[Percy Bysshe Shelley by John Addington Symonds]@TWC D-Link bookPercy Bysshe Shelley CHAPTER 8 2/13
His life has, therefore, to be told, in order that his life-work may be rightly valued: for, great as that was, he, the man, was somehow greater; and noble as it truly is, the memory of him is nobler. To the world he presented the rare spectacle of a man passionate for truth, and unreservedly obedient to the right as he discerned it.
The anomaly which made his practical career a failure, lay just here.
The right he followed was too often the antithesis of ordinary morality: in his desire to cast away the false and grasp the true, he overshot the mark of prudence.
The blending in him of a pure and earnest purpose with moral and social theories that could not but have proved pernicious to mankind at large, produced at times an almost grotesque mixture in his actions no less than in his verse.
We cannot, therefore, wonder that society, while he lived, felt the necessity of asserting itself against him.
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