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The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,

A heart whose love is innocent!

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ON THIS DAY I COMPLETE MY THIRTYSIXTH YEAR

MISSOLONGHI, JANUARY 22, 1824

'Tis time this heart should be unmoved,
Since others it hath ceased to move:
Yet, though I cannot be beloved,
Still let me love!

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But 't is not thus and 't is not here

Such thoughts should shake my soul, nor now,

Where glory decks the hero's bier,

Or binds his brow

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The sword, the banner, and the field,
Glory and Greece, around me see!
The Spartan, borne upon his shield,
Was not more free.

Awake! (not Greece

she is awake!)

Awake, my spirit! Think through whom Thy lifeblood tracks its parent lake,

And then strike home!

Tread those reviving passions down,
Unworthy manhood! unto thee
Indifferent should the smile or frown
Of beauty be.

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If thou regrett'st thy youth, why live?
The land of honorable death

Is here: up to the field, and give

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Away thy breath!

Seek out less often sought than found
A soldier's grave, for thee the best;

Then look around, and choose thy ground,

And take thy rest.

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PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

1792-1822

His

SHELLEY was born in Sussex, in the south of England. father, Sir Timothy Shelley, was a well-to-do country gentleman, who sent his son to Eton and then to Oxford. The lad was high-spirited and rather ungovernable, and chafed at all restraint. He was expelled from Oxford when he was nineteen.

Shortly afterwards Shelley married Harriet Westbrooke, a schoolgirl of sixteen. This childish pair lived an unsettled life for a few years and then parted. After the suicide of his wife, Shelley married Mary Godwin, with whom he lived happily until his death. Deprived by the Lord Chancellor of the guardianship of his children by his first wife, and stung by the harsh criticisms which were heard on every hand, he forsook England and spent the remainder of his life in Italy. It was during his residence here that his chief literary work was done. At the age of twentynine he was drowned in a squall off the coast of Italy. His remains were laid to rest in the Protestant cemetery at Rome.

Shelley's chief poems are Queen Mab, Alastor, The Revolt of Islam, Prometheus Unbound, The Cenci, Adonais, a noble elegy on Keats, To a Skylark, Ode to the West Wind, and many short lyrics.

Much of Shelley's poetry expresses the political, social, and religious unrest of his times; and, as Matthew Arnold points out, he failed to get any "wide and luminous view of life." But Shelley died at thirty, and it is not given to many mortals to obtain a "wide and luminous view of life at that age. Let us

be glad, therefore, that he has left us a body of poetry that will always charm us by its brilliant imaginative qualities, its refinement and delicacy, its gifts of language and of melody, and its fine lyric note.

ODE TO THE WEST WIND

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O, WILD West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O, thou,
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the spring shall blow
Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odors plain and hill:
Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and preserver; hear, O, hear!

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IO

Thou on whose stream, 'mid the steep sky's commotion, 15
Loose clouds like earth's decaying leaves are shed,
Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean,

Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread

On the blue surface of thine airy surge,

Like the bright hair uplifted from the head

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Of some fierce Mænad, even from the dim verge
Of the horizon to the zenith's height

The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge

Of the dying year, to which this closing night
Will be the dome of a vast sepulcher,

Vaulted with all thy congregated might

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Of vapors, from whose solid atmosphere

Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: O, hear!

III

Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams

The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,

Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams,

Beside a pumice isle in Baia's bay,

And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave's intenser day,

All overgrown with azure moss and flowers

So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou
For whose path the Atlantic's level powers
Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below
The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear
The sapless foliage of the ocean, know

Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear,
And tremble and despoil themselves: O, hear!

IV

If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;

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A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share

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The impulse of thy strength, only less free
Than thou, O, uncontrollable! If even
I were as in my boyhood, and could be

The comrade of thy wanderings over heaven,
As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed

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Scarce seemed a vision; I would ne'er have striven

As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.
Oh! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!

I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!

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