Date: w. 1821, 1840
"It is as it were the interpretation of a diviner nature through our own; but its footsteps are like those of a wind over the sea, which the coming calm erases, and whose traces remain only as on the wrinkled sand which paves it."
preview | full record— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)
Date: w. 1821, 1840
"These and corresponding conditions of being are experienced principally by those of the most delicate sensibility and the most enlarged imagination; and the state of mind produced by them is at war with every base desire"
preview | full record— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)
Date: w. 1821, 1840
"The enthusiasm of virtue, love, patriotism, and friendship is essentially linked with such emotions; and whilst they last, self appears as what it is, an atom to a universe."
preview | full record— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)
Date: w. 1821, 1840
"Poetry thus makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the world; it arrests the vanishing apparitions which haunt the interlunations of life, and veiling them, or in language or in form, sends them forth among mankind, bearing sweet news of kindred joy to those with whom their sister...
preview | full record— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)
Date: w. 1821, 1840
Poetry "reproduces the common universe of which we are portions and percipients, and it purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being."
preview | full record— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)
Date: w. 1821, 1840
"But even whilst they deny and abjure, they are yet compelled to serve, that power which is seated on the throne of their own soul."
preview | full record— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)
Date: w. 1821, 1840
"The greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the color of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious p...
preview | full record— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)
Date: 1841
"As certain liquors, confined in casks too cramped in their dimensions, will ferment, and fret, and chafe in their imprisonment, so the spiritual essence or soul of Mr. Tappertit would sometimes fume within that precious cask, his body, until, with great foam and froth and splutter, it would forc...
preview | full record— Dickens, Charles (1812-1870)
Date: 1842
Rash, angry words may be "spoken out of season / When passion has usurp'd the throne of reason"
preview | full record— Frere, John Hookham (1769-1846)
Date: 1839-1842
"My heart within / Melts as the wax."
preview | full record— Frere, John Hookham (1769-1846)