greater than is supposed. Those who wait until they can eat this plain fare with the sauce of appetite will scarcely join with the hypocritical sensualist at a lord-mayor's feast, who declaims against the pleasures of the table. Solomon kept a thousand concubines, and owned in despair that all was vanity. The man whose happiness is constituted by the society of one amiable woman would find some difficulty in sympathizing with the disappointment of this venerable debauchee.

I address myself not only to the young enthusiast, the ardent devotee of truth and virtue, the pure and passionate moralist yet unvitiated by the contagion of the world. He will embrace a pure system, from its abstract truth, its beauty, its simplicity and its promise of wide-extended benefit; unless custom has turned poison into food, he will hate the brutal pleasures of the chase by instinct; it will be a contemplation full of horror and disappointment to his mind that beings capable of the gentlest and most admirable sympathies should take delight in the death-pangs and last convulsions of dying animals. The elderly man, whose youth has been poisoned by intemperance, or who has lived with apparent moderation and is afflicted with a variety of painful maladies, would find his account in a beneficial change produced without the risk of poisonous medicines. The mother, to whom the perpetual restlessness of disease and unaccountable deaths incident to her children are the causes of incurable unhappiress, would on this diet experience the satisfaction of beholding their perpetual healths and natural playfulness. The most valuable lives are daily destroyed by diseases that it is dangerous to palliate and impossible to cure by medicine. How much longer will man continue to pimp for the gluttony of death, his most insidious, implacable and eternal foe?

[Four brief extracts from Plutarch, repì σapKopayias, are here omitted, by advice of the general editor.]

NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS

For the sources of QUEEN MAB, beyond those indicated in Shelley's notes, the student should consult the Latin authors; Volney's Ruins suggested the framework. The text presents few difficulties. Mrs. Shelley made a few changes in the interest of grammar, and Rossetti increased their number and added other changes in the interest of what he conceived to be Shelley's sense. Some of these grammatical corrections are unnecessary, and those in the sense are usually arbitrary. The most important points are the following:

1 See Mr. Newton's book. His children are the most beautiful and healthy creatures it is possible to conceive the girls are perfect models for a sculptor; their dispositions are also the most gentle and conciliating; the judicious treatment, which they experience in other points, may be a correlative cause of this. In the first five years of their life. of 18,000 children that are born 7500 die of various diseases; and how many more of those that survive are not rendered miserable by

Page 10. Line 151. Rossetti reads As for Who.

Page 13. Line 115. Rossetti reads sanctify. Line 140. Dowden accepts Tutin's conjecture in punctuation, reading a colon after element and deleting the period after remained in the next line.

Page 14. Line 176. All editors follow Mrs. Shelley in reading secure.

Page 15. Line 9. The reading of the text is Rossetti's, the original having a period after promise.

Page 18. Line 219. Rossetti reads his for its. Page 25. Line 56. Rossetti reads Shows. Page 27. Line 182. Rossetti reads his for

their.

Page 28. Line 205. Shelley in quoting the line in his NOTES reads Dawns for Draws, which Rossetti adopts.

Page 30. Line 139. Rossetti reads future for past.

Page 31. ALASTOR.

This poem has been examined in a more scholarly way than any other of Shelley's longer works, Dr. Richard Ackermann having made it in part the subject of an inaugural dissertation, Quellen, Vorbilder, Stoffe zu Shelley's Poetischen Werken, I. Alastor, etc. (Erlangen & Leipzig, 1890), and Prof. Al. Beljame having translated and edited it, with elaborate notes, Alastor, ou le génie de la solitude (Paris, 1895). Dr. Acker mann traces the influence of Wordsworth and Coleridge in the special romantic features of the nature-handling, vision element, and what might be called the psychology of the poem and also that of Southey and Landor in some of the Oriental coloring and detail of the narrative; but, like Brandl in his Life of Coleridge, he pushes the theory of direct obligation too far, inasmuch as what is common in subjectmatter and spontaneous to the method of any poetic period or group cannot fairly be regarded as peculiar to the originality of even its earliest members. Professor Beljame does not fall into this error, and gives illustrative parallelisms of phrase and image merely as such unless the borrowing is clear. The versification and diction recall Coleridge and Wordsworth in their most musical blank verse, but except in a few passages (lines 46-49, 482-485, 718-720) the rhythm has distinctly Shelley's rapid and peculiar modulation. The substance of the poem, however, is variously embedded in Shelley's literary studies and in his actual observation of nature, while the feeling of the whole is a personal mood. It is customary to regard Shelley's landscape as unreal; but, though it is imaginative, it contains elements of actuality, transcripts of scenes as witnessed by him, to a far maladies not immediately mortal? The quality and quantity of a woman's milk are materially injured by the use of dead flesh. In an island near Iceland, where no vegetables are to be got, the children invariably die of tetanus before they are three weeks old, and the population is supplied from the mainland. - Sir G. Mackenzie's History of Iceland. See. also, Emile, chap. 1. pp. 53, 54, 56.

greater extent than has ever been acknowledged; in the present poem, his own rivernavigation, his life in Wales and travels abroad, as well as the forest at Windsor, have left direct traces, as Dr. Ackermann especially remarks. Shelley himself mentions his opportunities for observation as among his qualifications for poetry, in the preface to THE REVOLT OF ISLAM. The notes that follow ascribe to each commentator what seems to be his own. The meaning of the title and its source are given in the head-notes. The motto is from the first chapter of the third book of St. Augustine's Confessions, and the full text is given by Beljame: Veni Carthaginem; et circumstrepebat me undique sartago flagitiosorum amorum. Nondum amabam, et amare amabam, et secretiore indigentia oderam me minus indigentem. Quærebam quod amarem, amans amare, et oderam securitatem et viam sine muscipulis.

Line 1. Beljame happily compares the invocation in Ben Jonson's Cynthia's Revels, V. 2, which is identical in structure. The substance, or feeling for nature, is Wordsworthian; compare, for example, Influence of natural objects, Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey, and Lines left upon a Seat in a Yew-Tree.

3. Natural piety, an example of Shelley's direct borrowings of phrase from Wordsworth (My heart leaps up), of which others occur below, obstinate questionings, line 26 (Ode on Intimations of Immortality, IX, 13, and too deep for tears, line 713 (the same, XI. 17).

13. Ackermann compares Wordsworth, The Ercursion, II. 41-47, but the humanitarian feeling toward animal life belongs to the period, and is a fundamental source of Shelley's inspiration.

20-29. Compare HYMN TO INTELLECTUAL BEAUTY, V.

30. Brandl (Life of Coleridge, 190) compares the situation with Coleridge's Frost at Midnight, but I can see in the two only a parallelism of the romantic temperament and method.

38. Beljame cites the inscription of the veiled Isis from Volney, Les Ruines: Je suis tout ce qui a été, tout ce qui est, tout ce qui sera, et nul mortel n'a levé mon voile.

54. Waste wilderness. Forman quotes Blake for. the phrase, and Beljame follows him, but in this as in other instances the attempt to tie Shelley to Blake fails. Had he known Blake's works he would have shown clearer evidences of it. The present phrase is, of course, Milton's, Paradise Regained, I. 7.

'And Eden raised in the waste wilderness.' 83. Volcano, Etna.

85. Bitumen lakes. Beljame identifies these with the Dead Sea, and notes Southey's description of Ait's bitumen-lake, Thalaba, V. 22. It seems as likely that Shelley's sole source is Southey, and that he had no particular local reference.

87-94. Beljame supposes that Shelley here blends in one description the marvels of the two isles Antiparos and Milo, one for its stalactite

And as he passes on, the little hinds That shake for bristly herds the foodful bough Wonder, stand still, gaze, and trip satisfied; Pleased more if chestnut, out of prickly husk, Shot from the sandal, roll along the glade.' 108. The background of the following passage appears to be, as Beljame suggests, Volney's Les Ruines, from the first four chapters of which he quotes to show a general sympathy, and also analogies of detail. The pilgrim literature, which both Volney and Chateaubriand (René, also cited, but inconclusively) illustrate, may well include ALASTOR as among its kindred.

119. The Zodiac's brazen mystery, the Zodiac of the temple of Denderah in Upper Egypt. Beljame refers to Volney, Les Ruines, XXII., note. It is now in the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris.

120. Mute, written just before Champollion's labors, as Beljame notes.

129. Arab maiden. Ackermann derives the character from Thalaba's Oneiza, as also the veiled maid below (line 151), and compares the description of the latter from point to point with that in Thalaba, III. 24, 25. The parallel is somewhat forced, as becomes more evident on examination. The lines 161-162 have as the corresponding passage in Thalaba:

'Oh! even with such a look as fables say
The Mother Ostrich fixes on her egg,

Till that intense affection
Kindle its light of life,-

Even in such deep and breathless tenderness
Oneiza's soul is centred on the youth.'

So, too, in the alleged parallelism for lines 167, 168, and 175, 176, we find in Thalaba

for a brother's eye

Were her long fingers tinged,
As when she trimmed the lamp,

And through the veins and delicate skin
The light shone rosy; '

that is, as a long note shows, being 'tinged with henna' so as to make the fingers seem in some instances branches of transparent red coral.' Shelley's meaning is far different, and is unlikely to be in any way connected in its origin with a recollection of Southey, in either of these two passages, though in introducing the Arab maiden he would naturally recall Oneiza. The veiled maid is, however, not an Arabian, but the spirit of the ideal.

140-144. The background of the Poet's wandering seems to be found in Arrian's Expedition of Alexander, and possibly similar passages

in Quintus Curtius and Dion Cassius. The wild Carmanian waste is the Desert of Kerman; the aërial mountains are the Hindoo Koosh, or Indian Caucasus, where Arrian wrongly places the sources of the Indus and Oxus.

145. The vale of Cashmire, the earthly paradise of that name, often mentioned in poetry. The particular descriptions given by Shelley, both here in the place of the vision, and later in the glen of the Caspian Caucasus, seem to me to recall the scenery and atmosphere of Miss Owenson's (Lady Morgan) The Missionary, a romance which Shelley read in 1811. See note on line 400.

161. Rossetti reads Himself for Herself in his first edition, and was defended by James Thomson, but no other editor has adopted the conjecture, and Rossetti himself has restored the original reading not without some apologetic protest.

177. Woven wind, the ventum textilem of the ancients, and also perhaps with a recollection of the transparent veils of Thalaba, VI. 26, note. For the development of the structure of the whole vision here given (lines 149-191) compare the passage in the preface where Shelley states the elements of his conception in prose.

6

204. See note on line 129. This vision is the ALASTOR or evil genius, the spirit of solitude, the embodiment of all the responses to his own nature which the Poet lacked through his separation from society, and was sent by the spirit of sweet human love to him who had spurned her choicest gifts' by his self-isolation; it was sent, as an Avenger, and leads or drives him on in search of its own phantasm till he dies. The folly of devotion to the idealizing faculty apart from human life seems to be the moral of the allegory, which most critics have found a dark one; but the treatment of the Poet is so sympathetic, notwithstanding the latter's error, and the presentation of the Destroyer in the shape of the visionary maid is so alluring, that the reader forgets the didactic intent of the fable, and sees only an adumbration of the life of Shelley as seen by himself in the clairvoyance of genius, and consciously seen by him as a fate which he would avoid by mingling sympathetically with the life of men. If, as Dowden says, the poem be in its inmost sense a pleading on behalf of human love,' shown by the fate of those who reject it, it is also not without a tragic sense of the pity of that fate in those in whose life such a rejection is rather the isolation of a noble nature and the result less of choice than of temperament and circumstance. Compare Shelley's comment in the preface.

210. Compare Eschylus, Agamemnon, 415. 211-219. The union of Sleep and Death in Shelley's poetry is a fixed idea; compare in this poem lines 293, 368. The use of waterreflections as a detail is also constant, and is repeated below no less than five times, lines 385, 408, 459, 470, 501. The tenacity with which Shelley's mind clings to its images is characteristic, and shows intensity of application

rather than poverty of material, in a young writer; not only in ALASTOR are there some of his images permanent in his verse, such as Ahasuerus, the serpent, and the boat, but instances of pure repetition frequently occur, as above; compare, below, the alchemist, 31, 682, the bird and snake, 227, 325, the lyre, 42, 667, the cloud, 663, 687.

219. Conducts, Rossetti thus corrects the original reading, conduct, which is, however, retained by all other editors. Shelley doubtless wrote conduct, the verb being attracted into the plural by the number of details mentioned in connection with vault; other explanations, on the ground of does understood, in one or another way, are only ingenious excuses; the structure of the group of questions is so continuous that it seems best to make the change.

227. Compare THE REVOLT OF ISLAM, I. viii.-xiv.

240. Aornos, 'identified by General Abbott in 1854 as Mount Mahabunn near the right bank of the Indus about sixty miles above its confluence with the Cabul,' Chinnock, Arrian's Anabasis, 237, note. Petra, identified as the Sogdian rock (Arrian, IV. 18); for the name Beljame quotes Quintus Curtius, VIII. 11; Una erat Petra.

242. Balk, Bactria was the ancient name.

242-244. It was Caracallus who violated the Parthian royal tombs and scattered the dust of the kings to the four winds. Beljame gives the reference Dion Cassius, LXXVIII. 1.

262-267. Ackermann and Beljame trace the detail to Thalaba, VIII. 1 and IX. 17, Shelley having united the two in one image.

272. Chorasmian shore, properly the Aral Sea, but Shelley apparently intends the Caspian Sea.

299. Shallop, the detail is from Thalaba, XI. 31, as Ackermann remarks, as is the general conception of the voyage on the underground river. The opening passage is as follows:

A little boat there lay, Without an oar, without a sail, One only seat it had, one seat.' Compare also the boat of THE WITCH OF ATLAS.

337-339. Beljame compares the same image in A SUMMER EVENING CHURCHYARD, but it is used most memorably in To NIGHT:

Bind with thy hair the eyes of Day,

Kiss her till she be wearied out."

349. Other editors retain the original reading of a period after ocean; but Rossetti changed this to a semicolon and dash, which seems justifiable where no pretence is made of reproducing Shelley's punctuation.

353. Caucasus, the Caspian Caucasus.

376. The cascade, like the underground voyage, is from Thalaba, VII. 6, quoted by Acker

Plunge the whole waters: so precipitous,
So fathomless a fall,

That their earth-shaking roar came deadened up
Like subterranean thunder.'

Ackermann also recalls the river in Kubla Khan.

400. The following extracts, from Miss Owenson's The Missionary, seem apposite here:

'Surrounded by those mighty mountains whose summits appear tranquil and luminous above the regions of cloud which float on their brow, whose grotesque forms are brightened by innumerable rills, and dashed by foaming torrents, the valley of Cashmire presented to the wandering eye scenes of picturesque and glowing beauty, whose character varied with each succeeding hour. It was evening when the missionary reached the base of a lofty mountain, which seemed a monument of the first day of creation. It was a solemn and sequestered spot, where an eternal spring seemed to reign, and which looked like the cradle of infant Nature, when she first awoke in all her primæval bloom of beauty. It was a glen screened by a mighty mass of rocks, over whose bold fantastic forms and variegated hues dashed the silvery foam of the mountain torrent, flinging its dewy sprays around. He proceeded through a path which from the long cusa-grass matted over it and the entangled creepers of the parasite plants, seemed to have been rarely if ever explored. The trees, thick and umbrageous, were wedded in their towering branches above his head, and knitted in their spreading roots beneath his feet. The sound of a cascade became his sole guide through the leafy labyrinth. He at last reached the pile of rocks whence the torrent flowed, pouring its tributary flood into a broad river. Before

the altar appeared a human form, if human it might be called, which stood so bright and so ethereal in its look that it seemed but a transient incorporation of the brilliant mists of the morning; so light and so aspiring in its attitude that it appeared already ascending from the earth it scarcely touched to mingle with its kindred air. The resplendent locks of the seeming sprite were enwreathed with beams, and sparkled with the waters of the holy stream whence it appeared recently to have emerged.' (Chap. VI.)

'Not a sound disturbed the mystic silence, save the low murmurs of a gushing spring, which fell with more than mortal music from a mossy cliff, sparkling among the matted roots of overhanging trees, and gliding, like liquid silver, beneath the network of the parasite plants. The flowers of the mangosteen gave to the fresh air a balmy fragrance. The mighty rocks of the Pagoda, which rose behind in endless perspective, scaling the heavens, which seemed to repose upon their summits, lent the strong relief of their deep shadows to the softened twilight of the foreground.' (Chap. XII.)

The landscape of the vale of Cashmire as here described is, in effect, the same as that of the glen in ALASTOR, and in the figure of Luxima

there is something sympathetic, at least, with the veiled maid of the vision. In Hilarion (the missionary) there is also something sympathetic with the Poet of the poem, as he has rejected love, and now suffers the penalty of a great passion, doomed necessarily to a tragic conclusion, under influences of solitude and nature. (See chap. IX., where his psychological character is developed: 'he resembled the enthusiast of experimental philosophy who shuts out the light and breath of heaven to inhale an artificial atmosphere and enjoy an ideal existence.') It is interesting to observe also the description of the subterranean cave, with stalactite formation, lit by blue subterraneous fire, the temple most ancient and celebrated in India, after that of Elephanta' (chap. XII.). See, also, for other traces of this romance in Shelley's work, the notes on THE REVOLT OF ISLAM, XII., and THE INDIAN SERENADE.

421, 422. Beljame quotes from Mrs. Shelley's Journal, August, 1814, in Dowden's Life of Shelley, At Noè [Nouaille ?] - in a roontide of intense heat - whilst our postilion waited, we walked into the forest of pines; it was a scene of enchantment, where every sound and sight contributed to charm. Our mossy seat in the deepest recesses of the wood was inclosed from the world by an impenetrable veil.'

431-438. Ackermann compares Scott, Rokeby, IV. 3; but there are many forest descriptions in English verse as similar, the original of all in this style being Milton's Paradise Lost, IV. 451-454. Ackermann here again seeks the original detail in Thalaba, VI. 22:

And oh what odours the voluptuous vale
Scatters from jasmine bowers,

From yon rose wilderness,

From clustered henna, and from orange groves That with such perfumes fill the breeze.' So definite an origin for general properties seems to me most unlikely.

454-456. Beljame compares A SUMMER EVENING CHURCHYARD, V. 5, 6.

479. Spirit, apparently an embodiment of Nature evoked by and reflecting the mood of death-melancholy in the Poet; not the spirit of the vision which he seeks, which is the light that shone within his soul' (lines 492, 493), but it may also be regarded as a later incarnation of the latter.

502-514. Ackermann compares the very similar though more diffuse passage in Wordsworth, The Excursion, III. 967-991.

543-548. Editors and commentators have struggled to extract the precise meaning from these lines, but without establishing any likely emendation. Miss Blind proposes inclosed for disclosed; Forman suggests amidst precipices for its precipice; Madox Brown guesses Hid for Mid; E. S.' would read their precipice for its; Swinburne thinks a verse has been dropped, and an anonymous writer conjectures that the lost verse may be represented by inserting after 547 'A cataract descending with wild roar.' Rossetti, after some ineffectual wanderings,

returned to the original text, which Dowden also sustains. The interpretation, however, remains different, Rossetti taking precipice, as the subject of disclosed used for disclosed itself, and Dowden taking which as the subject of disclosed with gulfs and caves as its object, and its precipice obscuring the ravine as parenthetical. Brooke also retains the text, and takes its as equivalent to its own. The simplest explanation where all are awkward is to consider the clause beginning and its precipice as parallel with the earlier half beginning now rose rocks, and the sense briefly would be: the rocks rose in the evening light, and also the precipice rose (shadowing the ravine below), disclosed above in the same light. I take precipice as subject to rose understood and disclosed as a participle; its is the same as in 542, 543, i. e., the loud streams in 550. If this is rejected I should prefer to take which as the subject of disclosed and precipice as its object. To take precipice as the subiect of disclosed with gulfs and caves as its object, involves a construction of line 548 so forced as to amount in my mind to impossibility.

602-605. Ackermann quotes from Mrs. Shelley's Journal (Dowden's Life of Shelley): The evening was most beautiful; the horned moon hung in the light of sunset, which threw a glow of unusual depth of redness above the piny mountains and the dark deep valleys. . . . The moon becomes yellow, and hangs close to the woody horizon."

668-671. The passage has been somewhat discussed, but Brooke's note settles the meaning easily: It is quite in Shelley's manner... to go back and bring together his illustrations. Here the poet's frame is a lute, a bright stream, a dream of youth. The lute is still, the stream is dark and dry, the dream is unremembered.' The practice is common to English poetry from the early days. Compare EPIPSYCHIDION, 73-75.

677. The reference is to Ahasuerus, the wandering Jew. Compare QUEEN MAB, VI. and Shelley's NOTES on the passage. The character again appears in HELLAS.

Page 43. THE REVOLT OF ISLAM.

The text was made from the sheets of Laon and Cythna by the insertion of 26 cancel-leaves. The copy upon which Shelley worked in recomposing is described at length by Forman, The Shelley Library, 83-86. The cancelled passages are as follows:

Canto II. xxi. 1

I had a little sister whose fair eyes

XXV. 2

To love in human life, this sister sweet

Canto III. i. 1

What thoughts had sway over my sister's slumber i. 3

As if they did ten thousand years outnumber Canto IV. xxx. 6

And left it vacant-'t was her brother's face Canto V. xlvii. 5

I had a brother once, but he is dead!

Canto VI. xxiv. 8

My own sweet sister looked, with joy did quail, xxxi. 6

The common blood which ran within our frames, xxxix. C-9

With such close sympathies, for to each other Had high and solemn hopes, the gentle might Of earliest love, and all the thoughts which smother Cold Evil's power, now linked a sister and a brother. xl. 1

And such is Nature's modesty, that those

Canto VIII. iv. 9

Dream ye that God thus builds for man in solitude ? v. 1.

What then is God? Ye mock yourselves and give vi. 1

What then is God? Some moonstruck sophist stood vi. 8, 9

And that men say God has appointed Death On all who scorn his will to wreak immortal wrath. vii. 1-4

Men say they have seen God, and heard from God, Or known from others who have known such things, And that his will is all our law, a rod

To scourge us into slaves-that Priests and Kings viii. 1

And it is said, that God will punish wrong; viii. 3, 4

And his red hell's undying snakes among

Will bind the wretch on whom he fixed a stain
xiii. 3, 4

For it is said God rules both high and low,
And man is made the captive of his brother;
Canto IX. xiii. 8

To curse the rebels. To their God did they xiv. 6

By God, and Nature, and Necessity.

xv. 4-7

There was one teacher, and must ever be, They said, even God, who, the necessity Of rule and wrong had armed against mankind, His slave and his avenger there to be;

xviii. 3-6

And Hell and Awe, which in the heart of man
Is od itself; the Priests its downfall knew,
As day by day their altars lovelier grew,
Till they were left alone within the fane;
Canto X. xxii. 9

On fire! Almighty God his hell on earth has spread! xxvi. 7, 8

Of their Almighty God, the armies wind

In sad procession: each among the train. xxviii. 1

O God Almighty! thou alone hast power. xxxi. 1

And Oromaze, and Christ, and Mahomet. xxxii. 1

He was a Christian Priest from whom it came xxxii. 4

To quell the rebel Atheists; a dire guest

xxxii. 9

To wreak his fear of God on vengeance on mankind