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) No draft of the poem has been traced, but two fair copies are known to exist. That in Harvard Nbk 1 71 is entitled An Anacreontic and followed by the notation ‘Florence — January 1820’, which may record only the date of the transcription. Title, place and date are in Mary’s hand. If the date was intended as that of composition, it may result from faulty memory; or perhaps either Mary or S. wished to mask the poem’s relation to Sophia Stacey. The other fair copy S. transcribed into The Literary Pocket-Book (LPB) for 1819, which he presented to Sophia on 28 December 1819: see headnotes to Goodnight and Thou art fair, and few are fairer [To Sophia]. The copy given to Sophia has no title, and it is possible that S. never provided one. If the press copy he sent to Hunt had carried the title Love’s Philosophy, there appears to be no good reason for S. to omit it on the transcription he made a few weeks later for Sophia Stacey. Both the other poems he transcribed for her in the LPB are titled: Goodnight and Time Long Past (Longman iii 246–7, no. 275). Hunt’s introductory note to The Indicator printing furnishes a seduction-lyric, conventional enough in theme, with a philosophical dimension and imagines it as authoritatively performed by classical deities, so it may be that he himself supplied an appropriate title to an untitled piece sent by S. In the absence of the press-copy, one cannot be sure of this; it is always possible that the title was S.’s and that it suggested Hunt’s note.