Page:The complete poetical works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, including materials never before printed in any edition of the poems.djvu/449



[Of the fragments of verse that follow, lines 1-37, 62-92 were printed by Mrs. Shelley in P. W., 1839, 2nd edition; lines 1-174 were printed or reprinted by Dr. Garnett in Relics of Shelley, 1862; and lines 175-186 were printed by Mr. C. D. Locock from the first draft of Epipsychidion amongst the Shelley MSS. in the Bodleian Library. See Examination, &c, 1903, pp. 12, 13. The three early drafts of the Preface (Advertisement) were printed by Mr. Locock in the same volume, pp. 4, 5.]

The following Poem was found amongst other papers in the Portfolio of a young Englishman with whom the Editor had contracted an intimacy at Florence, brief indeed, but sufficiently long to render the Catastrophe by which it terminated one of the most painful events of his life.—

The literary merit of the Poem in question may not be considerable; but worse verses are printed every day, &

He was an accomplished & amiable person but his error was, ,—his fate is an additional proof that 'The tree of Knowledge is not that of Life.'—He had framed to himself certain opinions, founded no doubt upon the truth of things, but built up to a Babel height; they fell by their own weight, & the thoughts that were his architects, became unintelligible one to the other, as men upon whom confusion of tongues has fallen.

[These] verses seem to have been written as a sort of dedication of some work to have been presented to the person whom they address: but his papers afford no trace of such a work—The circumstances to which [they] the poem allude, may easily be understood by those to whom [the] spirit of the poem itself is [un]intelligible: a detail of facts, sufficiently romantic in [themselves but] their combinations

The melancholy [task] charge of consigning the body of my poor friend to the grave, was committed to me by his desolated family. I caused him to be buried in a spot selected by himself, & on the h