 

Has sung its death-dirge o'er the ruined fanes

And broken altars of the almighty fiend,

Whose name usurps thy honors, and the blood

Through centuries clotted there has floated down

The tainted flood of ages, shalt thou live

Unchangeable! A shrine is raised to thee,

Which nor the tempest breath of time,

Nor the interminable flood

Over earth’s slight pageant rolling,

Availeth to destroy, – 

The sensitive extension of the world;

That wondrous and eternal fane,

Where pain and pleasure, good and evil join,

To do the will of strong necessity,

And life, in multitudinous shapes,

Still pressing forward where no term can be,

Like hungry and unresting flame

Curls round the eternal columns of its strength.’

VII

SPIRIT

‘I was an infant when my mother went

To see an atheist burned. She took me there.

The dark-robed priests were met around the pile;

The multitude was gazing silently;

And as the culprit passed with dauntless mien,

Tempered disdain in his unaltering eye,

Mixed with a quiet smile, shone calmly forth;

The thirsty fire crept round his manly limbs;

His resolute eyes were scorched to blindness soon;

His death-pang rent my heart! the insensate mob 

Uttered a cry of triumph, and I wept.

"Weep not, child!” cried my mother, “for that man

Has said, There is no God."’

FAIRY

‘There is no God!

Nature confirms the faith his death-groan sealed.

Let heaven and earth, let man’s revolving race,

His ceaseless generations, tell their tale;

Let every part depending on the chain

That links it to the whole, point to the hand

That grasps its term! Let every seed that falls

In silent eloquence unfold its store 

Of argument; infinity within,

Infinity without, belie creation;

The exterminable spirit it contains

Is Nature’s only God; but human pride

Is skilful to invent most serious names

To hide its ignorance.

’the name of God

Has fenced about all crime with holiness,

Himself the creature of his worshippers,

Whose names and attributes and passions change,

Seeva, Buddh, Foh, Jehovah, God, or Lord, 

Even with the human dupes who build his shrines,

Still serving o'er the war-polluted world

For desolation’s watchword; whether hosts

Stain his death-blushing chariot-wheels, as on

Triumphantly they roll, whilst Brahmins raise

A sacred hymn to mingle with the groans;

Or countless partners of his power divide

His tyranny to weakness; or the smoke

Of burning towns, the cries of female helplessness,

Unarmed old age, and youth, and infancy, 

Horribly massacred, ascend to heaven

In honor of his name; or, last and worst,

Earth groans beneath religion’s iron age,

And priests dare babble of a God of peace,

Even whilst their hands are red with guiltless blood,

Murdering the while, uprooting every germ

Of truth, exterminating, spoiling all,

Making the earth a slaughter-house!

‘O Spirit! through the sense

By which thy inner nature was apprised 

Of outward shows, vague dreams have rolled,

And varied reminiscences have waked

Tablets that never fade;

All things have been imprinted there,

The stars, the sea, the earth, the sky,

Even the unshapeliest lineaments

Of wild and fleeting visions

Have left a record there

To testify of earth.

‘These are my empire, for to me is given 

The wonders of the human world to keep,

And fancy’s thin creations to endow

With manner, being and reality;

Therefore a wondrous phantom from the dreams

Of human error’s dense and purblind faith

I will evoke, to meet thy questioning.

Ahasuerus, rise!’

A strange and woe-worn wight

Arose beside the battlement,

And stood unmoving there. 

His inessential figure cast no shade

Upon the golden floor;

His port and mien bore mark of many years,

And chronicles of untold ancientness

Were legible within his beamless eye;

Yet his cheek bore the mark of youth;

Freshness and vigor knit his manly frame;

The wisdom of old age was mingled there

With youth’s primeval dauntlessness;

And inexpressible woe, 

Chastened by fearless resignation, gave

An awful grace to his all-speaking brow.

SPIRIT

‘Is there a God?’

AHASUERUS

‘Is there a God! -ay, an almighty God,

And vengeful as almighty! Once his voice

Was heard on earth; earth shuddered at the sound;

The fiery-visaged firmament expressed

Abhorrence, and the grave of Nature yawned

To swallow all the dauntless and the good

That dared to hurl defiance at his throne, 

Girt as it was with power. None but slaves

Survived, -cold-blooded slaves, who did the work

Of tyrannous omnipotence; whose souls

No honest indignation ever urged

To elevated daring, to one deed

Which gross and sensual self did not pollute.

These slaves built temples for the omnipotent fiend,

Gorgeous and vast; the costly altars smoked

With human blood, and hideous pæans rung

Through all the long-drawn aisles. A murderer heard 

His voice in Egypt, one whose gifts and arts

Had raised him to his eminence in power,

Accomplice of omnipotence in crime

And confidant of the all-knowing one.

These were Jehovah’s words.

‘"From an eternity of idleness

I, God, awoke; in seven days’ toil made earth

From nothing; rested, and created man;

I placed him in a paradise, and there

Planted the tree of evil, so that he 

Might eat and perish, and my soul procure

Wherewith to sate its malice and to turn,

Even like a heartless conqueror of the earth,

All misery to my fame. The race of men,

Chosen to my honor, with impunity

May sate the lusts I planted in their heart.

Here I command thee hence to lead them on,

Until with hardened feet their conquering troops

Wade on the promised soil through woman’s blood,

And make my name be dreaded through the land. 

Yet ever-burning flame and ceaseless woe

Shall be the doom of their eternal souls,

With every soul on this ungrateful earth,

Virtuous or vicious, weak or strong, -even all

Shall perish, to fulfil the blind revenge

(Which you, to men, call justice) of their God.”

‘The murderer’s brow

Quivered with horror.

‘"God omnipotent,

Is there no mercy? must our punishment

Be endless? will long ages roll away, 

And see no term? Oh! wherefore hast thou made

In mockery and wrath this evil earth?

Mercy becomes the powerful -be but just!

O God! repent and save!”

‘"One way remains:

I will beget a son and he shall bear

The sins of all the world; he shall arise

In an unnoticed corner of the earth,

And there shall die upon a cross, and purge

The universal crime; so that the few

On whom my grace descends, those who are marked 

As vessels to the honor of their God,

May credit this strange sacrifice and save

Their souls alive. Millions shall live and die,

Who ne'er shall call upon their Saviour’s name,

But, unredeemed, go to the gaping grave,

Thousands shall deem it an old woman’s tale,

Such as the nurses frighten babes withal;

These in a gulf of anguish and of flame

Shall curse their reprobation endlessly,

Yet tenfold pangs shall force them to avow, 

Even on their beds of torment where they howl,

My honor and the justice of their doom.

What then avail their virtuous deeds, their thoughts

Of purity, with radiant genius bright

Or lit with human reason’s earthly ray?

Many are called, but few will I elect.

Do thou my bidding, Moses!”

‘Even the murderer’s cheek

Was blanched with horror, and his quivering lips

Scarce faintly uttered -"O almighty one,

I tremble and obey!”

‘O Spirit! centuries have set their seal

On this heart of many wounds, and loaded brain,

Since the Incarnate came; humbly he came,

Veiling his horrible Godhead in the shape

Of man, scorned by the world, his name unheard

Save by the rabble of his native town,

Even as a parish demagogue. He led

The crowd; he taught them justice, truth and peace,

In semblance; but he lit within their souls

The quenchless flames of zeal, and blessed the sword 

He brought on earth to satiate with the blood

Of truth and freedom his malignant soul

At length his mortal frame was led to death.

I stood beside him; on the torturing cross

No pain assailed his unterrestrial sense;

And yet he groaned. Indignantly I summed

The massacres and miseries which his name

Had sanctioned in my country, and I cried,

"Go! go!” in mockery.

A smile of godlike malice reillumined 

His fading lineaments. “I go,” he cried,

"But thou shalt wander o'er the unquiet earth

Eternally.” The dampness of the grave

Bathed my imperishable front. I fell,

And long lay tranced upon the charmèd soil.

When I awoke hell burned within my brain

Which staggered on its seat; for all around

The mouldering relics of my kindred lay,

Even as the Almighty’s ire arrested them,

And in their various attitudes of death 

My murdered children’s mute and eyeless skulls

Glared ghastily upon me.

But my soul,

From sight and sense of the polluting woe

Of tyranny, had long learned to prefer

Hell’s freedom to the servitude of heaven.

Therefore I rose, and dauntlessly began

My lonely and unending pilgrimage,

Resolved to wage unweariable war

With my almighty tyrant and to hurl

Defiance at his impotence to harm 

Beyond the curse I bore. The very hand,

That barred my passage to the peaceful grave,

Has crushed the earth to misery, and given

Its empire to the chosen of his slaves.

These I have seen, even from the earliest dawn

Of weak, unstable and precarious power,

Then preaching peace, as now they practise war;

So, when they turned but from the massacre

Of unoffending infidels to quench

Their thirst for ruin in the very blood 

That flowed in their own veins, and pitiless zeal

Froze every human feeling as the wife

Sheathed in her husband’s heart the sacred steel,

Even whilst its hopes were dreaming of her love;

And friends to friends, brothers to brothers stood

Opposed in bloodiest battle-field, and war,

Scarce satiable by fate’s last death-draught, waged,

Drunk from the wine-press of the Almighty’s wrath;

Whilst the red cross, in mockery of peace,

Pointed to victory! When the fray was done, 

No remnant of the exterminated faith

Survived to tell its ruin, but the flesh,

With putrid smoke poisoning the atmosphere,

That rotted on the half-extinguished pile.

‘Yes! I have seen God’s worshippers unsheathe

The sword of his revenge, when grace descended,

Confirming all unnatural impulses,

To sanctify their desolating deeds;

And frantic priests waved the ill-omened cross

O'er the unhappy earth; then shone the sun 

On showers of gore from the upflashing steel

Of safe assassination, and all crime

Made stingless by the spirits of the Lord,

And blood-red rainbows canopied the land.

‘Spirit! no year of my eventful being

Has passed unstained by crime and misery,

Which flows from God’s own faith. I ‘ve marked his slaves

With tongues, whose lies are venomous, beguile

The insensate mob, and, whilst one hand was red

With murder, feign to stretch the other out 

For brotherhood and peace; and that they now

Babble of love and mercy, whilst their deeds

Are marked with all the narrowness and crime

That freedom’s young arm dare not yet chastise,

Reason may claim our gratitude, who now,

Establishing the imperishable throne

Of truth and stubborn virtue, maketh vain

The unprevailing malice of my foe,

Whose bootless rage heaps torments for the brave,

Adds impotent eternities to pain, 

Whilst keenest disappointment racks his breast

To see the smiles of peace around them play,

To frustrate or to sanctify their doom.

‘Thus have I stood, -through a wild waste of years

Struggling with whirlwinds of mad agony,

Yet peaceful, and serene, and self-enshrined,

Mocking my powerless tyrant’s horrible curse

With stubborn and unalterable will,

Even as a giant oak, which heaven’s fierce flame

Had scathèd in the wilderness, to stand 

A monument of fadeless ruin there;

Yet peacefully and movelessly it braves

The midnight conflict of the wintry storm,

As in the sunlight’s calm it spreads

Its worn and withered arms on high

To meet the quiet of a summer’s noon.’

The Fairy waved her wand;

Ahasuerus fled

Fast as the shapes of mingled shade and mist,

That lurk in the glens of a twilight grove, 

Flee from the morning beam; -

The matter of which dreams are made

Not more endowed with actual life

Than this phantasmal portraiture

Of wandering human thought.

VIII

THE FAIRY

‘The present and the past thou hast beheld.

It was a desolate sight. Now, Spirit, learn,

The secrets of the future. -Time!

Unfold the brooding pinion of thy gloom,

Render thou up thy half-devoured babes,

And from the cradles of eternity,

Where millions lie lulled to their portioned sleep

By the deep murmuring stream of passing things,

Tear thou that gloomy shroud. -Spirit, behold

Thy glorious destiny!’

Joy to the Spirit came.

Through the wide rent in Time’s eternal veil,

Hope was seen beaming through the mists of fear;

Earth was no longer hell;

Love, freedom, health had given

Their ripeness to the manhood of its prime,

And all its pulses beat

Symphonious to the planetary spheres;

Then dulcet music swelled

Concordant with the life-strings of the soul; 

It throbbed in sweet and languid beatings there,

Catching new life from transitory death;

Like the vague sighings of a wind at even

That wakes the wavelets of the slumbering sea

And dies on the creation of its breath,

And sinks and rises, falls and swells by fits,

Was the pure stream of feeling

That sprung from these sweet notes,

And o'er the Spirit’s human sympathies

With mild and gentle motion calmly flowed.

Joy to the Spirit came, -

Such joy as when a lover sees

The chosen of his soul in happiness

And witnesses her peace

Whose woe to him were bitterer than death;

Sees her unfaded cheek

Glow mantling in first luxury of health,

Thrills with her lovely eyes,

Which like two stars amid the heaving main

Sparkle through liquid bliss.

Then in her triumph spoke the Fairy Queen:

'I will not call the ghost of ages gone

To unfold the frightful secrets of its lore;

The present now is past,

And those events that desolate the earth

Have faded from the memory of Time,

Who dares not give reality to that

Whose being I annul. To me is given

The wonders of the human world to keep,

Space, matter, time and mind. Futurity 

Exposes now its treasure; let the sight

Renew and strengthen all thy failing hope.

O human Spirit! spur thee to the goal

Where virtue fixes universal peace,

And, ‘midst the ebb and flow of human things,

Show somewhat stable, somewhat certain still,

A light-house o'er the wild of dreary waves.

‘The habitable earth is full of bliss;

Those wastes of frozen billows that were hurled

By everlasting snow-storms round the poles, 

Where matter dared not vegetate or live,

But ceaseless frost round the vast solitude

Bound its broad zone of stillness, are unloosed;

And fragrant zephyrs there from spicy isles

Ruffle the placid ocean-deep, that rolls

Its broad, bright surges to the sloping sand,

Whose roar is wakened into echoings sweet

To murmur through the heaven-breathing groves

And melodize with man’s blest nature there.

‘Those deserts of immeasurable sand, 

Whose age-collected fervors scarce allowed

A bird to live, a blade of grass to spring,

Where the shrill chirp of the green lizard’s love

Broke on the sultry silentness alone,

Now teem with countless rills and shady woods,

Cornfields and pastures and white cottages;

And where the startled wilderness beheld

A savage conqueror stained in kindred blood,

A tigress sating with the flesh of lambs

The unnatural famine of her toothless cubs, 

Whilst shouts and howlings through the desert rang, -

Sloping and smooth the daisy-spangled lawn,

Offering sweet incense to the sunrise, smiles

To see a babe before his mother’s door,

Sharing his morning’s meal

With the green and golden basilisk

That comes to lick his feet.

‘Those trackless deeps, where many a weary sail

Has seen above the illimitable plain

Morning on night and night on morning rise, 

Whilst still no land to greet the wanderer spread

Its shadowy mountains on the sun-bright sea,

Where the loud roarings of the tempest-waves

So long have mingled with the gusty wind

In melancholy loneliness, and swept

The desert of those ocean solitudes

But vocal to the sea-bird’s harrowing shriek,

The bellowing monster, and the rushing storm;

Now to the sweet and many-mingling sounds

Of kindliest human impulses respond. 

Those lonely realms bright garden-isles begem,

With lightsome clouds and shining seas between,

And fertile valleys, resonant with bliss,

Whilst green woods overcanopy the wave,

Which like a toil-worn laborer leaps to shore

To meet the kisses of the flowrets there.

‘All things are recreated, and the flame

Of consentaneous love inspires all life.

The fertile bosom of the earth gives suck

To myriads, who still grow beneath her care, 

Rewarding her with their pure perfectness;

The balmy breathings of the wind inhale

Her virtues and diffuse them all abroad;

Health floats amid the gentle atmosphere,

Glows in the fruits and mantles on the stream;

No storms deform the beaming brow of heaven,

Nor scatter in the freshness of its pride

The foliage of the ever-verdant trees;

But fruits are ever ripe, flowers ever fair,

And autumn proudly bears her matron grace, 

Kindling a flush on the fair cheek of spring,

Whose virgin bloom beneath the ruddy fruit

Reflects its tint and blushes into love.

‘The lion now forgets to thirst for blood;

There might you see him sporting in the sun

Beside the dreadless kid; his claws are sheathed,

His teeth are harmless, custom’s force has made

His nature as the nature of a lamb.

Like passion’s fruit, the nightshade’s tempting bane

Poisons no more the pleasure it bestows; 

All bitterness is past; the cup of joy

Unmingled mantles to the goblet’s brim

And courts the thirsty lips it fled before.

But chief, ambiguous man, he that can know

More misery, and dream more joy than all;

Whose keen sensations thrill within his breast

To mingle with a loftier instinct there,

Lending their power to pleasure and to pain,

Yet raising, sharpening, and refining each;

Who stands amid the ever-varying world, 

The burden or the glory of the earth;

He chief perceives the change; his being notes

The gradual renovation and defines

Each movement of its progress on his mind.

‘Man, where the gloom of the long polar night

Lowers o'er the snow-clad rocks and frozen soil,

Where scarce the hardiest herb that braves the frost

Basks in the moonlight’s ineffectual glow,

Shrank with the plants, and darkened with the night;

His chilled and narrow energies, his heart 

Insensible to courage, truth or love,

His stunted stature and imbecile frame,

Marked him for some abortion of the earth,

Fit compeer of the bears that roamed around,

Whose habits and enjoyments were his own;

His life a feverish dream of stagnant woe,

Whose meagre wants, but scantily fulfilled,

Apprised him ever of the joyless length

Which his short being’s wretchedness had reached;

His death a pang which famine, cold and toil 

Long on the mind, whilst yet the vital spark

Clung to the body stubbornly, had brought:

All was inflicted here that earth’s revenge

Could wreak on the infringers of her law;

One curse alone was spared -the name of God.

‘Nor, where the tropics bound the realms of day

With a broad belt of mingling cloud and flame,

Where blue mists through the unmoving atmosphere

Scattered the seeds of pestilence and fed

Unnatural vegetation, where the land 

Teemed with all earthquake, tempest and disease,

Was man a nobler being; slavery

Had crushed him to his country’s blood-stained dust;

Or he was bartered for the fame of power,

Which, all internal impulses destroying,

Makes human will an article of trade;

Or he was changed with Christians for their gold

And dragged to distant isles, where to the sound

Of the flesh-mangling scourge he does the work

Of all-polluting luxury and wealth, 

Which doubly visits on the tyrants’ heads

The long-protracted fulness of their woe;

Or he was led to legal butchery,

To turn to worms beneath that burning sun

Where kings first leagued against the rights of men

And priests first traded with the name of God.

‘Even where the milder zone afforded man

A seeming shelter, yet contagion there,

Blighting his being with unnumbered ills,

Spread like a quenchless fire; nor truth till late 

Availed to arrest its progress or create

That peace which first in bloodless victory waved

Her snowy standard o'er this favored clime;

There man was long the train-bearer of slaves,

The mimic of surrounding misery,

The jackal of ambition’s lion-rage,

The bloodhound of religion’s hungry zeal.

‘Here now the human being stands adorning

This loveliest earth with taintless body and mind;

Blest from his birth with all bland impulses, 

Which gently in his noble bosom wake

All kindly passions and all pure desires.

Him, still from hope to hope the bliss pursuing

Which from the exhaustless store of human weal

Draws on the virtuous mind, the thoughts that rise

In time-destroying infiniteness gift

With self-enshrined eternity, that mocks

The unprevailing hoariness of age;

And man, once fleeting o'er the transient scene

Swift as an unremembered vision, stands 

Immortal upon earth; no longer now

He slays the lamb that looks him in the face,

And horribly devours his mangled flesh,

Which, still avenging Nature’s broken law,

Kindled all putrid humors in his frame,

All evil passions and all vain belief,

Hatred, despair and loathing in his mind,

The germs of misery, death, disease and crime.

No longer now the wingèd habitants,

That in the woods their sweet lives sing away, 

Flee from the form of man; but gather round,

And prune their sunny feathers on the hands

Which little children stretch in friendly sport

Towards these dreadless partners of their play.

All things are void of terror; man has lost

His terrible prerogative, and stands

An equal amidst equals; happiness

And science dawn, though late, upon the earth;

Peace cheers the mind, health renovates the frame;

Disease and pleasure cease to mingle here, 

Reason and passion cease to combat there;

Whilst each unfettered o'er the earth extend

Their all-subduing energies, and wield

The sceptre of a vast dominion there;

Whilst every shape and mode of matter lends

Its force to the omnipotence of mind,

Which from its dark mine drags the gem of truth

To decorate its paradise of peace.’

IX

‘O happy Earth, reality of Heaven!

To which those restless souls that ceaselessly

Throng through the human universe, aspire!

Thou consummation of all mortal hope!

Thou glorious prize of blindly working will,

Whose rays, diffused throughout all space and time,

Verge to one point and blend forever there!

Of purest spirits thou pure dwelling-place

Where care and sorrow, impotence and crime,

Languor, disease and ignorance dare not come! 

O happy Earth, reality of Heaven!

‘Genius has seen thee in her passionate dreams;

And dim forebodings of thy loveliness,

Haunting the human heart, have there entwined

Those rooted hopes of some sweet place of bliss,

Where friends and lovers meet to part no more.

Thou art the end of all desire and will,

The product of all action; and the souls,

That by the paths of an aspiring change

Have reached thy haven of perpetual peace, 

There rest from the eternity of toil

That framed the fabric of thy perfectness.

‘Even Time, the conqueror, fled thee in his fear;

That hoary giant, who in lonely pride

So long had ruled the world that nations fell

Beneath his silent footstep. Pyramids,

That for millenniums had withstood the tide

Of human things, his storm-breath drove in sand

Across that desert where their stones survived

The name of him whose pride had heaped them there. 

Yon monarch, in his solitary pomp,

Was but the mushroom of a summer day,

That his light-wingèd footstep pressed to dust;

Time was the king of earth; all things gave way

Before him but the fixed and virtuous will,

The sacred sympathies of soul and sense,

That mocked his fury and prepared his fall.

‘Yet slow and gradual dawned the morn of love;

Long lay the clouds of darkness o'er the scene,

Till from its native heaven they rolled away: 

First, crime triumphant o'er all hope careered

Unblushing, undisguising, bold and strong,

Whilst falsehood, tricked in virtue’s attributes,

Long sanctified all deeds of vice and woe,

Till, done by her own venomous sting to death,

She left the moral world without a law,

No longer fettering passion’s fearless wing,

Nor searing reason with the brand of God.

Then steadily the happy ferment worked;

Reason was free; and wild though passion went 

Through tangled glens and wood-embosomed meads,

Gathering a garland of the strangest flowers,

Yet, like the bee returning to her queen,

She bound the sweetest on her sister’s brow,

Who meek and sober kissed the sportive child,

No longer trembling at the broken rod.

‘Mild was the slow necessity of death.

The tranquil spirit failed beneath its grasp,

Without a groan, almost without a fear,

Calm as a voyager to some distant land, 

And full of wonder, full of hope as he.

The deadly germs of languor and disease

Died in the human frame, and purity

Blessed with all gifts her earthly worshippers.

How vigorous then the athletic form of age!

How clear its open and unwrinkled brow!

Where neither avarice, cunning, pride or care

Had stamped the seal of gray deformity

On all the mingling lineaments of time.

How lovely the intrepid front of youth, 

Which meek-eyed courage decked with freshest grace;

Courage of soul, that dreaded not a name,

And elevated will, that journeyed on

Through life’s phantasmal scene in fearlessness,

With virtue, love and pleasure, hand in hand!

‘Then, that sweet bondage which is freedom’s self,

And rivets with sensation’s softest tie

The kindred sympathies of human souls,

Needed no fetters of tyrannic law.

Those delicate and timid impulses 

In Nature’s primal modesty arose,

And with undoubting confidence disclosed

The growing longings of its dawning love,

Unchecked by dull and selfish chastity,

That virtue of the cheaply virtuous,

Who pride themselves in senselessness and frost.

No longer prostitution’s venomed bane

Poisoned the springs of happiness and life;

Woman and man, in confidence and love,

Equal and free and pure together trod 

The mountain-paths of virtue, which no more

Were stained with blood from many a pilgrim’s feet.

‘Then, where, through distant ages, long in pride

The palace of the monarch-slave had mocked

Famine’s faint groan and penury’s silent tear,

A heap of crumbling ruins stood, and threw

Year after year their stones upon the field,

Wakening a lonely echo; and the leaves

Of the old thorn, that on the topmost tower

Usurped the royal ensign’s grandeur, shook 

In the stern storm that swayed the topmost tower,

And whispered strange tales in the whirlwind’s ear.

‘Low through the lone cathedral’s roofless aisles

The melancholy winds a death-dirge sung.

It were a sight of awfulness to see

The works of faith and slavery, so vast,

So sumptuous, yet so perishing withal,

Even as the corpse that rests beneath its wall!

A thousand mourners deck the pomp of death

To-day, the breathing marble glows above 

To decorate its memory, and tongues

Are busy of its life; to-morrow, worms

In silence and in darkness seize their prey.

‘Within the massy prison’s mouldering courts,

Fearless and free the ruddy children played,

Weaving gay chaplets for their innocent brows

With the green ivy and the red wall-flower

That mock the dungeon’s unavailing gloom;

The ponderous chains and gratings of strong iron

There rusted amid heaps of broken stone 

That mingled slowly with their native earth;

There the broad beam of day, which feebly once

Lighted the cheek of lean captivity

With a pale and sickly glare, then freely shone

On the pure smiles of infant playfulness;

No more the shuddering voice of hoarse despair

Pealed through the echoing vaults, but soothing notes

Of ivy-fingered winds and gladsome birds

And merriment were resonant around.

‘These ruins soon left not a wreck behind; 

Their elements, wide-scattered o'er the globe,

To happier shapes were moulded, and became

Ministrant to all blissful impulses;

Thus human things were perfected, and earth,

Even as a child beneath its mother’s love,

Was strengthened in all excellence, and grew

Fairer and nobler with each passing year.

‘Now Time his dusky pennons o'er the scene

Closes in steadfast darkness, and the past

Fades from our charmèd sight. My task is done; 

Thy lore is learned. Earth’s wonders are thine own

With all the fear and all the hope they bring.

My spells are passed; the present now recurs.

Ah me! a pathless wilderness remains

Yet unsubdued by man’s reclaiming hand.

‘Yet, human Spirit! bravely hold thy course;

Let virtue teach thee firmly to pursue

The gradual paths of an aspiring change;

For birth and life and death, and that strange state

Before the naked soul has found its home, 

All tend to perfect happiness, and urge

The restless wheels of being on their way,

Whose flashing spokes, instinct with infinite life,

Bicker and burn to gain their destined goal;

For birth but wakes the spirit to the sense

Of outward shows, whose unexperienced shape

New modes of passion to its frame may lend;

Life is its state of action, and the store

Of all events is aggregated there

That variegate the eternal universe; 

Death is a gate of dreariness and gloom,

That leads to azure isles and beaming skies

And happy regions of eternal hope.

Therefore, O Spirit! fearlessly bear on.

Though storms may break the primrose on its stalk,

Though frosts may blight the freshness of its bloom,

Yet spring’s awakening breath will woo the earth

To feed with kindliest dews its favorite flower,

That blooms in mossy bank and darksome glens,

Lighting the greenwood with its sunny smile.

‘Fear not then, Spirit, death’s disrobing hand,

So welcome when the tyrant is awake,

So welcome when the bigot’s hell-torch burns;

’t is but the voyage of a darksome hour,

The transient gulf-dream of a startling sleep.

Death is no foe to virtue; earth has seen

Love’s brightest roses on the scaffold bloom,

Mingling with freedom’s fadeless laurels there,

And presaging the truth of visioned bliss.

Are there not hopes within thee, which this scene 

Of linked and gradual being has confirmed?

Whose stingings bade thy heart look further still,

When, to the moonlight walk by Henry led,

Sweetly and sadly thou didst talk of death?

And wilt thou rudely tear them from thy breast,

Listening supinely to a bigot’s creed,

Or tamely crouching to the tyrant’s rod,

Whose iron thongs are red with human gore?

Never: but bravely bearing on, thy will

Is destined an eternal war to wage 

With tyranny and falsehood, and uproot

The germs of misery from the human heart.

Thine is the hand whose piety would soothe

The thorny pillow of unhappy crime,

Whose impotence an easy pardon gains,

Watching its wanderings as a friend’s disease;

Thine is the brow whose mildness would defy

Its fiercest rage, and brave its sternest will,

When fenced by power and master of the world.

Thou art sincere and good; of resolute mind, 

Free from heart-withering custom’s cold control,

Of passion lofty, pure and unsubdued.

Earth’s pride and meanness could not vanquish thee,

And therefore art thou worthy of the boon

Which thou hast now received; virtue shall keep

Thy footsteps in the path that thou hast trod,

And many days of beaming hope shall bless

Thy spotless life of sweet and sacred love.

Go, happy one, and give that bosom joy,

Whose sleepless spirit waits to catch 

Light, life and rapture from thy smile!’

The Fairy waves her wand of charm.

Speechless with bliss the Spirit mounts the car,

That rolled beside the battlement,

Bending her beamy eyes in thankfulness.

Again the enchanted steeds were yoked;

Again the burning wheels inflame

The steep descent of heaven’s untrodden way.

Fast and far the chariot flew;

The vast and fiery globes that rolled 

Around the Fairy’s palace-gate

Lessened by slow degrees, and soon appeared

Such tiny twinklers as the planet orbs

That there attendant on the solar power

With borrowed light pursued their narrower way.

Earth floated then below;

The chariot paused a moment there;

The Spirit then descended;

The restless coursers pawed the ungenial soil,

Snuffed the gross air, and then, their errand done, 

Unfurled their pinions to the winds of heaven.

The Body and the Soul united then.

A gentle start convulsed Ianthe’s frame;

Her veiny eyelids quietly unclosed;

Moveless awhile the dark blue orbs remained.

She looked around in wonder, and beheld

Henry, who kneeled in silence by her couch,

Watching her sleep with looks of speechless love,

And the bright beaming stars

That through the casement shone.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

"Can Man be free, if Woman be a slave...?"

 “The true difference between Byron and Shelley consists in this, that those who understand and love them consider it fortunate that Byron died in his thirty-sixth year, for he would have become a reactionary bourgeois had he lived longer; 

conversely, they regret Shelley’s death at the age of twenty-nine, because he was a revolutionary through and through and would consistently have stood with the vanguard of socialism.”  

- Karl Marx

Paul Foot on Percy Bysshe Shelley from Spike EP on Vimeo.

DECLARATION OF RIGHTS.
1

GOVERNMENT has no rights; it is a delegation from several individuals for the purpose of securing their own. It is therefore just, only so far as it exists by their consent, useful only so far as it operates to their well-being.

2

IF these individuals think that the form of government which they, or their forefathers constituted is ill adapted to produce their happiness, they have a right to change it.

3

Governmnent is devised for the security of rights. The rights of man are liberty, and all equal participation of the commonage of nature.

4

As the benefit of the governed, is, or ought to be the origin of government, no men can have any authority that does not expressly emanate from their will.

5

Though all governments are not so bad as that of Turkey, yet none are so good as they might be; the majority of every country have a right to perfect their government, the minority should not disturb them, they ought to secede, and form their own system in their own way.

6

All have a right to an equal share in the benefits, and burdens of Government. Any disabilities for opinion, imply by their existence, barefaced tyranny on the side of government, ignorant slavishness on the side of the governed.

7

The rights of man in the present state of society, are only to be secured by some degree of coercion to be exercised on their violator. The sufferer has a right that the degree of coercion employed be as slight as possible.

8

It may be considered as a plain proof of the hollowness of any proposition, if power be used to enforce instead of reason to persuade its admission. Government is never supported by fraud until it cannot be supported by reason.

9

No man has a right to disturb the public peace, by personally resisting the execution of a law however bad. He ought to acquiesce, using at the same time the utmost powers of his reason, to promote its repeal.

10

A man must have a right to act in a certain manner before it can be his duty. He may, before he ought.

11

A man has a right to think as his reason directs, it is a duty he owes to himself to think with freedom, that he may act from conviction.

12

A man has a right to unrestricted liberty of discussion, falsehood is a scorpion that will sting itself to death.

13

A man has not only a right to express his thoughts, but it is his duty to do so.

14

No law has a right to discourage the practice of truth. A man ought to speak the truth on every occasion, a duty can never be criminal, what is not criminal cannot be injurious.

15

Law cannot make what is in its nature virtuous or innocent, to be criminal, any more than it can make what is criminal to be innocent. Government cannot make a law, it can only pronounce that which was the law before its organisation, viz. the moral result of the imperishable relations of things.

16

The present generation cannot bind their posterity. The few cannot promise for the many.

17

No man has a right to do an evil thing that good may come.

18

Expediency is inadmissible in morals. Politics are only sound when conducted on principles of morality. They are, in fact, the morals of nations.

19

Man has no right to kill his brother, it is no excuse that he does so in uniform. He only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder.

20

Man, whatever be his country, has the same rights in one place as another, the rights of universal citizenship.

21

The government of a country ought to be perfectly indifferent to every opinion. Religious differences, the bloodiest and most rancorous of all, spring from partiality.

22

A delegation of individuals, for the purpose of securing their rights, can have no undelegated power of restraining the expression of their opinion.

23

Belief is involuntary; nothing involuntary is meritorious or reprehensible. A man ought not to be considered worse or better for his belief.

24

A Christian, a Deist, a Turk, and a Jew, have equal rights: they are men and brethren.

25

If a person's religious ideas correspond not with your own, love him nevertheless. How different would yours have been, had the chance of birth placed you in Tartary or India!

26

Those who believe that Heaven is, what earth has been, a monopoly in the hands of a favored few, would do well to reconsider their opinion: if they find that it came from their priest or their grandmother, they could not do better than reject it.

27

No man has a right to be respected for any other possessions, but those of virtue and talents. Titles are tinsel, power a corruptor, glory a bubble, and excessive wealth, a libel on its possessor.

28

No man has a right to monopolize more than he can enjoy; what the rich give to the poor, whilst millions are starving, is not a perfect favour, but an imperfect right.

29

Every man has a right to a certain degree of leisure and liberty, because it is his duty to attain a certain degree of knowledge. He may before he ought.

30

Sobriety of body and mind is necessary to those who would be free, because, without sobriety a high sense of philanthropy cannot actuate the heart, nor cool and determined courage, execute its dictates.

31

The only use of government is to repress the vices of man. If man were to day sinless, to-morrow he would have a right to demand that government and all its evils should cease.

---

Man! thou whose rights are here declared, be no longer forgetful of the loftiness of thy destination. Think of thy rights; of those possessions which will give thee virtue and wisdom, by which thou mayest arrive at happiness and freedom. They are decimated to thee by one who knows thy dignity, for every hour does his heart swell with honorable pride in the contemplation of what thou mayest attain, by one who is not forgetful of thy degeneracy, for every moment brings home to him the bitter conviction of what thou art.

Awake!-arise!-or be for ever fallen.

---

Forman's Editorial Preface: In addition to the two Irish pamphlets, Shelley appears to have got printed in Dublin the broadside entitled Declaration of Rights, which afterwords led to the imprisonment of his Irish servant Daniel Hill (or Healy) for uttering the same without an imprint. Although this curious document was reprinted by Richard Carlile in The Republican for the 24th of September, 1819, and figures in Lowndes's Bibliographers's Manual (Bohn's Edition, p. 2374) as having occurred in a certain copy of Queen Mab not now forthcoming, it remained for Mr. Rossetti to place it before the present generation of Shelley's readers in an article contributed to The Fortnightly Review for January, 1871, entitled "Shelley in 1812-13." Mr. Rossetti (p. 71) points out the resemblances between this Declaration and two such Documents of the French Revolution, "the one adopted by the Consituent Assembly in August, 1789, and the other proposed in April, 1793, by Robespierre." Mr. MacCarthy (Shelley's Early Life, p. 323) calls attention to the recurrence, in the Declaration of Rights, of certain thoughts and phrases from the Proposals for an Association. For a concise account of Shelley's proceeding's at Barnstaple with this hand-bill, see p. 37 of the memoir prefixed to Vol. I. of Mr. Rossetti's last edition of Shelley's Poetical Works (3 vols. 1878). The Declaration is a roughly printed affair,—a single leaf measuring 14[and]7/8 inches by 8[and]15/16 inches. There are two copies preserved in the Public Record Office; and Lord Carlingford has the copy sent officially to Mr. (afterwards Sir Francis) Feeling, Secretary of the Post Office, by the Post Office Agent at Holyhead, under circumstances fully detailed by Mr. MacCarthy (Shelley's Early Life, pp. 309 et seq.). By his Lordship's courtesy, the text is here given from that copy.—H.B.F.

Edward and Eleanor Marx-Aveling 1888

Shelley and Socialism

---

Source: “Shelley and Socialism,” by Edward and Eleanor Marx-Aveling, To-Day, April 1888, pp. 103-116;
Transcribed: by Ted Crawford.

---

Part I.

All references are to the Second Edition of Shelley’s Poetical Works, edited by H. Buxton Forman (Reeves and Turner, 1886); to Professor Dowden’s Life of Shelley, (Kegan Paul and Co., 1886), or to Dr. Garnet’s “Letters,” Parchment Series (Kegan Paul and Co)

This paper is, in the first place, an attempt at the treatment of an important subject on the plan that seems to its writers the one most likely to lead to results at once accurate and fruitful. That plan is based upon the co-operation of a man and a woman, whose sympathies are kindred, but whose points of view and methods of looking at facts are as different as are the positions of the two sexes to-day, even in the most favourable conditions, under the compulsion of our artificial and unhealthy society.

The question to be considered is not whether Socialism is right or wrong, but whether Shelley was or was not a Socialist; and it may not be unfair to contend, that if it can be shown that Shelley was a Socialist, a prima facia case, at least, is in the judgment of every Shelley lover made out in favour of Socialism.

That the question at issue may be clearly understood, let us state in the briefest possible way what Socialism means to some of us. (1) That there are inequality and misery in the world; (2) that this social inequality, this misery of the many and this happiness of the few are the necessary outcome of our social conditions; (3) that the essence of these social conditions is that the mass of the people, the working class, produce and distribute all commodities, while the minority of the people, the middle and upper class possess these commodities; (4) that this initial tyranny of the possessing class over the producing class is based on the present wage-system, and now maintains all other forms of oppression, such as that of monarchy or clerical rule, or police despotism; (5) that this tyranny of the few over the many is only possible because the few have obtained possession of the land, the raw materials, the machinery, the banks, the railways, in a word, of all the means of production and distribution of commodities, and have, as a class, obtained possession of these by no superior virtue, effort or self-denial, but by either force or fraud (6) lastly, that the approaching change in “civilised” society will be a revolution, or in the words of Shelley “the system of human society as it exists at present must be overthrown from the foundations.” ^[a] The two classes at present existing will be replaced be a single class consisting of the whole of the healthy and sane members of the community, possessing all the means of production and distribution in common, and working in common for the production and distribution of commodities.

Again let us say that we are not now concerned with the accuracy or inaccuracy of these principles. But we are concerned with the question whether they were, or were not, held by Shelley. If he enunciated views such as these, or even approximating to these, it is clear that we must admit that Shelley was a teacher as well as a poet. The large and interesting question whether a poet has or has not a right to be didactic as well as merely descriptive, analytical, musical, cannot be entered upon here. In passing we may note that poets have a habit of doing things whether they have the right or not.

For the purpose of our study the following plan is suggested. I. A note or two on Shelley himself and his own personality, as bearing on his relations to Socialism. II. On those, who, in this connection had most influence upon his thinking. III. His attacks on tyranny, and his singing for liberty, in the abstract. IV. And in the concrete. V. His clear perception of the class struggle. VI. His insight into the real meaning of such words as “freedom,'’ “justice,” “crime,” “labour,” “property,” to-day. VII. His practical, his exceedingly practical nature in respect to the remedies for the ills of society. VIII. His comprehension of the fact that a reconstruction of society is inevitable, is imminent. IX. His pictures of the future, “delusions that were no delusions,” as he says. X.A reference to the chief works in which his socialistic ideas found expression. We cannot hope in this article to deal with more than the first six of these divisions. The remaining four we shall be glad, if opportunity offers to consider upon some future occasion.

Shelley’s own Personality. He was the child of the French Revolution. “The wild-eyed women” thronging round the path of Cythna as she went through the great city ^[b] were from the streets of Paris, and he, more than any other of his time, knew the real strength and beauty of this wild mother of his and ours. With his singular poetical and historical insight he saw the real significance of the holy struggle. Another singer of that melodious time, Byron, was also a child of the same Revolution. But his intellectual fore-runners were Voltaire and his school, and the Rousseau of the Nouvelle Héloise, whilst those of Shelley were Baboeuf and the Rousseau of the Contrat Social. It is a wise child that knows his own father. As Marx, who understood the poets as well as he understood the philosophers and economists, was wont to say: “The real difference between Byron and Shelley is this: those who understand them and love them rejoice that Byron died at thirty-six, because if he had lived he would have become a reactionarybourgeois; they grieve that Shelley died at twenty-nine, because he was essentially a revolutionist, and he would always have been one of the advanced guard of Socialism.”

The outbreak of the Revolution was only three years in advance of Shelley’s birth. Throughout Europe in the earlier part of this century reaction was in full swing. In England there were trials for blasphemy, trials for treason, suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, misery everywhere. Shelley saw — not as Professor Dowden alternately has it, “thought he saw” — in the French Revolution an incident of the movement towards a reconstruction of society. He flung himself into politics, and yet he never ceased singing.

Every poem of Shelley’s is stained with his intense individuality. Perhaps for our purpose the Lines written on the Euganean Hills, the Lionel of Rosalind and Helen, and Prince Athanase afford the best exemplars. But let us also keep in remembrance Mary Shelley’s testimony to the especial value of Peter Bell the Third, in respect to the social and religious views of her husband. “No poem contains more of Shelley’s peculiar views with regard to the errors into which many of the wisest have fallen, and of the pernicious effects of certain opinions on society ... Though, like the burlesque drama of Swellfoot, it must be looked on as a plaything, it has ... so much of himself in it that it cannot fail to interest greatly, and by right belongs to the world for whose instruction and benefit it was written.” ^[c]

And now having quoted her we may quote himself upon himself. Whether wholly unconsciously, or with the modest self-consciousness of genius he has written, lines and lines that are word-portraits of himself. Of these only one or two familiar instances can be taken.

He was one of —

“The sacred few who could not tame

Their spirits to the conquerors.”

[Triumph of Life]. ^[d]

“And then I clasped my hands and looked around — 

But none was near to mock my streaming eyes,

Which poured their warm drops on the sunny ground — 

So without shame, I spake: — “I will be wise,

And just, and free, and mild, if in me lies

Such power, for I grow weary to behold

The selfish and the strong still tyrannise

Without reproach or check.” I then controlled

My tears, my heart grew calm, and I was meek and bold.

“And from that hour did I with earnest thought

Heap knowledge from forbidden mines of lore,

Yet nothing that my tyrants knew or taught

I cared to learn, but from that secret store

Wrought linked armour for myself, before

It might walk forth to war among mankind;

Thus power and hope were strengthened more and more

Within me, till there came upon my mind

A sense of loneliness, a thirst with which I pined.” 

[Laon and Cytha]^[e]

He was one of —

“Those who have struggled, and with resolute will

Vanquished earth’s pride and meanness, burst the chains,

The icy chains of custom, and have shone

The day-stars of their age.”

[Queen Mab.] ^[f])

The dedication of The Cenci to Leigh Hunt may be taken as if Shelley was communing with his own heart.

“One more gentle, honourable, innocent and brave; one of more exalted toleration for all who do and think evil, and yet himself more free from evil; one who knows better how to receive and how to confer a benefit though he must ever confer far more than he can receive; one of simpler, and, in the highest sense of the word, of purer life and manners I never knew.”

[Dedication of The Cenci.] ^[g]

Pure-minded, earnest-souled, didactic poet, philosopher, prophet, then he is. But add to this, if you will rightly estimate the immense significance of his advocacy of any political creed, the fact already noted of his extraordinary political insight; and add also, if you will rightly estimate the value of his adherence to any scientific truth, the fact that he had a certain conception of evolution long before it had been enunciated in clear language by Darwin, or had even entered seriously into the region of scientific possibilities. Of his acuteness as historical observer, one general instance has already been given in connection with the French Revolution. Yet another less obvious but even more astounding example is furnished by his poems on Napoleon. Shelley was the first, was indeed the only man of his time to see through Napoleon. The man whom every one in Europe at that period took for a hero or a monster, Shelley recognised as a mean man, a slight man, greedy for gold, as well as for the littleness of empire. His instinct divined a Napoleon “the little” in Napoleon “the great.” That which Michelet felt was true, that which it was left for Lanfrey to prove as a historical fact, the conception of Napoleon that is as different from the ordinary one, as an ordinary person is from Shelley, this “dreamer” had.

In 1816 we find him writing:

“I hated thee, fallen tyrant! I did groan

To think that a most unambitious slave,

Like thou, shouldst dance and revel on the grave 

Of Liberty.” ^[h]

and in 1821, the year of Napoleon’s death.

“Napoleon’s fierce spirit rolled,

In terror, and blood, and gold,

A torrent of ruin to death from his birth” ^[i]

By instinct, intuition, whatever we are to call that fine faculty that feels truths before they are put into definite language, Shelley was an Evolutionist. He translated into his own pantheistic language the doctrine of the eternity of matter and the eternity of motion, of the infinite transformation of the different forms of matter into each other, of different forms of motion into each other, without any creation or destruction of either matter or motion. But that he held these scientific truths as part of his creed, there can be no doubt. You have the doctrine, certainly in a pantheistic form, but certainly there, in the letter to Miss Hitchener. “As the soul which now animates this frame was once the vivifying principle of the lowest link in the chain of existence, so is it ultimately destined to attain the highest.” (Letters VI., p.12). ^[k]. In Queen Mab:

“Spirit of Nature! here!

In this interminable wilderness

Of worlds, at whose immensity

Even soaring fancy staggers,

Here is thy fitting temple.

Yet not the lightest leaf

That quivers to the passing breeze

Is less instinct with thee

Yet not the meanest worm

That lurks in graves and fattens on the dead

Less shares thy eternal breath “^[l].

Of the two great principles affecting the development of the individual and of the race, those of heredity and adaptation, he had a clear perception, although they as yet were neither accurately defined nor even named. He understood that men and peoples were the result of their ancestry and of their environment. Two prose fragments in illustration of this. One is: “But there must be a resemblance which does not depend upon their own will, between all the writers of any particular age. They cannot escape from subjection to a common influence which arises out of an infinite combination of circumstances belonging to the times in which they live, though each is in a degree the author of the very influence by which his being is thus pervaded. Thus, the tragic poets of the age of Pericles; the Italian revivers of learning; those mighty intellects of our own country that succeeded the Reformation, the translators of the Bible, Shakespeare, Spenser, the dramatists of the reign of Elizabeth, and Lord Bacon, the colder spirits of the interval that succeeded; all resemble each other and differ from every other in their several classes. In this view of things Ford can no more be called the imitator of Shakespeare, than Shakespeare the imitator of Ford. There were perhaps few other joints of resemblance between these two men, than that which the universal and inevitable influence of their age produced. And this is an influence which neither the meanest scribbler, nor the sublimest genius of any era can escape, and which I have not attempted to escape.” (F. I. p.57-58).

The other is:

“It is less the character of the individual than the situation in which he is placed which determines him to be honest or dishonest.” ^[m] (Letter to Hunt).

This extraordinary power of seeing things clearly and of seeing them in their right relations one to another, shown not alone in the artistic side of his nature, but in the scientific, the historical, the social, is a comfort and strength to us that hold in the main the beliefs, made more sacred to us in that they were his, and must give every lover of Shelley pause when he finds himself parting from the Master on any fundamental question of economics, of faith, of human life.

II. The people most immediately influencing him.

A word again upon Byron here. In Byron we have the vague, generous and genuine aspirations in the abstract, which found their final expression in the bourgeois-democratic movement of 1848. In Shelley, there was more than the vague striving after freedom in the abstract, and therefore his ideas are finding expression in the social-democratic movement of our own day. Thus Shelley was on the side of the bourgeoisie when struggling for freedom, but ranged against them when in their turn they became the oppressors of the working-class. He saw more clearly than Byron, who seems scarcely to have seen it at all, that the epic of the nineteenth century was to be the contest between the possessing and the producing classes. And it is just this that removes hint from the category of Utopian Socialists, and makes him so far as it was possible in his time, a Socialist of modern days.

We have already referred to the influence of Baboeuf, (probably indirect), and of Rousseau. To these must of course be added the French “philosophes,” the Encyclopaedists, especially Holbach, or more accurately his “ghost” Diderot — Diderot, the intellectual “ghost” of everybody of his time.

Into any inquiry concerning the writer, that influenced Shelley’s politics and sociology the name of Godwin must necessarily enter prominently. Bowden’s Life, has made us all so thoroughly acquainted with the ill side of Godwin, that just now there may be a not unnatural tendency to forget the best of him. But whatever his colossal and pretentious meannesses and other like faults may have been, we have to remember that he wrote Political Justice, a work in itself of extraordinary power, and of special significance to us as the one that did more than any other to fashion Shelley’s thinking. Much has been made, scarcely too much can be made, of the influence of Godwin’s writings on Shelley. But not enough has been made of the influence upon him of the two Marys; Mary Wollstonecraft, and Mary Shelley. It was one of Shelley’s “delusions that are not delusions” that man and woman should be equal and united; and in his own life and that of his wife he not only saw this realised, but saw the possibility of that realisation in lives less keen and strong than theirs. All through his work this oneness with his wife shines out, and most notably in the dedication to that most didactic of poems, Laon and Cythna. Laon and Cythna are equal and united powers, brother and sister, husband and wife, friend and friend, man and woman. In the dedication to the history of their suffering, their work, their struggle, their triumph and their love, Mary is “his own heart’s home, his dear friend beautiful and calm and free.”

“And what art thou? I know, but dare not speak:

Time may interpret to his silent years,

Yet in the paleness of thy thoughful cheek,

And in the light thine ample forehead wears,

And in thy sweetest smiles and in thy tears,

And in thy gentle speech, a prophecy

Is whispered, to subdue my fondest fears;

And thro’ thine eyes, even in thy soul I see,

A camp of vestal fire burning internally.”

And in the next stanza to the one just quoted that other Mary is besung.

“One then left this earth

Whose life was like a setting planet mild,

Which clothed thee in the radiance undefiled,

Of its departing glory, still her fame

Shines on thee thro’ the tempests dark and wild,

Which shake these latter days.”

In a word, the world in general has treated the relative influences of Godwin on the one hand and of the two women on the other, pretty much as might have been expected with men for historians.

Probably the fact that he saw so much through the eyes of these two women quickened Shelley’s perception of women’s real position in society, and of the real cause of that position. This, which he only felt in the Harriet days, he would have understood fully of himself sooner or later. That this understanding came sooner, is in large measure due to the two Marys. One of them at least before him had seen in part that women’s social condition is a question of economics, not of religion or of sentiment. The woman is to the man as the producing class is to the possessing. Her “inferiority,” in its actuality and in its assumed existence, is the outcome of the holding of economic power by man to her exclusion. And this Shelley understood not only in its application to the most unfortunate of women, but in its application to every woman.

But note how in the Laon and Cythna it is (F. I. 108, xxi) “woman, (i.e. woman in general) outraged and polluted long.” Now truly he understands the position of woman, and how thoroughly he recognizes that in her degradation man is degraded, and that in dealing out justice to her man will be himself set free, the well-known Laon and Cythna passage will serve to illustrate.

“Can man be free if woman be a slave?

Chain one who lives, and breathes this boundless air

To the corruption of a closed grave!

Can they whose mates are beasts, condemned to bear

Scorn heavier far than toil or anguish, dare

To trample their oppressors? in their home

Among their babes, thou knowest a curse would wear

The shape of woman — hoary crime would come

Behind, and Fraud rebuild religion’s tottering dome ^[n].”

III. Tyranny and Liberty in the abstract. With these in the abstract the poets have always been busy. They have denounced the former in measured language and unmeasured terms. Yet they have been known to refuse their signatures to petitions asking for justice on behalf of seven men condemned to death upon police evidence of the worst kind. They have sung paeans in praise of liberty in the abstract, or in foreign lands. Yet they have written hymns against Ireland and for the Liberal Unionists. Shelley has not, to use a forcible colloquialism, “gone back on himself.” When we read the Ode to Liberty, or the 1819 Ode for the Spaniards, or the tremendous Liberty of 1820, we have not the sense of uneasiness that we have when reading Holy Cross Day or The Litany of Nations. This man is through and through foe to tyranny in the abstract and in the concrete form.

Of course in much of his work the ideas that exercise a malevolent despotism over men’s minds are attacked in general terms. Superstition and empire in all their forms Shelley hated, and therefore he again and again dealt with them as abstractions from those forms. Superstition, or an unfounded reverence for that which is unworthy of reverence, was to him, at first, mainly embodied in the superstition of religion. To the younger Shelley, l'infâme of Voltaire’s ecrasez l'infâme was to a great extent, as with Voltaire wholly, the priesthood. And the empire that he antagonised was at first that of kingship and that of personal tyranny. But even in his attacks on these he simultaneously assails the superstitious belief in the capitalistic system, and the empire of class. As time goes on, with increasing distinctness, he makes assault upon these, the most recent, and most dangerous foes of humanity. And always, every word that he has written against religious superstitions, and the despotism of individual rulers may be read as against economic superstition and the despotism of class. “The immense improvements of which by the extinction of certain moral superstitions [for moral we can also read economic] human society may be yet susceptible.” [Preface to Julian and Maddalo] ^[o].

IV. Tyranny in the concrete. We must pass over, with a mere reference only, the songs for nations — for Mexico, Spain, Ireland, England. Of his attacks upon Napoleon mention has been made. In the Mask of Anarchy, Castlereagh, Sidmouth, Eldon, are all personally gibbeted. In each case, not only the mere man but the infamous principle he represents is the object of attack. Just as the Prince Regent to Shelley was embodied princeship, and Napoleon embodied personal greed and tyranny, so Castlereagh (the Chief Secretary for Ireland before he was War Minister), was embodied war and government; Sidmouth, Home Secretary at the Peterloo time, embodied officialism, Eldon embodied Law. He is for ever denouncing priest and king and statesman.

Kings priests and statesmen, blast the human flower,

Even in its tender bud; their influence darts

Like sudden poison, through the bloodless veins

Of desolate society — (Queen Mab) ^[p]

But he scarcely ever fails to link with these the basis on which nowadays they all rest — our commercial system. See the Queen Mab passage beginning: —

Commerce has set the mark of selfishness

The signet of its all enslaving power.^[q]

It is not for nothing that in Charles I. the court fool puts together the shops and churches. “ The rainbow hung over the city with all its shops — and churches."^[r] This leads us to our next point.

V. His perception of the class-struggle. — More than anything else that makes us claim Shelley as a Socialist is his singular understanding of the facts that to-day tyranny resolves itself into the tyranny of the possessing class over the producing, and that to this tyranny in the ultimate analysis is traceable almost all evil and misery. He saw that the so-called middle-class is the real tyrant, the real danger at the present day. Those of us who belong to that class, in our delight at Shelley’s fierce onslaughts upon the higher members of it, aristocrats, monarchs, landowners, are apt to forget that de nobis etiam fabula narratur. Of us also he speaks. This point is of such importance that more quotations than usual must be taken to enforce it. From Edinburgh, in his first honeymoon he writes: — “Had he [Uncle Pilfold] not assisted us, we should still have been chained to the filth and commerce of Edinburgh. Vile as aristocracy is, commerce — purse-proud ignorance and illiterateness — is more contemptible ^[s].” From Keswick a few months later he writes of the Lake District: — “Though the face of the country is lovely, the people are detestable. The manufacturers, with their contamination, have crept into the peaceful vale, and deformed the loveliness of nature with human taint^[t].”

Or take the end of a Keswick letter, 1811, to Miss Hitchener: — “The grovelling souls of heroes, aristocrats, and commercialists.” Even when he uses the phrase “privileged classes” in the Philosophic View of Reform ^[u], it is clear he is thinking of them as a whole in contradiction to the class destitute of every privilege. Two or three last quotations in this connection to show how he understood the relative positions, not only above and below but antagonistic of these two classes ^[v]. The chorus of priests, Act ii. scene 2 of Swellfoot: “Those who consume these fruits through thee (the goddess Famine) grow fat; those who produce these fruits through thee grow lean ^[w].” For a taste of the consequences to all and sundry, to whichever class they belong, of this class-antagonism a few stanzas from Peter Bell ^[x]. Mary’s words may be quoted as summing up his position: “Shelley loved the people, and respected them as often more virtuous, as always more suffering, and, therefore more deserving of sympathy than the great. He believed that a clash between the two classes of society was inevitable, and he eagerly ranged himself on the people’s side.” — (Critical Notes) ^[y]

VI. His understanding of the real meaning of things. — His acuteness of vision is not only seen in his marking off society into the two groups, but in his understanding the real meaning of phrases that are to most of us either formulae or cant. Let us take as many of these as space allows.

Anarchy. — Shelley saw and said that the Anarchy we are all so afraid of is very present with us. We live in the midst of it. Anarchy is God and King and Law in the Mask of Anarchy, and let us add is Capitalism.

Freedom. — The extraordinary statement that England is a free country was to Shelley the merest nonsense. “The white shore of Albion free no more .... The abortion with which she travaileth is the Liberty smitten to death.” Lines written during the Castlereagh administration ^[z]. And he understood the significant fact in this connection that those who talk and write of English freedom and the like know they are talking and writing cant. The hollowness of the whole sham kept up by newspaper writers, parliamentary orators, and so forth, was as apparent to him sixty years ago as it is to-day to the dullest of us ^[aa].

Custom. — The general evil of that custom which is to most of us a law, the law, the only law of life, he was never weary of denouncing. “The chains, the icy chains of custom (Queen Mab) ^[bb]. The “more eternal foe than force or fraud, old custom” (Fall of Bonaparte). And with the denunciation of custom, followed merely because it is custom, is the noble teaching of self-mastery, and the poet’s contradiction of the statement that under the new regime men will be machines, uniformity reign, and individuality be dead ^[cc].

Cruelty of the governing class. — A tyrannical class like a tyrannical man stops at nothing in order to maintain its position of supremacy. No means are too insignificant, no weapon too ponderous. From the policeman’s “nark,” or spy not a member of the police force, to the machinery of a trial for treason, nothing comes amiss to the class that governs. Shelley knew what a mockery for the most part is a trial instituted by a government, whether in Ireland or in England. “A trial I think men call it” (Rosalind and Helen) ^[dd].

In June 1817, a few operatives rose in Derbyshire. A score of dragoons put down the Derbyshire insurrection, an insurrection there is reason to believe put up by a Government spy. On November 7th 1817, three men, Brandreth, Turner, Ludlam, “were drawn on hurdles to the place of execution, and were hanged and decapitated in the presence of an excited and horror-stricken crowd” (Dowden’s Life)^[ee]. Against this judicial murder Shelley’s voice was lifted up, as it would be now in like case. For like cases are occurring, still occur in increasing numbers as the class struggle intensifies. In Ireland at Lisdoovarna, Constable Whelehan was murdered recently in a moonlighting raid. The raid had been planned by Cullinane, a Government spy. On Monday Dec. 12, 1887, one man was condemned to ten years’, four others to seven years’ penal servitude for an offence planned by a government spy. Against this sentence Shelley were he alive would, we are certain, protest. So would he have protested against the direct murders by the police at Michelstown, and Trafalgar Square. So would he have protested against the recent judicial murder in America of four men and the practical imprisonment for life of three others. The Chicago Anarchist meeting differed even from the Derbyshire insurrection of 1817. There was no rising, no talk of rising, no use of physical force by the people, no threat of it. Yet seven men were condemned on the evidence of the police, evidence that those who have read every word of it feel was not only insufficient to prove the guilt, but absolutely conclusive as to the innocence of the accused. Had Shelley been alive he would have been the first to sign the petition on behalf of the Chicago Anarchists.

Crime. — This phenomenon Shelley recognized as the natural result of social conditions. The criminal was to him as much a creature of the society in which the lived as the capitalist or the monarch. “Society,” said he, “grinds down poor wretches into the dust of abject poverty, till they are scarcely recognizable as human beings."^[ff] In his literal discussions with Miss Hitchener Shelley more than once asks whether with a juster distribution of happiness, of toil and leisure, crime and the temptation to crime, would not almost cease to exist.^[gg]. And much that is called crime was to Shelley (the Preface to Laon and Cythna is but one evidence) only crime by convention.

Property. The opinion of Shelley as to that which could be rightly enjoyed as a person’s own property and what could only be enjoyed wrongly, will be in part gathered from a quotation which paraphrased in the more precise language of scientific Socialism reads thus: “A man has a right to anything that his own labour has produced, and that he does not intend to employ for the purpose of injuring his fellows. But no man can himself acquire a considerable aggregation of properly except at the expense of his fellows. He must either cheat a certain number out of the value of it, or take it by force.”

Again, note the conception of wealth in the Song to the Men of England: “The wealth ye find another keeps.” ^[ii] The source of all wealth is human labour, and that not the labour of the possessors of that wealth.^[jj]

As to that for which the working class work he quotes Godwin in the fifth note to Queen Mab.^[kk]

Let us take as our last example of his understanding of the central position of Socialism, a quotation to be found in a letter to Miss Hitchner, dated December 15th, 1811. Shelley is discussing the entailment of his estate: “that I should entail £120,000 of command over labour, of power to remit this, to employ it for beneficent purposes, on one whom I know not."^[ll]

We cannot expect even such a man as Shelley to have thought out in his time the full meaning of labour-power, labour, and the value of commodities. But undoubtedly he knew the real economic value of private property in the means of production and distribution, whether it was in machinery, land, funds, what not. He saw that this value lay in the command, absolute, merciless, unjust, over human labour. The Socialist believes that these means of production and distribution should be the property of the community. For the man or company that owns them has practically irresponsible control over the class that does not possess them.

The possessor can and does dictate terms to the man or woman of that non-possessing class. “You shall sell your labour to me. I will pay you only a fraction of its value in wage. The difference between that value and what I pay for your labour I pocket, as a member of the possessing class, and I am richer than before, not by labour of my own, but by your unpaid labour.” This was the teaching of Shelley. This is the teaching of Socialism, and therefore the teaching of Socialism, whether it is right or wrong, is also that of Shelley. We claim him as a Socialist.

Notes

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a. Letter to Leigh Hunt, May 1, 1820 D II., 346

b. Laon and Cythna. F. I. 108.

c. Mary’s notes, F. I. p.lxxxii

d. F. II 140 128-9, Is

e. F. I. 63 st. iv. v.

f. F. II. 434, Is. 125-8.

g. F I. 251-2.

h. F. 127.

i. F. I. 572, is. 34-36.

k. Parchment series.

l. F. II. 438, ls. 264-274

m. D p.346.

n. F. I.92 xlii

o. F. II. 2.

p. F II 454, Is, 104-107,

q. F. II. 460, IS. 53-78.

r. F. II. 129.

s. D. I. 181.

t. D. I. 200.

u. D, II. 294.

v. F. II. 115, D. I. 319.

w. F. I. 484.

x. F. II 53-55.

y. F. I. lxxx.

z. F. II. 185.

aa. F. I. 106.

bb. F. II. 431.

cc. F. II. 237.

dd. F. I. 225.

ee. II. 157

ff. D. I. 474

gg. D. I. 164

hh. D. II. 295

ii. F. II. 187.

jj. F. II. 188

kk. II. 499, 500

ll. D. I. 205, 6

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“The difference between Byron and Shelley”

Abstract

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Source: Marx Engels On Literature and Art, Progress Publishers, 1976;
Transcribed: by Andy Blunden;
First published: in Die Neue Zeit, VI. Jg., 1888;

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Marx, who knew and understood poets just as well as philosophers and economists, used to say: “The true difference between Byron and Shelley consists in this, that those who understand and love them consider it fortunate that Byron died in his thirty-sixth year, for he would have become a reactionary bourgeois had he lived longer; conversely, they regret Shelley’s death at the age of twenty-nine, because he was a revolutionary through and through and would consistently have stood with the vanguard of socialism.”