Date: 1817, 1818

"But the dark fiend who with his iron pen / Dipped in scorn's fiery poison, makes his fame / Enduring there, would o'er the heads of men / Pass harmless, if they scorned to make their hearts his den."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: 1820

"And the beasts, and the birds, and the insects were drowned / In an ocean of dreams without a sound; / Whose waves never mark, though they ever impress / The light sand which paves it, consciousness"

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: 1820

"O, that the wise from their bright minds would kindle / Such lamps within the dome of this dim world, / That the pale name of PRIEST might shrink and dwindle / Into the hell from which it first was hurled, / A scoff of impious pride from fiends impure; / Till human thoughts might kneel alone, / ...

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: 1820

"Thus a number of writers possess the form, whilst they want the spirit of those whom, it is alleged, they imitate; because the former is the endowment of the age in which they live, and the latter must be the uncommunicated lightning of their own mind."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: 1820

"The cloud of mind is discharging its collected lightning, and the equilibrium between institutions and opinions is now restoring or is about to be restored."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: 1820

"He might as wisely and as easily determine that his mind should no longer be the mirror of all that is lovely in the visible universe as exclude from his contemplation the beautiful which exists in the writings of a great contemporary."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: 1820

"Every man's mind is, in this respect, modified by all the objects of Nature and art; by every word and every suggestion which he ever admitted to act upon his consciousness; it is the mirror upon which all forms are reflected and in which they compose one form."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: 1820

"How will thy soul, cloven to its depth with terror, / Gape like a hell within!"

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: 1820

"Obscurely through my brain, like shadows dim, / Sweep awful thoughts, rapid and thick."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: 1820

"I curse thee! let a sufferer's curse / Clasp thee, his torturer, like remorse; / Till thine Infinity shall be / A robe of envenomed agony; / And thine Omnipotence a crown of pain, / To cling like burning gold round thy dissolving brain."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)