Page:The complete poetical works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, including materials never before printed in any edition of the poems.djvu/215



[Composed at Este after Shelley's first visit to Venice, 1818 (Autumn); first published in the Posthumous Poems, London, 1824 (ed. Mrs. Shelley). Shelley's original intention had been to print the poem in Leigh Hunt's Examiner; but he changed his mind and, on August 15, 1819, sent the MS. to Hunt to be published anonymously by Ollier. This MS., found by Mr. Townshend Mayer, and by him placed in the hands of Mr. H. Buxton Forman, C.B., is described at length in Mr. Forman's Library Edition of the poems (vol. iii, p. 107). The date, 'May, 1819,' affixed to Julian and Maddalo in the P. P., 1824, indicates the time when the text was finally revised by Shelley. Sources of the text are (1) P. P., 1824; (2) the Hunt MS.; (3) a fair draft of the poem amongst the Boscombe MSS.; (4) Poetical Works, 1839, 1st and 2nd edd. (Mrs. Shelley). Our text is that of the Hunt MS., as printed in Forman's Library Edition of the Poems, 1876, vol. iii, pp. 103-30; variants of 1824 are indicated in the footnotes; questions of punctuation are dealt with in the notes at end of the volume.]

is a Venetian nobleman of ancient family and of great fortune, who, without mixing much in the society of his countrymen, resides chiefly at his magnificent palace in that city. He is a person of the most consummate genius, and capable, if he would direct his energies to such an end, of becoming the redeemer of his degraded country. But it is his weakness to be proud: he derives, from a comparison of his own extraordinary mind with the dwarfish intellects that surround him, an intense apprehension of the nothingness of human life. His passions and his powers are incomparably greater than those of other men; and, instead of the latter having been employed in curbing the former, they have mutually lent each other strength. His ambition preys upon itself, for want of objects which it can consider worthy of exertion. I say that Maddalo is proud, because I can find no other word to express the concentered and impatient feelings which consume him; but it is on his own hopes and affections only that he seems to trample, for in social life no human being can be more gentle, patient, and unassuming than Maddalo. He is cheerful, frank, and witty. His more serious conversation is a sort of intoxication; men are held by it as by a spell. He has travelled much; and there is an inexpressible charm in his relation of his adventures in different countries.

Julian is an Englishman of good family, passionately attached