Page:The complete poetical works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, including materials never before printed in any edition of the poems.djvu/592

XI
No record of his crime remains in story,
But if the morning bright as evening shone,
It was some high and holy deed, by glory 60
Pursued into forgetfulness, which won
From the blind crowd he^[1] made secure and free
The patriot's meed, toil, death, and infamy.

XII
For when by sound of trumpet was declared
A price upon his life, and there was set 65
A penalty of blood on all who shared
So much of water with him as might wet
His lips, which speech divided not—he went
Alone, as you may guess, to banishment.

XIII
Amid the mountains,^[2] like a hunted beast, 70
He hid himself, and hunger, toil, and cold,^[3]
Month after month endured; it was a feast
Whene'er he found those globes of deep-red gold
Which in the woods the strawberry-tree doth bear,
Suspended in their emerald atmosphere. 75

XIV
And in the roofless huts of vast morasses,
Deserted by the fever-stricken serf,
All overgrown with reeds and long rank grasses,
And hillocks heaped of moss-inwoven turf,
And where the huge and speckled aloe made, 80
Rooted in stones, a broad and pointed shade,—

XV
He housed himself. There is a point of strand
Near Vado's tower and town; and on one side
The treacherous marsh divides it from the land,
Shadowed by pine and ilex forests wide, 85
And on the other, creeps eternally,
Through muddy weeds, the shallow sullen sea.

XVI
Here the earth's breath is pestilence, and few
But things whose nature is at war with life—
Snakes and ill worms—endure its mortal dew. 90
The trophies of the clime's victorious strife—
And ringed horns which the buffalo did wear,
And the wolf's dark gray scalp who tracked him there.^[4]

1. 62 he 1824; thus B.
2. 70 Amid the mountains 1824; Mid desert mountains [?] B.
3. 71 toil, and cold] cold and toil edd. 1824, 1830.
4. 92, 93 And . . . there B. (see Editor's Note); White bones, and locks of dun and yellow hair, And ringèd horns which buffaloes did wear— 1870.