[The little volume containing Alastor and other poems, whereof the original title-page is reproduced opposite, seems to have become scarce as early as 1824, for Mrs. Shelley says, in her preface to the Posthumous Poems of that year, "I have added a reprint of Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude' :-the difficulty with which a copy can be obtained is the cause of its republication." This volume has no table of contents, but consists of title, 4 pages of preface, a fly-title with quotation from St. Augustine, and 101 pages of text, including the respective fly-titles to the Poems and The Dæmon of the World. The poems printed with Alastor are (1) the Stanzas addressed to Coleridge, headed AAKPTEI AIOIN HOTмON AПOTмON, (2) Stanzas, April, 1814, (3) Mutability, (4) the Stanzas on the verse of Ecclesiastes, "There is no work, nor device," &c., (5) A Summer-Evening Church-yard, (6) Sonnet To Wordsworth, (7) Sonnet, Feelings of a Republican on the Fall of Bonaparte, (8) Superstition (an excerpt from Queen Mab), (9) Sonnet from the Italian of Dante, (10) Sonnet, Translated from the Greek of Moschus, (11) The Demon of the World. I am not aware of any extant manuscript of Alastor.-H. B. F.]

ALASTOR;

OR,

THE SPIRIT OF SOLITUDE:

AND OTHER POEMS.

BY

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY.

LONDON:

PRINTED FOR BALDWIN, CRADOCK, AND JOY, PATER

NOSTER ROW; AND CARPENTER AND SON,

OLD BOND-STREET:

By S. Hamilton, Weybridge, Surrey.

1816.

PREFACE.

[BY SHELLEY.]

THE poem entitled ALASTOR,' may be considered as allegorical of one of the most interesting situations of the human mind. It represents a youth of uncorrupted feelings and adventurous genius led forth by an imagination inflamed and purified through familiarity with all that is excellent and majestic, to the contemplation of the universe. He drinks deep of the fountains of knowledge, and is still insatiate. The magnificence and beauty of the external world sinks profoundly into the frame of his conceptions, and affords to their modifications a variety not to be exhausted. So long as it is possible for his desires to point towards objects thus infinite and unmeasured, he is joyous, and tranquil, and self-possessed. But the period arrives when these objects cease to suffice. His mind is at length. suddenly awakened and thirsts for intercourse with an intelligence similar to itself. He images to himself the Being whom he loves. Conversant with speculations of the sublimest and most perfect natures, the vision in which he embodies his own imaginations unites all of wonderful, or wise, or beautiful, which the poet, the philosopher, or the lover could depicture. The intellectual faculties, the imagination, the functions of sense, have their respective

requisitions on the sympathy of corresponding powers in other human beings. The Poet is represented as uniting these requisitions, and attaching them to a single image. He seeks in vain for a prototype of his conception. Blasted by his disappointment, he descends to an untimely

grave.

The picture is not barren of instruction to actual men. The Poet's self-centred seclusion was avenged by the furies of an irresistible passion pursuing him to speedy ruin. But that Power which strikes the luminaries of the world with sudden darkness and extinction, by awakening them to too exquisite a perception of its influences, dooms to a slow and poisonous decay those meaner spirits that dare to abjure its dominion. Their destiny is more abject and inglorious as their delinquency is more contemptible and pernicious. They who, deluded by no generous error, instigated by no sacred thirst of doubtful knowledge, duped by no illustrious superstition, loving nothing on this earth, and cherishing no hopes beyond, yet keep aloof from sympathies with their kind, rejoicing neither in human joy nor mourning with human grief; these, and such as they, have their apportioned curse. They languish, because none feel with them their common nature. They are morally dead. They are neither friends, nor lovers, nor fathers, nor citizens of the world, nor benefactors of their country. Among those who attempt to exist without human sympathy, the pure and tender-hearted perish through the intensity and passion of their search after its communities, when the vacancy of their spirit suddenly makes itself felt. All else, selfish, blind, and torpid, are those unforeseeing multitudes who constitute, together with their own,