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.' The feelings here spoken of which moulded the conception of the story' were suggested, in part, by the relation of Mrs. Shelley with a friend of her girlhood, Isabel Baxter, who fell away from her early attachment in consequence of Mrs. Shelley's flight with Shelley in July, 1814, and was afterward reconciled with her. (Dowden, Life, ii. 130, 131.) Forman (Type Facsimile of the original edition, Shelley Society's Publications, Second Series, No. 17, Introduction) discusses the matter at length, together with the reflection of political events in England possibly to be detected in the poem. Shelley wrote to Peacock, 'I lay no stress on it one way or the other.' Mrs. Shelley's note develops the reason for this indifference: 'Rosalind and Helen was begun at Marlow, and thrown aside, till I found it; and, at my ROSALIND AND HELEN ROSALIND, HELEN, and her Child. SCENE. The Shore of the Lake of Como. HELEN COME hither, my sweet Rosalind. None doth behold us now; the power Oh, come, If thou depart in scorn. And talk of our abandoned home! Remember, this is Italy, And we are exiles. Talk with me Of that our land, whose wilds and floods, request, it was completed. Shelley had no care for any of his poems that did not emanate from the depths of his mind, and develop some high or abstruse truth. When he does touch on human life and the human heart, no pictures can be more faithful, more delicate, more subtle, or more pathetic. He never mentioned Love, but he shed a grace, borrowed from his own nature, that scarcely any other poet has bestowed on that passion. When he spoke of it as the law of life, which inasmuch as we rebel against, we err and injure ourselves and others, he promulgated that which he considered an irrefragable truth. In his eyes it was the essence of our being, and all woe and pain arose from the war made against it by selfishness, or insensibility, or mistake. By reverting in his mind to this first principle, he discovered the source of many emotions, and could disclose the secrets of all hearts, and his delineations of passion and emotion touch the finest chords in our nature. Rosalind and Helen was finished during the summer of 1818, while we were at the Baths of Lucca.' |