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“Best and brightest, come away!”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Source: To Jane: The Invitation (1822), l. 1

“The body is placed under the earth, and after a certain period there remains no vestige even of its form. This is that contemplation of inexhaustible melancholy, whose shadow eclipses the brightness of the world. The common observer is struck with dejection of the spectacle. He contends in vain against the persuasion of the grave, that the dead indeed cease to be. The corpse at his feet is prophetic of his own destiny. Those who have preceded him, and whose voice was delightful to his ear; whose touch met his like sweet and subtle fire: whose aspect spread a visionary light upon his path — these he cannot meet again.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley book The Necessity of Atheism

The Necessity of Atheism (1811)

“Once, early in the morning,
Beelzebub arose,
With care his sweet person adorning,
He put on his Sunday clothes.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

The Devil's Walk http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/shelley/devil/br-text.html (1812), st. 1

“If he is infinitely good, what reason should we have to fear him?
If he is infinitely wise, why should we have doubts concerning our future?
If he knows all, why warn him of our needs and fatigue him with our prayers?
If he is everywhere, why erect temples to him?
If he is just, why fear that he will punish the creatures that he has filled with weaknesses?
If grace does everything for them, what reason would he have for recompensing them?
If he is all-powerful, how offend him, how resist him?
If he is reasonable, how can he be angry at the blind, to whom he has given the liberty of being unreasonable?
If he is immovable, by what right do we pretend to make him change his decrees?
If he is inconceivable, why occupy ourselves with him?
If he has spoken, why is the universe not convinced?
If the knowledge of a God is the most necessary, why is it not the most evident and the clearest?”

Percy Bysshe Shelley book The Necessity of Atheism

The Necessity of Atheism (1811)

“And he wore a kingly crown;
And in his grasp a sceptre shone;
On his brow this mark I saw —
'I AM GOD, AND KING, AND LAW!”

Percy Bysshe Shelley The Masque of Anarchy

St. 9
The Masque of Anarchy (1819)

“As I lay asleep in Italy
There came a voice from over the Sea,
And with great power it forth led me
To walk in the visions of Poesy.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

St. 1
(1819)

“Then black despair,
The shadow of a starless night, was thrown
Over the world in which I moved alone.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley The Revolt of Islam

Dedication, st. 6
The Revolt of Islam (1817)

“Thy light alone like mist o'er mountains driven,
Or music by the night-wind sent
Through strings of some still instrument,
Or moonlight on a midnight stream,
Gives grace and truth to life's unquiet dream.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

St. 3
Hymn to Intellectual Beauty (1816)

“There is no sport in hate where all the rage
Is on one side.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Lines to a Reviewer http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/s/shelley/percy_bysshe/s54cp/section229.html (1821), l. 3

“And many more Destructions played
In this ghastly masquerade,
All disguised, even to the eyes,
Like Bishops, lawyers, peers, or spies.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

St. 7
(1819)

“He gave man speech, and speech created thought,
Which is the measure of the universe.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Prometheus Unbound

Asia, Act II, sc. iv, l. 72
Prometheus Unbound (1818–1819; publ. 1820)

“First our pleasures die — and then
Our hopes, and then our fears — and when
These are dead, the debt is due,
Dust claims dust — and we die too.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Death (Shelley, 2)

Death (1820), st. 3

“Rarely, rarely, comest thou,
Spirit of Delight!
Wherefore hast thou left me now
Many a day and night?
Many a weary night and day
'Tis since thou are fled away.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

St. 1 <br class="br"> Song: Rarely, Rarely, Comest Thou http://www.poetryconnection.net/poets/Percy_Bysshe_Shelley/17889 (1821)

“By all that is sacred in our hopes for the human race, I conjure those who love happiness and truth, to give a fair trial to the vegetable system.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley book A Vindication of Natural Diet

Source: A Vindication of Natural Diet (1813)

“And man … no longer now
He slays the lamb that looks him in the face,
And horribly devours his mangled flesh.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Queen Mab

Canto VIII
Queen Mab (1813)

“It has been the persuasion of an immense majority of human beings in all ages and nations that we continue to live after death,—that apparent termination of all the functions of sensitive and intellectual existence. Nor has mankind been contented with supposing that species of existence which some philosophers have asserted; namely, the resolution of the component parts of the mechanism of a living being into its elements, and the impossibility of the minutest particle of these sustaining the smallest diminution. They have clung to the idea that sensibility and thought, which they have distinguished from the objects of it, under the several names of spirit and matter, is, in its own nature, less susceptible of division and decay, and that, when the body is resolved into its elements, the principle which animated it will remain perpetual and unchanged.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

On a Future State (1815; publ. 1840)

“What! alive, and so bold, O earth?”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Written on hearing the News of the Death of Napoleon; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“You would not easily guess
All the modes of distress
Which torture the tenants of earth;
And the various evils,
Which like so many devils,
Attend the poor souls from their birth.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

"Verses On A Cat" (1800), St. 2, as published in Life of Shelley (1858) by Thomas Jefferson Hogg, p. 21

“To that high Capital, where kingly Death
Keeps his pale court in beauty and decay,
He came.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Adonaïs

St. VI
Adonais (1821)