Song: To —— [Harriet]

 XIV. Saint Edmond’s Eve

  XV. Revenge

 XVI. Ghasta; or, The Avenging Demon

XVII. Fragment; or, The Triumph of Conscience

POEMS FROM ST. IRVYNE; OR, THE ROSICRUCIAN

  I. Victoria

 II. ‘On the Dark Height of Jura’

III. Sister Rosa. A Ballad

IV. St. Irvyne’s Tower

 V. Bereavement

VI. The Drowned Lover

POSTHUMOUS FRAGMENTS OF MARGARET NICHOLSON

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War

Fragment: Supposed to be an Epithalamium of Francis Ravaillac and Charlotte Corday

Despair

Fragment

The Spectral Horseman

Melody to a Scene of Former Times

Stanza from a Translation of the Marseillaise Hymn

Bigotry’s Victim

On an Icicle that clung to the Grass of a Grave

Love

On a Fěte at Carlton House: Fragment

To a Star

To Mary, who died in this opinion

A Tale of Society as it is: From Facts, 1811

To the Republicans of North America

To Ireland

On Robert Emmet’s Grave

The Retrospect: Cwm Elan, 1812

Fragment of a Sonnet: To Harriet

To Harriet

Sonnet: To a Balloon laden with Knowledge

Sonnet: On launching some Bottles filled with Knowledge into the Bristol Channel

The Devil’s Walk

Fragment of a Sonnet: Farewell to North Devon

On leaving London for Wales

The Wandering Jew’s Soliloquy

Evening: To Harriet

To Ianthe

Song from the Wandering Jew

Fragment from the Wandering Jew

To the Queen of my Heart

INDEX OF FIRST LINES

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 majestic, 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 intercourse with an intelligence similar to itself. He images to himself the Being whom he loves. Conversant with speculations of the sublimest and most perfect 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 functions of sense, have their respective requisitions on the sympathy of corresponding powers in other human beings. The Poet is represented as uniting these requisitions, and attaching them to a single image. 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.