1.
The awful shadow of some unseen Power
Floats tho' unseen amongst[2] us,—visiting
This various world with as inconstant wing
As summer winds that creep from flower to flower,—
Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower,
- ↑ This poem was published in The Examiner for 19 January, 1817 (No. 473), having been, as the Editor remarks, "originally announced under the signature of the Elfin Knight." In the meantime the authorship had become known to the editor; and the poem was duly signed, on its appearance, with the name Percy B. Shelley. I suspect that Shelley read a proof of this poem before it appeared in The Examiner, or else that it was pretty correctly printed from a very careful copy. The punctuation is wholly different in system from that of the version in the Rosalind and Helen volume; and, referring to the remark made in a former note (p. 57) as to Peacock's practice of removing the pauses so constantly used by Shelley, it should be observed that this Hymn, as printed in The Examiner, has no less than twenty-one pauses in it, while the other version has not a single one left, the whole being replaced by more orthodox points. Moreover Shelley was in England when the Examiner version appeared, while, from the preface to the Rosalind volume, it would seem that he did not even know the Hymn was to be in that volume,—so that he is not likely to have prepared that version. On the whole therefore, I think it safer to give the earlier version, which presents no important difference from the other, except in this matter of punctuation, and in the few particulars specified in the following notes. Mrs. Shelley tells us in her note on Poems of 1816 that the Hymn "was conceived during his voyage round the Lake [of Geneva] with Lord Byron."
- ↑ In the version of 1819, among, instead of amongst,—one point in which that version seems to me preferable to the other,—more Shelley-like in instinct for sound.
