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."

— 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"

— 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."

— 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...

— 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."

— 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."

— 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...

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)