taken from: shelly's poem 'a lament'

original text:

WORLD! O life! O time!
On whose last steps I climb,
Trembling at that where I had stood before;
When will return the glory of your prime?
No more - oh, never more!Out of the day and night
A joy has taken flight;
Fresh spring, and summer, and winter hoar,
Move my faint heart with grief, but with delight
No more - oh, never more!

about the quoted person:

english poet. shelly is ranked as one of the great English poets of the romantic period.

The son of a prosperous squire, shelly entered Oxford in 1810, where readings in philosophy led him toward a study of the empiricists and the modern skeptics. In 1811 he and his friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg published their pamphlet, 'The Necessity of Atheism', which resulted in their immediate expulsion from the university.

Shelly was a distinguished translator as well as a great lyric and dramatic poet.

Supported reluctantly by their fathers, the young couple traveled through Great Britain. Shelley's life continued to be dominated by his desire for social and political reform, and he was constantly publishing pamphlets. His first important poem, 'Queen Mab', privately printed in 1813, set forth a radical system of curing social ills by advocating the destruction of various established institutions.

In 1814 Shelley left England for France with Mary Godwin, the daughter of William Godwin. During their first year together they were plagued by social ostracism and financial difficulties. However, in 1815 Shelley's grandfather died and left him an annual income. 'Laon and Cynthna' appeared in 1817 but was withdrawn and reissued the following year as The Revolt of Islam; it is a long poem in Spenserian stanzas that tells of a revolution and illustrates the growth of the human mind aspiring toward perfection.

On July 8, 1822, Shelley was drowned when his yacht foundered while sailing in a storm in the Bay of Spezia, near Lerici. His body, washed ashore after a week, was cremated in the presence of Byron and Leigh Hunt.