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Reeves and Turner., 1888
 

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Page 24 - The stars burnt out in the pale blue air, And the thin white moon lay withering there, To tower, and cavern, and rift and tree, The owl and the bat fled drowsily.
Page 9 - AH, did you once see Shelley plain, And did he stop and speak to you And did you speak to him again ? How strange it seems and new...
Page 13 - ... the supreme Intelligence which apprehends all things in their absolute truth, — an ultimate view ever aspired to, if but partially attained, by the poet's own soul. Not what man sees, but what God sees — the Ideas of Plato, seeds of creation lying burningly on the Divine Hand — it is toward these that he struggles.
Page 23 - Coleridge says, is a solemn duty, which we owe alike to ourselves and to the world — a worship to the spirit of good within, which requires, before it sends that inspiration forth, which impresses its likeness upon all that it creates, devoted and disinterested homage.
Page 13 - He is rather a seer, accordingly, than a fashioner, and what he produces will be less a work than an effluence. That effluence cannot be easily considered in abstraction from his personality, — being indeed the very radiance and aroma 'of his personality, projected from it but not separated.
Page 27 - I would rather consider Shelley's poetry as a sublime fragmentary essay towards a presentment of the correspondency of the universe to Deity, of the natural to the spiritual, and of the actual to the ideal, than I would isolate and separately appraise the worth of many detachable portions which might be acknowledged as utterly perfect in a lower moral point of view, under the mere conditions of art. It would be easy to take my stand on successful instances of objectivity in Shelley: there is the...
Page 19 - ... needlessly been wondered at, ever since the world began, and concerning which any present anger may well be moderated, no less in justice to our forerunners than in policy to ourselves. For the misapprehensiveness of his age is exactly what a poet is sent to remedy ; and the interval between his operation and the generally perceptible effect of it, is no greater, less indeed, than in many other departments of the great human effort. The
Page 22 - For the rest, these new letters are not offered as presenting any new feature of the poet's character. Regarded in themselves, and as the substantive productions of a man, their importance would be slight. But they possess interest beyond their limits, in confirming the evidence just dwelt on, of the poetical mood of Shelley being only the intensification of his habitual mood; the same tongue only speaking, for want of the special excitement to sing. The very first letter, as one instance for all,...
Page 21 - ... no mean discovery of the real motives of a life's achievement, often, in other lives, laid bare as pitifully as when, at the close of a holiday, we catch sight of the internal lead-pipes and wood-valves to which, and not to the ostensible conch and dominant Triton of the fountain, we have owed our admired waterwork. No breaking out, in household privacy, of hatred, anger, and scorn, incongruous with the higher mood, and suppressed artistically in the book; no brutal return to selfdelighting,...
Page 26 - To thirst and find no fill — to wail and wander With short unsteady steps — to pause and ponder — To feel the blood run through the veins and tingle Where busy thought and blind sensation mingle; To nurse the image of unfelt caresses Till dim imagination just possesses The half-created shadow.

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