Page:The complete poetical works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, including materials never before printed in any edition of the poems.djvu/397

Rh If you strip Peter, you will see a fellow Scorched by Hell's hyperequatorial climate Into a kind of a sulphureous yellow: A lean mark, hardly fit to fling a rhyme at; In shape a Scaramouch, in hue Othello. If you unveil my Witch, no priest nor primate Can shrive you of that sin.—if sin there be In love, when it becomes idolatry.

those cruel Twins, whom at one birth Incestuous Change bore to her father Time, Error and Truth, had hunted from the Earth All those bright natures which adorned its prime, And left us nothing to believe in, worth The pains of putting into learned rhyme, A lady-witch there lived on Atlas' mountain Within a cavern, by a secret fountain.

Her mother was one of the Atlantides: The all-beholding Sun had ne'er beholden In his wide voyage o'er continents and seas So fair a creature, as she lay enfolden In the warm shadow of her loveliness;— He kissed her with his beams, and made all golden The chamber of gray rock in which she lay— She, in that dream of joy, dissolved away.

'Tis said, she first was changed into a vapour, And then into a cloud, such clouds as flit, Like splendour-winged moths about a taper, Round the red west when the sun dies in it: And then into a meteor, such as caper On hill-tops when the moon is in a fit: Then, into one of those mysterious stars Which hide themselves between the Earth and Mars.

Ten times the Mother of the Months had bent Her bow beside the folding-star, and bidden With that bright sign the billows to indent The sea-deserted sand—like children chidden, At her command they ever came and went— Since in that cave a dewy splendour hidden Took shape and motion: with the living form Of this embodied Power, the cave grew warm.