St. 4
Dejection: An Ode (1802)
“Our glories float between the earth and heaven
Like clouds which seem pavilions of the sun.”
Act v, Scene iii.
Richelieu (1839)
When the Lamp is Shattered http://www.readprint.com/work-1382/Percy-Bysshe-Shelley (1822), st. 1
Context: When the lamp is shattered
The light in the dust lies dead —
When the cloud is scattered,
The rainbow's glory is shed.
When the lute is broken,
Sweet tones are remembered not;
When the lips have spoken,
Loved accents are soon forgot.
The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), III Six books on Light and Shade
"Modern Fiction"
The Common Reader (1925)
Context: Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions — trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible? We are not pleading merely for courage and sincerity; we are suggesting that the proper stuff of fiction is a little other than custom would have us believe it.
Source: Practical Pictorial Photography, 1898, Perspective of clouds, p. 100
(19th May 1827) Genius
The London Literary Gazette, 1827
“You yourself may not be luminous, but you are a conductor of light.”
Source: Miller, H. (1957). Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, New Directions Books, New York, p. 6.
“Luminous words, like those drops of light we see in fireworks.”
