A MODERN ECLOGUE; WITH OTHER POEMS. BY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY. LONDON: PRINTED AND PUBLISHED BY JOHN ASCHAM, 71, CHANCERY LANE, HOLBORN, AND SOLD BY ALL BOOKSELLERS. ADVERTISEMENT. THE story of "Rosalind and Helen," is, undoubt edly, not an attempt in the highest style of poetry. It is in no degree calculated to excite profound meditation; and if, by interesting the affections and amusing the imagination, it awaken a certain ideal melancholy favourable to the reception of more important impressions, it will produce in the reader all that the writer experienced in the composition. I resigned myself, as I wrote, to the impulse of the feelings which moulded the conception of the story; and this impulse determined the pauses of a measure which only pretends to be regular inasmuch as it corresponds with, and expresses, the irregularity of the imaginations which inspired it. I do not know which of the few scattered poems I left in England will be selected by my bookseller to add to this collection. One, which I sent from Italy, was written after a day's excursion among those lovely mountains which surround what was once the retreat, and where is now the sepulchre, of Petrarch. If any one is inclined to condemn the insertion of the introductory lines, which image forth the sudden relief of a state of deep despondency by the radiant visions disclosed by the sudden burst of an Italian sunrise in autumn on the highest peak of those delightful mountains, |