early youth had past, he left
His cold fireside and alienated home,
To seek strange truths in undiscovered lands."

He wandered through many wildernesses, and visited the ruins of Egypt
and the East, where an Arab maiden fell in love with him and tended him.
But he passes on, "through Arabie, and Persia, and the wild Carmanian
waste," and, arrived at the vale of Cashmire, lies down to sleep in
a dell. Here he has a vision. A "veiled maid" sits by him, and, after
singing first of knowledge and truth and virtue, then of love, embraces
him. When he awakes, all the beauty of the world that enchanted and
satisfied him before has faded:

"The Spirit of Sweet Human Love has sent
A vision to the sleep of him who spurned
Her choicest gifts,"

and he rushes on, wildly pursuing the beautiful shape, like an eagle
enfolded by a serpent and feeling the poison in his breast. His limbs
grow lean, his hair thin and pale. Does death contain the secret of his
happiness? At last he pauses "on the lone Chorasmian shore," and sees a
frail shallop in which he trusts himself to the waves. Day and night the
boat flies before the storm to the base of the cliffs of Caucasus, where
it is engulfed in a cavern. Following the twists of the cavern, after a
narrow escape from a maelstrom, he floats into a calm pool, and lands.
Elaborate descriptions of forest and mountain scenery bring us, as the
moon sets, to the death of the worn-out poet--

"The brave, the gentle, and the beautiful,
The child of grace and genius! Heartless things
Are done and said i' the world, and many worms
And beasts and men live on... but thou art fled."

(4 "Alastor" is a Greek word meaning "the victim of an
Avenging Spirit.")

In 'Alastor' he melted with pity over what he felt to be his own
destiny; in 'The Revolt of Islam' (1817) he was "a trumpet that sings to
battle." This, the longest of Shelley's poems (there are 4176 lines of
it, exclusive of certain lyrical passages), is a versified novel with
a more or less coherent plot, though the mechanism is cumbrous, and any
one who expects from the title a story of some actual rebellion against
the Turks will be disappointed. Its theme, typified by an introductory
vision of an eagle and serpent battling in mid-sky, is the cosmic
struggle between evil and good, or, what for Shelley is the same thing,
between the forces of established authority and of man's aspiration for
liberty, the e