WorkPercy Bysshe Shelley

“To a Skylark, in Prometheus Unbound, with Other Poems”

InferredThe exact phrase 'pine for what is not' is from Shelley's 'To a Skylark' (1820), stanza 18: 'We look before and after, / And pine for what is not: / Our sincerest laughter / With some pain is fraught; / Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.'

TranslatedQuotedRead

Documented 1843

Books

Selected engagements, in chronological order.

Totals count documented engagements, once at the earliest witness. How we count →

Reprints, Memoirs passages, and repeat notes within a single manuscript are shown but never counted twice. Evidence for this work is selective, not exhaustive. Methodology →

DemonstratedConfirmed readingEvidence ↓

Confirmed reading

Passages where the evidence goes beyond allusion to indicate that Fuller had this work in hand — an explicit statement of reading, sustained excerpting or translation, or a specific reading episode recorded by those who knew her.

undatedTo a SkylarkDemonstrated
“Hear Shelley. Hail to thee, blithe spirit! Bird thou never wert.”
Papers on Literature and Art
Very long excerpt range (142 lines) indicates Fuller reproduces most of Shelley's 'To a Skylark.'

When Fuller engaged with this work

I. Childhood

II. Adolescence

III. Self-Directed

IV. Transcendentalist

V. New York1record

VI. Europe

✦. Memoirs (1852)

1810

1820

1832

1836

1844

1846

1850

1843—

Summer on the Lakes, in 1843

quoted · read

“We get the better because we do "Look before and after." But, from the same cause, we "Pine for what is not.”

Fuller, Margaret. Summer on the Lakes, in 1843. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1844.

Inferred The exact phrase 'pine for what is not' is from Shelley's 'To a Skylark' (1820), stanza 18: 'We look before and after, / And pine for what is not: / Our sincerest laughter / With some pain is fraught; / Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.'