... apt and harmonious. She often leaves the ground fallow for a generation and the world is surprised when it sees spring from Sir Timothy Shelley, Baronet and orthodox, Percy Bysshe Shelley, poet and pioneer of free-thought, but learns in a little while that Percy Shelley had a grandfather, and marvels no longer. Could we trace the descent of Goethe and Shakespeare we should find the root of the Italian ...

Sri Aurobindo > Books > CWSA > Early Cultural Writings

Inspiration and Effort > Shelley, Swinbure, Housman-and Mary Shelley

... eyes. And he would have done so, had he not been misguided in his memory. No Shelley authority could have given the version he quoted. Perhaps he came across a mention somewhere that at one time Shelley put autumn after spring but later retained summer . And he definitely might have seen Notebooks of Percy Bysshe Shelley from the Originals in the Library of W. K. Bixby, Deciphered, Transcribed... scientific or pedantic". His case ran: "Shelley's MS exists; and the inequality, though exquisite, does not exist in Shelley's MS. Shelley wrote with his own hand, Fresh Spring and Autumn, Summer and Winter hoar... The one verse in Shelley and in English of more divine and sovereign sweetness than any other is the verse, not of Shelley, but of the compositor. Mr. Swinburne's veins... considered it "unworthy of Shelley". What he believed Shelley to have written has not at all been vindicated. What might be credited is something which, in Housman's opinion, could never have been in Shelley's manuscript. In the second place, even Housman's general idea that all the four seasons were enumerated by Shelley, in whatever order, is highly improbable. Shelley did not have to cast about ...