“In the forehead and head of Byron there was a more massive power and breadth: Shelley’s had a smooth, arched, spiritual expression; wrinkles there seemed none on his brow; it was as if perpetual youth had there dropped its freshness. Byron’s eye seemed the focus of pride and lust; Shelley’s was mild, pensive, fixed on you, but seeing through the mist of its own idealism. Defiance curled Byron’s nostril, and sensuality steeped his full, large lips; the lower portions of Shelley’s face were frail, feminine, and flexible. Byron’s head was turned upwards; as if, having proudly risen above his contemporaries, he were daring to claim kindred, or to demand a contest with a superior order of beings; Shelley’s was half bent in reverence and humility before some vast vision seen by his eye alone. In the portrait of Byron, taken at the age of nineteen, you see the unnatural age of premature passion. His hair is grey, his dress is youthful, but his face is old. In Shelley you see the eternal child, none the less because the hair is grey, and that “sorrow seems half his immortality.”
Thomas Medwin on Shelley and Byron
BYSSHE
"The fascination with fire-arms was one of many elements in Shelley's character which Hogg, a very down-to-earth personality despite all his masterly sarcasms, could never really account for. Another was Shelley's almost maniac disregard, on certain occasions, for the commonplace decencies of public normal public behaviour, as the time when he seized a baby out of its mother's arms while crossing Magdalen Bridge and began earnestly to question it about the nature of its Platonic pre-existence so that he might prove a point in an argument he was having with Hogg concerning metempsychosis."
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January152012
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