the Pagan World were amerced of their worship;1 and the many unsubdued, or the monstrous objects of the idolatry of China, India, the Antarctic islands, and the native tribes of America, certainly have reigned over the understandings of men in conjunction or in succession, during periods in which all we know of evil has been in a state of portentous, and, until the revival of learning and the arts, perpetually increasing activity. The Grecian gods seem indeed to have been personally more innocent, although it cannot be said, that as far as temperance and chastity are concerned, they gave so edifying an example as their The sublime human character of Jesus Christ was deformed by an imputed identification with a power, who tempted, betrayed, and punished the innocent beings who were called into existence by his sole will; and for the period of a thousand years, the spirit of this most just, wise, and benevolent of men, has been propitiated with myriads of hecatombs of those who approached the nearest to his innocence and wisdom, sacrificed under every aggravation of atrocity and variety of torture. The horrors of the Mexican, the Peruvian, and the Indian superstitions are well known. successor. 1 This passage from the One to worship was omitted from the first edition. 2 This passage from so edifying to variety of torture was omitted from the first edition, where we read instead the three words very edifying examples. WRITTEN ON HEARING THE NEWS OF THE WHAT! alive and so bold, oh earth? Art thou not overbold? What! leapest thou forth as of old Are not the limbs still when the ghost is fled, How is not thy quick heart cold? What spark is alive on thy hearth? And livest thou still, Mother Earth? Of that most fiery spirit, when it fled What, Mother, do you laugh now he is dead? Who has known me of old," replied Earth, It is thou who art overbold." 1 Mrs. Shelley places this poem among those written in 1821. So in Shelley's edition; but more is substituted for move in Mrs. Shelley's editions. As she sung, "to my bosom I fold And so with living motion all are fed, And the quick spring like weeds out of the dead. "Still alive and still bold," shouted Earth, "I grow bolder and still more bold. The dead fill me ten thousand fold Fuller of speed, and splendour, and mirth, Till by the spirit of the mighty dead My heart grew warm. I feed on whom I fed. "Aye, alive and still bold," muttered Earth, In terror and blood and gold, 25 30 A torrent of ruin to death from his birth. 35 And weave into his shame, which like the dead 1 The inverted commas at the beginning and end of this stanza are wanting in Shelley's edition. 40 [Shelley's letter to Leigh Hunt, an extract from which follows the preface to Julian and Maddalo, is conclusive as to the date of that poem,-between August and November, 1818; and Mrs. Shelley assigns it to that year, although, when it was first printed among the Posthumous Poems, the words "Rome, May, 1819," appeared at the end. I do not conclude, with Mr. Rossetti, that " probably the poem was not finished until this latter date," -which seems to me more likely to be that of some transcript, and accidentally left standing. Shelley must have written the poem out himself at least three times; for, beside the final MS. from which it is now given, there is a fair draft written in ink in a note-book in Sir Percy Shelley's possession; and no poem of Shelley's was, I believe, ever first composed in the form of a fair draft. The MS. sent to Leigh Hunt is one of rare beauty. It was discovered by Mr. Townshend Mayer, and placed at my disposal for this edition, under the circumstances mentioned in my preface (Vol. I. p. xxxviii). It is written on gilt-edged leaves apparently removed from a pocket-book, and measuring only 315 inches by 2, so as to necessitate the minutest care and neatness. The iambic is usually made to come into the breadth of the tiny page; and a curious result of this is that besides the many stops omitted on general grounds of inexactness in such small matters, an inordinate number are wanting when the sense requires them at the close of the line. At page 106 I give a statement of those points which I found it necessary to supply. The fac-simile of page 10 of the MS., which Mr. G. I. F. Tupper has produced, and which faces this page, will suffice to show how likely these stops were to be dropped. I suppose Shelley took the trouble to count the lines, to see whether there were too many for The Examiner, and counted them wrongly; for at the end he has written the figures "608." Julian and Maddalo and other Poems were announced as "in the press," at the end of the Prometheus volume; but Hunt probably thought it well to stop the issue on account of the unmistakeable personality of two of the characters depicted,-Byron and Shelley. In a letter to Mr. Ollier, dated 15 December, 1819 (Shelley Memorials, pp. 122-3), Shelley says "Suppose you print that in the manner of Hunt's Hero and Leander"; and in another letter to the same gentleman, dated the 14th of May, 1820 (Shelley Memorials, pp. 138-9), he says, "If you print Julian and Maddalo, I wish it to be printed in some unostentatious form, accompanied with the fragment of Athanase, and exactly in the manner in which I sent it; and I particularly desire that my name be not annexed to the first edition of it in any case." This Linds one pretty closely to the text of the Leigh Hunt MS.; and indeed every important variation therein is an improvement.-H. B. F.] |