“By solemn vision and bright silver dreamHis infancy was nurtured. Every sightAnd sound from the vast earth and ambient airSent to his heart its choicest impulses.”

“The being called God...bears every mark of a veil woven by philosophical conceit, to hide the ignorance of philosophers even from themselves. They borrow the threads of its texture from the anthropomorphism of the vulgar.”

“There was a Being whom my spirit oftMet on its visioned wanderings far aloft.A seraph of Heaven, too gentle to be human,Veiling beneath that radiant form of woman....”

“A poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.”

“Ozymandias"I met a traveller from an antique landWho said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stoneStand in the desert. Near them on the sand,Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frownAnd wrinkled lip and sneer of cold commandTell that its sculptor well those passions readWhich yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.And on the pedestal these words appear:'My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'Nothing beside remains. Round the decayOf that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

“The mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within...could this influence be durable in its original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness of the result; but when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline; and the most glorious poetry that has been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet.”

“(Title: To the Moon)Art thou pale for wearinessOf climbing heaven, and gazing on the earth,Wandering companionlessAmong the stars that have a different birth,--And ever-changing, like a joyless eyeThat finds no object worth its constancy?”