The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Vol. 1 [of 2]Shelley, Percy Bysshe
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The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Vol. 1 [of 2]
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
English prose literature
Everything is swallowed up in sorrow: she is all tears; her
countenance, in assured expectation of the arrow piercing its last
victim in her embrace, is fixed on her omnipotent enemy. The pathetic
beauty of the expression of her tender, and inexhaustible, and
unquenchable despair, is beyond the effect of sculpture. As soon as
the arrow shall pierce her last tie upon earth, the fable that she was
turned into stone, or dissolved into a fountain of tears, will be but a
feeble emblem of the sadness of hopelessness, in which the few and evil
years of her remaining life, we feel, must flow away.
It is difficult to speak of the beauty of the countenance, or to make
intelligible in words, from what such astonishing loveliness results.
The head, resting somewhat backward upon the full and flowing contour
of the neck, is as in the act of watching an event momently to arrive.
The hair is delicately divided on the forehead, and a gentle beauty
gleams from the broad and clear forehead, over which its strings are
drawn. The face is of an oval fulness, and the features conceived
with the daring of a sense of power. In this respect it resembles the
careless majesty which Nature stamps upon the rare masterpieces of her
creation, harmonising them as it were from the harmony of the spirit
within. Yet all this not only consists with, but is the cause of the
subtlest delicacy of clear and tender beauty--the expression at once of
innocence and sublimity of soul--of purity and strength--of all that
which touches the most removed and divine of the chords that make
music in our thoughts--of that which shakes with astonishment even the
most superficial.
The Minerva.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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