“It is because we enter into the meditations, designs, and destinies of something beyond ourselves that the contemplation of the ruins of human power excites an elevating sense of awfulness and beauty. It is therefore that the ocean, the glacier, the cataract, the tempest, the volcano have each a spirit which animates the extremities of our frame with tingling joy. It is therefore that the singing of birds, and the motion of leaves, the sensation of the odorous earth beneath, and the freshness of the living wind around is sweet. And this is Love. This is the religion of eternity, whose votaries have been exiled from among the multitude of mankind.”
from “The Colosseum” (1818)
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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