Hellas Author:Percy Bysshe Shelley Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: NOTE ON THE PROLOGUE TO HELLAS1 RICHARD GARNETT. Mns. Shelley informs us, in her note on the Prometheus Unbound, that at the time of her husband's ar... more »rival in Italy, he meditated the production of three dramas.2 One of these was the Prdmet/ieug itself; the second, a drama on the subject of Tasso's madness; the third one founded on the Book of Job ; " of which," she adds, " he never abandoned the idea." That this was the case will be apparent from the following newly-discovered fragment, which may have been, as I have on the whole preferred to describe it, an unfinished prologue to Hellas, or perhaps the original sketch of that work, discarded for the existing more dramatic, but less ambitious version, for which the Persae of Eschylus evidently supplied the model. It is written in the same book as the original MS. of Hellas, and so blended with this as to be only separable after very minute examination. Few even of Shelley's rough drafts have proved more difficult to decipher or connect; numerous chasms will be observed, which, with every diligence, it has proved impossible to fill upj the correct reading of many printed lines is far from certain; and the imperfection of some passages is such as to have occasioned their entire omission. Nevertheless, I am confident that the unpolished and mutilated remnant will be accepted as a worthy emanation of one of Shelley's sublimesfc moods, and a noble earnest of what he might have accomplished could he have executed his original design of founding a drama on the Book of Job. Weak health, variable spirits, above all, the absence of encouragement, must be enumerated as chief among the causes which have deprived our literature of so magnificent a work. Besides the evident imitation of the Book of Job, the resemblance of the f...« less