I have spoken of this poem under its first name of “Laon 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 course begins,
    Though they be children of one mother;
    And so through this dark world they fleet
    Divided, till in death they meet: 
    But he loved all things ever.  Then
    He past amid the strife of men,
    And stood at the throne of armed power
    Pleading for a world of woe: 
    Secure as one on a rock-built tower
    O’er the wrecks which the surge trails to and fro,