THE COMPLETE POETICAL WORKS OF PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY THE TEXT NEWLY COLLATED AND REVISED BY GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY BOSTON AND NEW YORK M DCCC XCII 828 Copyright, 1892, BY HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. All rights reserved. The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A. Rosalind and Helen was published, together with other poems, in a thin volume, with Shelley's name, at London, in the spring of 1819, under the imprint of C. H. Reynell for C. & J. Ollier. The poem was begun at Marlow as early as the summer of 1817, and was sufficiently far advanced to lead Shelley to send copy to the publisher just before leaving England in March, 1818; it was finished, apparently, on Mary's request, in August, at the Baths of Lucca. Shelley's original Advertisement to the volume, dated Naples, December 20, 1818, opens with the following: "The story of Rosalind and Helen is, undoubtedly, 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 favorable 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." The remainder of the Advertisement is printed, in this edition, in the NOTES upon Lines written among the Euganean Hills. |