1815. ALASTOR; OR, THE SPIRIT OF SOLITUDE. 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 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 selfcentred 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 they whose hearts are dry as summer dust, December 14, 1815. "Nondum amabam, et amare amabam, quærebam quid amarem, amans mare." EARTH, ocean, air, beloved brotherhood! CONFESS. ST. August. Your love, and recompense the boon with mine; Mother of this unfathomable world! Thy messenger, to render up the tale Of what we are. In lone and silent hours, When night makes a weird sound of its own stillness, Staking his very life on some dark hope, Have I mixed awful talk and asking looks With my most innocent love, until strange tears Uniting with those breathless kisses, made Such magic as compels the charmed night To render up thy charge: . . . . and, though ne'er yet Enough from incommunicable dream, And twilight phantasms and deep noonday thought Suspended in the solitary dome Of some mysterious and deserted fane, I wait thy breath, Great Parent, that my strain There was a Poet whose untimely tomb By solemn vision and bright silver dream, His infancy was nurtured. Every sight And sound from the vast earth and ambient air, Sent to his heart its choicest impulses. The fountains of divine philosophy Fled not his thirsting lips; and all of great, Or good, or lovely, which the sacred past In truth or fable consecrates, he felt And knew. When early youth had past, he left To scek strange truths in undiscovered lands. Its fields of snow and pinnacles of ice To avarice or pride, their starry domes In lonesome vales, making the wild his home, His wandering step, Obedient to high thoughts, has visited The awful ruins of the days of old : Athens, and Tyre, and Balbec, and the waste Of Babylon, the eternal pyramids, Memphis and Thebes, and whatsoe'er of strange Or jasper tomb, or mutilated sphinx, Dark Ethiopia on her desert hills Conceals. Among the ruined temples there, Of more than man, where marble demons watch Hang their mute thoughts on the mute walls around, Of the world's youth, through the long burning day Gazed on those speechless shapes, nor, when the moon Filled the mysterious halls with floating shades Suspended he that task, but ever gazed And gazed, till meaning on his vacant mind Meanwhile an Arab maiden brought his food, And spread her matting for his couch, and stole To speak her love :-and watched his nightly sleep, Parted in slumber, whence the regular breath The Poet wandering on, through Arabie In joy and exultation held his way: Its loneliest dell, where odorous plants entwine Beside a sparkling rivulet he stretched His languid limbs. A vision on his sleep There came, a dream of hopes that never yet Had flushed his cheek. He dreamed a veiled maid Sate near him, talking in low solemn tones. Her voice was like the voice of his own soul Of many-coloured woof and shifting hues. Thoughts the most dear to him, and poesy, Of her pure mind kindled through all her frame She raised, with voice stifled in tremulous sobs Its bursting burthen: at the sound he turned, With frantic gesture and short breathless cry Roused by the shock, he started from his trance- The hues of heaven that canopied his bower Of yesternight? The sounds that soothed his sleep, The mystery and the majesty of earth, The joy, the exultation? His wan eyes Gaze on the empty scene as vacantly As ocean's moon looks on the moon in heaven. A vision to the sleep of him who spurned |