She looked around in wonder, and beheld Henry, who kneeled in silence by her couch, ALASTOR OR THE SPIRIT OF SOLITUDE Nondum amabam, et amare amabam, quærebam quid amarem, amans amare. Confess. St. August. Alastor was published by Shelley in March, 1816, with other poems, in a thin volume, to which it gave the title, under the imprint of S. Hamilton, Weybridge, Surrey, for Baldwin, Cradock and Joy, London. It was composed during the autumn of 1815, when Shelley was living at Bishopsgate Heath near Windsor Park, and reflects the quiet of his days there, as well as the impressions of nature which he derived from travel, and the mood of expectation of early death which he experienced in the earlier months of that year. The volume, although it had little sale and made no impression except upon Shelley's personal friends, became sufficiently scarce to lead Mrs. Shelley to include a reprint of the poem in Posthumous Poems, 1824. PREFACE 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 selfpossessed. 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, the lasting misery and loneliness of the world. Those who love not their fellow-beings live unfruitful lives and prepare for their old age a miserable grave. "The good die first, And those whose hearts are dry as summer dust December 14, 1815. [The remainder of the Preface published with Alastor is printed, in this edition, with The Damon of the World, which it concerns.] |