COURT, NOTE. As regards the circumstances in which Laon and Cythna was composed and converted into The Revolt of Islam, the reader is referred to the memoir prefixed to vol. i (pages xli and xlii). Shelley's persistent preference for the original version, and his protestation that his poem was ruined by the alterations, make his own edition of Laon and Cythna, with its printed list of errata, the proper basis for the text. His edition of Rosalind and Helen and the three minor poems printed in the present volume is not quite so authoritative, because he did not see it through the press, and had not attached much importance to its fitful and fragmentary composition. The Hymn to Intellectual Beauty and the Ozymandias Sonnet were first printed in The Examiner for the 19th of January 1817 and the 11th of January 1818, which must be reckoned among the foundations of the text. Mrs. Shelley's collected editions of 1839, important in this respect throughout the bulk of Shelley's poetry, do not afford much help in regard to the corruptions which Shelley declared in general terms to have crept into the first edition of Rosalind and Helen. H. B. F. |