few unfinished verses that showed that he felt the sting; among such I find the following:-- 'Alas! this is not what I thought Life was. I knew that there were crimes and evil men, Misery and hate; nor did I hope to pass Untouched by suffering through the rugged glen. In mine own heart I saw as in a glass The hearts of others...And, when I went among my kind, with triple brass Of calm endurance my weak breast I armed, To bear scorn, fear, and hate--a woful mass!' I believed that all this morbid feeling would vanish if the chord of sympathy between him and his countrymen were touched. But my persuasions were vain, the mind could not be bent from its natural inclination. Shelley shrunk instinctively from portraying human passion, with its mixture of good and evil, of disappointment and disquiet. Such opened again the wounds of his own heart; and he loved to shelter himself rather in the airiest flights of fancy, forgetting love and hate, and regret and lost hope, in such imaginations as borrowed their hues from sunrise or sunset, from the yellow moonshine or paly twilight, from the aspect of the far ocean or the shadows of the woods,--which celebrated the singing of the winds among the pines, the flow of a murmuring stream, and the thousand harmonious sounds which Nature creates in her solitudes. These are the materials which form the "Witch of Atlas": it is a brilliant congregation of ideas such as his senses gathered, and his fancy coloured, during his rambles in the sunny land he so much loved. NOTE ON OEDIPUS TYRANNUS, BY MRS. SHELLEY.