1. 5. Thunder-smoke, whose skirts were chrysolite.
Technically, chrysolite is synonymous with the precious
stone peridot, or olivine—its tint is a
yellowish green. But probably Shelley thought
only of the primary meaning of the word chrysolite,
‘golden-stone,’ and his phrase as a whole
comes to much the same thing as ’a cloud with
a golden lining.’
+Stanza 6,+ 1. 1. And like a sudden meteor.
We here have a fragmentary simile which may—or
equally well may not—follow on as connected
with St. 5. See on p. 147, for whatever it may
be worth in illustration, the line relating to Coleridge:—
‘A cloud-encircled meteor of the air.’
1. 5. Pavilioned in its tent of light. Shelley
was fond of the word Pavilion, whether as substantive
or as verb. See St. 50: ’Pavilioning
the dust of him,’ &c.
[1] See the Life of Mrs. Shelley, by Lucy Madox
Rossetti (Eminent Women Series), published
in 1890. The connexion between the two branches
of the Shelley family is also set forth—incidentally,
but with perfect distinctness—in Collins’s
Peerage of England(1756), vol. iii. p. 119.
He says that Viscount Lumley (who died at some date
towards 1670) ’married Frances, daughter of
Henry Shelley, of Warminghurst in Sussex, Esq. (a
younger branch of the family seated at Michaelgrove,
the seat of the present Sir John Shelley, Bart.).’
[2] I am indebted to Mr. J. Cordy Jeaffreson for some
strongly reasoned arguments, in private-correspondence,
tending to Harriet’s disculpation.
[3] This line (should be ‘Beneath the
good,’ &c.) is the final line of Gray’s
Progress of Poesy. The sense in which Shelley
intends to apply it to The Cenci may admit
of some doubt. He seems to mean that The Cenci
is not equal to really good tragedies; but still is
superior to some tragedies which have recently appeared,
and which bad critics have dubbed great.
[4] This phrase is not very clear to me. From
the context ensuing, it might seem that the ‘circumstance’
which prevented Keats from staying with Shelley in
Pisa was that his nerves were in so irritable a state
as to prompt him to move from place to place in Italy
rather than fix in any particular city or house.
[5] Though Shelley gave this advice, which was anything
but unsound, he is said to have taken good-naturedly
some steps with a view to getting the volume printed.
Mr. John Dix, writing in 1846, says: ’He
[Shelley] went to Charles Richards, the printer in
St. Martin’s Lane, when quite young, about the
printing a little volume of Keats’s first poems.’
[6] This statement is not correct—so far
at least as the longer poems in the volume are concerned.
Isabella indeed was finished by April, 1818;
but Hyperion was not relinquished till late
in 1819, and the Eve of St. Agnes and Lamia
were probably not even begun till 1819.
