ABSTRACT
Published in Leigh Hunt's weekly miscellany The Indicator (XI, 22 December 1819). Hunt had written in a letter to Mary of 12 September 1819: ‘I must ask you, Shelley, to give me a few verses, if you have any to spare, for the next Pocket-Book, which will be speedily going to press’ (Hunt Correspondence i 146). S. responded to the request in a letter posted on 16 November (SC vi 1085) with ‘a piece for the Examiner; or let it share the fate, whatever that fate may be, of the “Masque of Anarchy”’ (L ii 152). On 2 December, Hunt replied: ‘What a delicious love song is that you enclosed!’, indicating his intention to publish it in the Examiner, then in a postscript altering his mind: ‘upon reading your delightful song, Shelley, for the ninth or tenth time: I shall put it, incontinently, into the Indicator (Hunt Correspondence i 153). Three weeks later Love's Philosophy appeared (under that title), signed with a Gk capital sigma Σ, and preceded by this note:
We intended to introduce the following delightful little lyric, by a friend, in very different company from that of the gentlemen just presented to the reader [in Hunt's essay Thieves, Ancient and Modern, the first part of which immediately precedes the lyric]; but as Mercury, who was the god of thieves, was also the inventor of the lyre, and as Love himself, time out of mind, has been called a thief, it is not, in all respects, inappropriately situated. We may fancy Mercury playing, and Love singing:—and the song is indeed worthy of the performers. It is elemental, Platonical; a meeting of divineness with humanity. (p. 88)
