CHAPTER XII.

'Needless were it to expatiate on their transports; they loved each other, and that is enough for those who have felt like Eloise and Fitzeustace.'

After comparing these two scenes of two sleeping lovers, each, of whom reveals the heart's secret to an attentive watcher; after comparing the literary characteristics of the one scene with those of the other, the structure of the sentences, language, details, touches; after noticing the identity of the very words used in some parts of the parallel passages, can any reader think the two scenes were by two different writers? that, whilst the extract from _Zastrozzi_ is a piece of original writing, the extract from _St. Irvyne_ is a piece of a translation from the undiscovered work of an undiscovered German author? These passages are fair examples of the two books from which they are taken. Can any reader hesitate in coming to the conclusion that Shelley reproduced in the later the materials of the earlier romance? The writer may have been unaware he was reproducing scraps of his former work. The reproduction may have been the result of mental action, occasioned by the effort of producing the earlier tale, rather than the consequence of a deliberate design to use the old stuff for a second time. But the reproduction is obvious.

_St. Irvyne_ contains six sets of verses, that are interesting examples of the earliest fruits of the poetical disposition, which soon developed into Shelley's poetical genius. Resembling Byron's _Hours of Idleness_, in affording only the faintest indications of the author's eventual faculty for the service of the Muse, these sets of verses are chiefly noteworthy for their evidence that the _Hours of Idleness_ may be styled 'the horn-book,' from which Shelley acquired the rudiments of the art of poesy. The resemblance of one of those pieces of versification to one of the stanzas of 'Lachin-y-Gair' in the _Hours of Idleness_ is so remarkable, that the Oxonian's lines may fairly be styled a plagiarism on the lines that had come a few years earlier from the Byron of Cambridge.

THE STANZA OF 'LACHIN-Y-GAIR.'

'_Shades of the dead! have I not heard your voices Rise on the night-rolling breath of the gale?_ Surely the _soul of the hero rejoices_, _And rides on the wind_, o'er his own Highland vale. Round Loch-na-Garr, while the stormy mist gathers, Winter presides in his cold icy car; _Clouds there encircle the forms of my fathers_: They dwell in the tempests of dark Loch-na-Garr.'

THE VERSES OF 'ST. IRVYNE.'

'_Ghosts of the dead! have I not heard your yelling Rise on the night-rolling breath of the blast_, When o'er the dark ether the tempest is swelling, And on eddying whirlwind the thunder-peal past?

'For oft I have stood on the dark height of Jura, Which frowns on the valley which opens beneath: Oft have I brav'd the chill night-tempest's fury, Whilst around me, I thought, echo'd murmurs of death.

'And now, whilst the winds of the mountain are howling, _O father! thy voice seems to strike on mine ear_; In air whilst the tide of the night-storm is rolling, It breaks on the pause of the elements' jar.

'On the wing of the whirlwind which roars in the mountain Perhaps _rides the ghost of my sire who is dead_; On the mist of the tempest which hangs o'er the fountain, Whilst a wreath of dark vapour encircles his head.'

In a note to _St. Irvyne_ (in his edition of Shelley's 'prose works'), Mr. Buxton Forman calls attention to the obvious adoption of the two first lines of the quoted stanza of Byron's poem, as though they were the whole of the youthful Shelley's 'small debt' in this particular matter, to the youthful Byron. It cannot have escaped the notice of Shelley's careful editor that, whilst Shelley speaks of his father's ghost as riding on the whirlwind and the mist of the tempest, Byron sees 'the forms of his fathers' in the clouds over-hanging Loch-na-Garr, and sings how the soul of one of his ancestral heroes 'rides on the wind.' It can scarcely have escaped the careful editor that the whole thought of Shelley's sixteen verses was 'lifted' out of Byron's eight verses.