Of some fierce Mænad, even from the dim verge

Of the horizon to the zenith's height
The locks of the approaching storm.

Thou dirge

Of the dying year, to which this closing night
Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre,
Vaulted with all thy congregated might

Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere

Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: O, hear!

III.

Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,

Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams,

Beside a pumice isle in Baiæ's bay,
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave's intenser day,

All overgrown with azure moss and flowers
So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou
For whose path the Atlantic's level powers

Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below
The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear
The sapless foliage of the ocean, know

Thy voice, and suddenly grow grey with fear,
And tremble and despoil themselves: O, hear!

IV.

If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;
A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share

The impulse of thy strength, only less free
Than thou, O, uncontroulable! If even
I were as in my boyhood, and could be

The comrade of thy wanderings over heaven,
As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed

Scarce seemed a vision; I would ne'er have striven

As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.
Oh! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!

I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed !

A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.

V.

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is :
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet thought in sadness. Be thou, spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth !
And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened earth

The trumpet of a prophecy! O, wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

NOTES.

NOTE i. p. I.

THE Hymn to Intellectual Beauty is placed first in this book, not only because it pictures Shelley's earliest aspirations, but also because Shelley has not added in this hymn, as he has done in other poems, any "mortal image" to his expression of the Platonic doctrine of the love of the Idea of Beauty. To understand the poem the reader ought to refer to that passage in Shelley's translation of the Symposium of Plato which begins-Diotima is represented as speaking: "Your own meditation, Socrates, might perhaps have initiated you in all these things which I have already taught you on the subject of Love," and continue to the close of the speech of Diotima. See Essays, vol. i. pp. 118-122.

"Shelley

NOTE ii. p. 6.

was at a loss for a title, and I proposed that which he adopted-Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude. The Greek word, ἀλάστωρ, is an evil genius, κακοδαίμων, The poem treated the spirit of solitude as a spirit of evil." This statement of Mr. Peacock's is supported not only by the poem, but also by the Preface, especially by the words "The poet's self-centred seclusion was avenged by the Furies of an irresistible passion pursuing him to speedy ruin." See also the lines

"The spirit of sweet human love has sent
A vision to the sleep of him who spurned
Her choicest gifts."

Y

NOTE iii. p. 12.

"Her voice was like the voice of his own soul

Heard in the calm of thought."

The Hymn to Intellectual Beauty represents the pure Platonic conception of Love, and of that which it loves. In Alastor, in Prince Athanase, in many of the lyrics, Shelley retreats from this conception, and amalgamating two thoughts in the Symposium, invents a conception of his own. In that dialogue Aristophanes tells an amusing myth of the original human-being divided into man and woman, and of each part of this man-woman ever afterwards passionately seeking the other. The serious element in this is, "that the loves of this world are an indistinct anticipation of an ideal union which is not yet realised," or perhaps that each human being has its complement, and strives to find it. That is one element in Shelley's conception. The other is taken from the representation made by Diotima of the lover of absolute Beauty seeking for its image in mortal forms, and his loving of these images when found, as one of the steps whereby he ascends to the love of ideal Beauty. Throwing these two together, Shelley forms a new conception. He conceives of the archetypal Beauty, that Beauty which is the model and source of all other beauty, as embodied somewhere beyond this material world in the other half of his own soul. In visions he sees this Being, and pursues her incessantly, but is always driven by a weakness in his nature to try and find her image in real women. His ideal love continually glides back into a desire of realising itself on earth. He is thus, as he calls himself in Adonais, a "power girt round with weakness." Alastor records the coming of the Vision, and the agony of not finding it realised. Unable to be content with the love of Ideal Beauty alone, unable to find it realised to the sense on earth, the poet, beaten between and tortured by these two inabilities, dies of the pain. Epipsychidion records a moment when he thought that he had found realised in Emilia this "soul out of his soul." Had Prince Athanase been finished, it would have recorded the vicissitudes of this pursuit.