and Cythna". A
certain number of copies were issued with this title (How many copies
were put in circulation is not known. There must certainly have been
many more than the traditional three; for when I was a boy at Harrow, I
picked up two uncut copies in boards at a Bristol bookshop, for the
price of 2 shillings and 6 pence a piece.); but the publisher, Ollier,
not without reason dreaded the effect the book would make; he therefore
induced Shelley to alter the relationship between the hero and his
bride, and issued the old sheets with certain cancelled pages under the
title of "Revolt of Islam". It was published in January, 1818. While
still resident at Marlow, Shelley began two autobiographical poems--the
one "Prince Athanase," which he abandoned as too introspective and
morbidly self-analytical, the other, "Rosalind and Helen", which he
finished afterwards in Italy. Of the second of these compositions he
entertained a poor opinion; nor will it bear comparison with his best
work. To his biographer its chief interest consists in the character of
Lionel, drawn less perhaps exactly from himself than as an ideal of the
man he would have wished to be. The poet in "Alastor", Laon in the
"Revolt of Islam", Lionel in "Rosalind and Helen", and Prince Athanase,
are in fact a remarkable row of self-portraits, varying in the tone and
scale of idealistic treatment bestowed upon them. Later on in life,
Shelley outgrew this preoccupation with his idealized self, and directed
his genius to more objective themes. Yet the autobiographic tendency, as
befitted a poet of the highest lyric type, remained to the end a
powerful characteristic.

Before quitting the first period of Shelley's development, it may be
well to set before the reader a specimen of that self-delineative poetry
which characterized it; and since it is difficult to detach a single
passage from the continuous stanzas of "Laon and Cythna", I have chosen
the lines in "Rosalind and Helen" which describe young Lionel:

To Lionel,
Though of great wealth and lineage high,
Yet through those dungeon walls there came
Thy thrilling light, O Liberty!
And as the meteor's midnight flame
Startles the dreamer, sun-like truth
Flashed on his visionary youth,
And filled him, not with love, but faith.
And hope, and courage mute in death;
For love and life in him were twins,
Born at one birth: in every other
First life, then love its cour