ABSTRACT
In Imagination and Fancy, the ‘Selections from Shelley, with Critical Notice’, are comprised of the introductory consideration. Shelley's works, in justice to himself, require either to be winnowed from what he disliked, or to be read with the remembrance of that dislike. He had sensibility almost unique, seemingly fitter for a planet of a different sort, or in a more final condition, than ours. The finest poetry of Shelley is so mixed up with moral and political speculation, that it is impossible to give more than specific extracts, in accordance with the purely poetical design. In general, if Coleridge is the sweetest of our poets, Shelley is at once the most ethereal and most gorgeous; the one who has clothed his thoughts in draperies of the most evanescent and most magnificent words and imagery. Not Milton himself is more learned in Grecisms, or nicer in etymological propriety; and nobody, throughout, has a style so Orphic and primaeval.
