With aspirations heaves no more-a part Of1 heaven-resumèd past thou art become, Thy spirit waits with his in 1 The word the is inserted after Of in Hunt's writing: it does not seem to me an improvement. 2 I cannot find a more appropriate place than the present in which to give the little poem by Mrs. Shelley, originally published in The Keepsake for 1831, and entitled A DIRGE. BY THE AUTHOR OF "FRANKENSTEIN," This morn, thy gallant bark, love, Sail'd on the sunny sea; 'Tis noon, and tempests dark, love, Ah, woe! ah, woe! ah, woe! Thou liest upon the shore, love, Beside the swelling surge; our far home.2 But sea-nymphs ever more, love, O come! O come! O come In her first collected edition of Shelley's Poetical Works (1839), Mrs. Shelley headed the Notes to the Poems of 1822 with a revised version of this Dirge; varying sufficiently from the original to make it quite worth while to rescue the earlier version. [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 Damon of the World. The poems printed with Alastor are (1) the Stanzas addressed to Coleridge, headed ΔΑΚΡΥΕΙ [for ΔΑΚΡΥΣΙ] ΔΙΟΙΣΩ ΠΟΤΜΟΝ ΑΠΟΤΜΟΝ, (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 Damon of the World. I am not aware of any extant manuscript of Alastor.-H. B. F.] ALASTOR; ов, 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. |