Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams The blue Mediterranean, where he lay, Lull'd by the coil of his crystalline streams Beside a pumice isle in Baiรฆ's bay, And saw in sleep old palaces and towers Quivering within the wave's intenser day, All overgrown with azure moss and flowers So sweet, the sense faints picturing them.
Percy Bysshe ShelleyHeaven's ebon vault Studded with stars unutterably bright, Through which the moon's unclouded grandeur rolls, Seems like a canopy which love has spread To curtain her sleeping world.
Percy Bysshe ShelleyMy name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Percy Bysshe ShelleyIf all the thought which had been expended on the construction of engines of agony and death - the modes of aggression and defence, the raising of armies, and the acquirement of those arts of tyranny and falsehood without which mixed multitudes could neither be led nor governed - had been employed to promote the true welfare and extend the real empire of man, how different would have been the present situation of human society!
Percy Bysshe ShelleyI never was attached to that great sect, Whose doctrine is that each one should select Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend, And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend, To cold oblivion.
Percy Bysshe ShelleyAt the very time that philosophers of the most enterprising benevolence were founding in Greece those institutions which have rendered it the wonder and luminary of the world, am I required to believe that the weak and wicked king of an obscure and barbarous nation, a murderer, a traitor and a tyrant, was the man after God's own heart?
Percy Bysshe Shelley