Percy Bysshe Shelley

Name: Percy Bysshe Shelley
Author: John Addington Symonds

by John Addington Symonds

Pages: about 203
Category: History
Language: English
Reading time: 3.7 h at 250 wpm

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1. The Poetical and Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, edited by Mrs. Shelley. Moxon, 1840, 1845. 1 volume.
2. The Poetical Works, edited by Harry Buxton Forman. Reeves and Turner, 1876-7. 4 volumes.
3. The Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, edited by W.M. Rossetti. Moxon, 1870. 2 volumes.
5. Trelawny's Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author. Pickering, 1878. 2 volumes.
6. Shelley Memorials, edited by Lady Shelley. Smith and Elder. 1 volume.
10. W.M. Rossetti's Life of Shelley, included in the edition above cited, Number 3.
14. Shelley in Pall Mall, by R. Garnett, in "Macmillan's Magazine," June, 1860.
15. Shelley's Last Days, by R. Garnett, in the "Fortnightly Review," June, 1878.
16. Two Lectures on Shelley, by W.M. Rossetti, in the "University Magazine," February and March, 1878.
It is worse than useless to deplore the irremediable; yet no man, probably, has failed to mourn the fate of mighty poets, whose dawning gave the promise of a glorious day, but who passed from earth while yet the light that shone in them was crescent. That the world should know Marlowe and Giorgione, Raphael and Mozart, only by the products of their early manhood, is indeed a cause for lamentation, when we remember what the long lives of a Bach and Titian, a Michelangelo and Goethe, held in reserve for their maturity and age. It is of no use to persuade ourselves, as some have done, that we possess the best work of men untimely slain. Had Sophocles been cut off in his prime, before the composition of "Oedipus"; had Handel never merged the fame of his forgotten operas in the immortal music of his oratorios; had Milton been known only by the poems of his youth, we might with equal plausibility have laid that flattering unction to our heart. And yet how shallow would have been our optimism, how fallacious our attempt at consolation.

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Percy Bysshe Shelley

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