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personal discovery, though one already made for themselves by poets of the previous generation, such as Wordsworth and Coleridge. But it gave Shelley no satisfaction for it led immediately to two further problems. How far was the state of self-absorbing reverie a genuinely creative or valuable one? And how far was it a state peculiar to himself, one that cut off his experiences from those of people and society around him? How far indeed, was it precisely that state in which ‘Thine own soul still is true to thee, But changed to a foul fiend through misery’?
    Shelley was now on the frontier which led immediately into that country and river of the mind to be described in the poem Alastor . He made one last effort to push his prose investigations further, in a second essay, ‘On Love’. This differs from the previous work in that he was now addressing in imagination at least a specific reader who was beyond doubt Mary. [6] It also differs in that the terms he uses are in places virtually identical with those used in the prose preface to Alastor , and one can assume that he was already drafting sections of the poem. This final prose trial is very brief, less than a thousand words, and opens with the directness which is characteristic of Shelley when he has tracked down what he wished to say. ‘I know not the internal constitution of other men, nor even yours whom I now address. I see that in some external attributes they resemble me, but when misled by that appearance I have thought to appeal to something in common and unburden my inmost soul to them, I have found my language misunderstood like one in a distant and savage land. . . . Thou demandest, What is Love? It is that powerful attraction towards all that we conceive, or fear, or hope beyond ourselves, when we find within our own thoughts the chasm of an insufficient void and seek to awaken in all things that are a community with what we experience within ourselves .’ Within this broad idea of a ‘community’ of attraction and sympathy, Shelley specified the particular human direction in which his own idea of love had developed. Its peculiar egoism is immediately apparent.
We dimly see within our intellectual nature a miniature as it were of our entire self, yet deprived of all we condemn or despise, the ideal prototype of everything excellent or lovely that we are capable of conceiving. . . . To this we eagerly refer all sensations, thirsting that they should resemble or correspond with it. The discovery of its anti-type; the meeting with an understanding capable of clearly estimating our own; an imagination which should enter into and seize upon the subtle and delicate peculiarities which we have delighted to cherish and unfold in secret. . . . this is the invisible and unattainable point to which Love tends. 21
    In this short essay, directed at Mary, which already admitted from a personal point of view the existence of the gap between them, Shelley had pressed the search into the caverns of his own mind as far as he could go in prose. He now sought the even greater formality and distancing of poetry, and composed the700-line blank verse poem Alastor , the second long poem of his career. This was the final point which these months of introspection and self-assessment reached, and his own comment, as a poet, on the inner significance of the events of 1814. The subject of the poem is, specifically, the picture of a developing psychological state. ‘The poem entitled Alastor may be considered as allegorical of one of the most interesting situations of the human mind,’ Shelley wrote. To which Mary shrewdly added in a later editorial note, ‘the poem ought rather to be considered didactic than narrative’. It is not known how long Shelley took to draft or revise it, but a good deal of it was written in his open-air study, sitting under the autumnal oaks of Windsor Great Park, during September and October.
    The myth that shapes the broad outline of the