The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley — Volume 3 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 370 pages of information about The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley — Volume 3.

The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley — Volume 3 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 370 pages of information about The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley — Volume 3.
stimuli, would yield to the power of natural and tranquil impulses.  He will no longer pine under the lethargy of ennui, that unconquerable weariness of life, more to be dreaded than death itself.  He will escape the epidemic madness, which broods over its own injurious notions of the Deity, and ‘realizes the hell that priests and beldams feign.’  Every man forms, as it were, his god from his own character; to the divinity of one of simple habits no offering would be more acceptable than the happiness of his creatures.  He would be incapable of hating or persecuting others for the love of God.  He will find, moreover, a system of simple diet to be a system of perfect epicurism.  He will no longer be incessantly occupied in blunting and destroying those organs from which he expects his gratification.  The pleasures of taste to be derived from a dinner of potatoes, beans, peas, turnips, lettuces, with a dessert of apples, gooseberries, strawberries, currants, raspberries, and in winter, oranges, apples and pears, is far greater than is supposed.  These who wait until they can eat this plain fare with the sauce of appetite will scarcely join with the hypocritical sensualist at a lord-mayor’s feast, who declaims against the pleasures of the table.  Solomon kept a thousand concubines, and owned in despair that all was vanity.  The man whose happiness is constituted by the society of one amiable woman would find some difficulty in sympathizing with the disappointment of this venerable debauchee.

I address myself not only to the young enthusiast, the ardent devotee of truth and virtue, the pure and passionate moralist, yet unvitiated by the contagion of the world.  He will embrace a pure system, from its abstract truth, its beauty, its simplicity, and its promise of wide-extended benefit; unless custom has turned poison into food, he will hate the brutal pleasures of the chase by instinct; it will be a contemplation full of horror, and disappointment to his mind, that beings capable of the gentlest and most admirable sympathies should take delight in the death-pangs and last convulsions of dying animals.  The elderly man, whose youth has been poisoned by intemperance, or who has lived with apparent moderation, and is afflicted with a wide variety of painful maladies, would find his account in a beneficial change produced without the risk of poisonous medicines.  The mother, to whom the perpetual restlessness of disease and unaccountable deaths incident to her children are the causes of incurable unhappiness, would on this diet experience the satisfaction of beholding their perpetual healths and natural playfulness. (See Mr. Newton’s book.  His children are the most beautiful and healthy creatures it is possible to conceive; the girls are perfect models for a sculptor; their dispositions are also the most gentle and conciliating; the judicious treatment, which they experience in other points, may be a correlative cause of this.  In the first five years of their

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The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley — Volume 3 from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.