Shelley; The Man and the Poet (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. SHELLEY AS A WRITER OF ROMANCE -- " ZASTROZZI " -- " ST. IRVYNE " -- i With Shelley to conceive was to execute, whether in literature and poetry or in life. He felt an imperious need of communicating his ideal of beauty and goodness to his fellow-men; in what form mattered not so long as it conveyed his impressions faithfully. Hence his thirst for publication during the years at Eton, hence his longing that no spark of beauty or of love should be lost to the world; and endowed as he was with the faculty of appropriating everything in harmony with his own attraction towards the marvellous, . the gigantic, and the supernatural, it is not surprising that he chose his models among the authors of the sublime horrors, the extravagant tales, the romantic and sentimental ballads that were just then produced in profusion in England. He had shuddered and grown pale in reading them, and while still full of his conceptions and still palpitating with divine emotion, he attempted to make others shudder and grow pale in their turn. In April, 1810, Messrs. Wilkie