shattered stones lie around, that once made a part of the solid wall. In the crevices, and on the vaulted roofs, grow a multitude of shrubs, the wild olive and the myrtle --and intricate brambles, and entangled weeds and plants I never saw before." The stones are immensely massive, and they jut out one from the other. There are terrible rifts in the wall,' and broad windows through which you see the blue heaven. There seems to be more than a thousand arches, some ruined, some entire, and they are all immensely high and wide. Some are shattered, and stand forth in great heaps, and the underwood is tufted on their crumbling summits. Around us lie enormous columns, shattered and shapeless and fragments of capitals and cornice, fretted with delicate sculptures."

It is open to the blue sky ?" said the old man.

"Yes. We see the liquid depth of heaven above through the rifts and the windows; and the flowers, and the weeds, and the grass and creeping moss, are nourished by its unforbidden rain. The blue sky is above the wide, bright, blue sky-it flows through the great rents" on high, and through the bare boughs of the marble-rooted figtree, and through the leaves and flowers of the weeds,

According to Medwin's version, "I see a vast circle of arches built upon arches, and stones like shattered crags, so vast are they, and walls giddily hanging-totteringly-on walls."

Medwin reads, "the wild olive, the myrtle, and the jasmine, and intricate brambles, and entangled weeds, and strange feathery plants like dishevelled hair, such as I never saw before."

3 Medwin reads jut out from each other like mountain cliffs.

4 Medwin reads walls and high

windows through which is seen the light of the blue heavens. There seem to me, &c.

5 Medwin reads broken.

6 In Medwin's version, tufted in their crumbling fragments; and the next sentence stands thus"Around us lie enormous collections of shattered and shapeless capitals and cornices, loaded with delicate sculpture."

7 Medwin omits blue, the note of interrogation, and the word Yes at the beginning of the next speech. 8 Medwin reads rifts.

even to the dark arcades beneath. I see I feel its' clear and piercing beams fill the universe, and impregnate the joy-inspiring wind with life and light, and casting the veil of its splendour over all things-even me. Yes, and through the highest rift the noonday waning moon is hanging, as it were, out of the solid sky, and this shows that the atmosphere has all the clearness which it rejoices me that you feel.”

Only the bright green mossy ground, speckled by tufts of dewy clover-grass that run into the interstices of the shattered arches, and round the isolated pinnacles of the ruin.""

"Like the lawny dells of soft short grass which wind among the pine forests and precipices in the Alps of Savoy?"

"Indeed, father, your eye has a vision more serene than mine."

of precipitous ruin, overgrown with the younglings of the forest, and more like chasms rent by an earthquake' among the mountains, than like the vestige of what was human workmanship what are they?"

"Things awe-inspiring and wonderful."

"Are they not caverns such as the untamed elephant might choose, amid the Indian wilderness, wherein to hide her cubs; such as, were the sea to overflow the earth, the mightiest monsters of the deep would change into their spacious chambers?"

"Father, your words image forth what I would have expressed, but, alas! could not."

"I hear the rustling of leaves, and the sound of waters, but it does not rain,-like the faint drops of a fountain among woods."

'It falls from among the heaps of ruin over our heads-it is, I suppose, the water collected in the rifts by the showers."

"A nursling of man's art, abandoned by his care, and transformed by the enchantment of Nature into a likeness of her own creations, and destined to partake their

1 Medwin reads earthquakes for an earthquake, omits like in the next line, gives what are they as a separate speech of the daughter, and makes the daughter's next speech the opening of the father's.

2 In Medwin's version the words and tigress are here inserted, and wildernesses is substituted for wil

derness, the next clause being where to hide their cubs.

3 Medwin reads mighty, and vast for spacious in the next line.

4 Medwin omits alas!

5 Mrs. Shelley has fast, but Medwin's reading, faint, must be right. 6 Medwin reads from, and in the next line A nursling of man now &c.

immortality Changed into a mountain cloven with' woody dells, which overhang its labyrinthine glades, and shattered into toppling precipices, even' the clouds, intercepted by its craggy summits,' feed its eternal fountains with their rain. By the column on which I' sit, I should judge that it had once been crowned by a temple or a theatre, and that on sacred days the multitude wound up its craggy path to the spectacle or the sacrifice

such itself!*

-It was

Helen, what sound of wings is that?"

Do

"It is the wild pigeons returning to their young. you not hear the murmur of those that are brooding in their nests?"

* Nor does a recollection of the use to which it may have been destined interfere with these emotions. Time has thrown its purple shadow athwart this scene, and no more is visible than the broad and everlasting character of human strength and genius, that pledge of all that is to be admirable and lovely in ages yet to come. Solemn temples, where the senate of the world assembled, palaces, triumphal arches, and cloudsurrounded columns, loaded with the sculptured annals of conquest and domination--what actions and deliberations have they been destined to enclose and commemorate? Superstitious rites, which in their mildest form, outrage reason, and obscure the moral sense of mankind; schemes for wide-extended murder, and devastation, and misrule, and servitude; and, lastly, these schemes brought to their tremendous consummations, and a human being returning in the midst of festival and solemn joy, with thousands and thousands of his enslaved and desolated species chained behind his chariot, exhibiting, as titles to renown, the labour of ages, and the admired creations of genius, overthrown by the brutal force, which was placed as a sword within his hand, and,-contemplation fearful and abhorred!—he himself a being capable of the gentlest and best emotions, inspired with the persuasion that he has done a virtuous deed! We do not forget these things.

1 Medwin reads to a mountain eloven into.

2 Mrs. Shelley sets a full stop at precipices and begins a fresh sentence with Even. The version of the text is Medwin's.

3 This word is singular in Mrs. Shelley's version, plural in that of

[SHELLEY'S NOTE.]

Medwin, who reads supply for feed its.
4 Medwin, who gives this pas-
sage, as far as sacrifice, to the
daughter, reads we for I, and lets
the father take up the word again
with It was such.

5 Mrs. Shelley omits the.
6 Medwin here inserts of.

Ay, it is the language of their happiness. They are as happy as we are, child, but in a different manner. They know not the sensations which this ruin excites within us. Yet it is pleasure to them to inhabit it; and the succession of its forms as they pass, is connected with associations in their minds, sacred to them as these to us. The internal nature of each being is surrounded by a circle, not to be surmounted by his fellows; and it is this repulsion which constitutes the misfortune of the condition of life. But there is a circle which comprehends, as well as one which mutually excludes, all things which feel. And, with respect to man, his public and his private happiness consists in diminishing the circumference which includes those resembling himself, until they become one with him, and he with them. It is because we enter into the meditations, designs and destinies of something beyond ourselves, that the contemplation of the ruins of human power excites an elevating sense of awfulness and beauty. It is therefore, that the ocean, the glacier, the cataract, the tempest, the volcano, have each a spirit which animates the extremities of our frame with tingling joy. It is therefore that the singing of birds, and the motion of leaves, the sensation of the odorous earth beneath, and the freshness of the living wind around, is sweet. And this is Love. This is the religion of eternity, whose votaries have been exiled from among the multitude of mankind. O Power!" cried the old man, lifting his sightless eyes towards the undazzling sun, "thou which interpenetratest all things, and without which this glorious world were a blind and formless chaos, Love, Author of Good, God, King, Father! Friend of these thy worshippers! Two

Medwin, omitting the word Ay, ended here, and did not give the

foot-note to the words It was such itself in the last paragraph but one.