746 / PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
for the Romantic quest that he reiterated in his later poems and that also served as a paradigm for many other poems, from Byron's Manfred and Keats's Endymion to the quest poems of Shelley's later admirer William Butler Yeats.
Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude
Preface
The poem entitled 'ALASTOR,' may be considered as allegorical of one of
the most interesting situations of the human mind. It represents a youth of
uncorrupted feelings and adventurous genius led forth by an imagination
inflamed and purified through familiarity with all that is excellent and majes
tic, to the contemplation of the universe. He drinks deep of the fountains of
knowledge, and is still insatiate. The magnificence and beauty of the external
world sinks profoundly into the frame of his conceptions, and affords to their
modifications a variety not to be exhausted. So long as it is possible for his
desires to point towards objects thus infinite and unmeasured, he is joyous,
and tranquil, and self-possessed. But the period arrives when these objects
cease to suffice. His mind is at length suddenly awakened and thirsts for inter
course with an intelligence similar to itself. He images to himself the Being
whom he loves. Conversant with speculations of the sublimest and most per
fect natures, the vision in which he embodies his own imaginations unites all
of wonderful, or wise, or beautiful, which the poet, the philosopher, or the
lover could depicture. The intellectual faculties, the imagination, the func
tions of sense, have their respective requisitions on the sympathy of corre
sponding powers in other human beings. The Poet is represented as uniting
these requisitions, and attaching them to a single image.1 He seeks in vain for
a prototype of his conception. Blasted by his disappointment, he descends to
an untimely grave. The picture is not barren of instruction to actual men. The Poet's self-
centred seclusion was avenged by the furies of an irresistible passion pursuing
him to speedy ruin. But that Power which strikes the luminaries of the world
with sudden darkness and extinction, by awakening them to too exquisite a
perception of its influences, dooms to a slow and poisonous decay those
meaner spirits that dare to abjure its dominion. Their destiny is more abject
and inglorious as their delinquency is more contemptible and pernicious. They
who, deluded by no generous error, instigated by no sacred thirst of doubtful
knowledge, duped by no illustrious superstition, loving nothing on this earth,
and cherishing no hopes beyond, yet keep aloof from sympathies with their
kind, rejoicing neither in human joy nor mourning with human grief; these,
and such as they, have their apportioned curse. They languish, because none
feel with them their common nature. They are morally dead. They are neither
friends, nor lovers, nor fathers, nor citizens of the world, nor benefactors of
their country. Among those who attempt to exist without human sympathy,
the pure and tender-hearted perish through the intensity and passion of their
1. Shelley's view that the object of love is an ide-belonging to the nature of men. . . . [This is] a soul alized projection of all that is best within the self within our soul. . . . The discovery of its anti-type is clarified by a passage in his 'Essay on Love,' .. . in such proportion as the type within demands; which may have been written at about the time of this is the invisible and unattainable point to which Alastor: 'We dimly see within our intellectual Love tends; and . . . without the possession of nature . . . the ideal prototype of every thing excel-which there is no rest nor respite to the heart over lent or lovely that we are capable of conceiving as which it rules.'
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ALASTOR / 75 1
search after its communities, when the vacancy of their spirit suddenly makes itself felt. All else, selfish, blind, and torpid, are those unforeseeing multitudes who constitute, together with their own, the lasting misery and loneliness of the world. Those who love not their fellow-beings live unfruitful lives, and prepare for their old age a miserable grave.
'The good die first, And those whose hearts are dry as summer dust, Burn to the socket!'2
