continual food for discovery and wonder
Ordinarily in the writings of the English Romantics, and particularly in
the contemporaneous poems of Byron
(Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto
III) and Percy Shelley ("Mont Blanc"), a world of never-ending
process is held up as far preferable to one of known or dogmatic
limitation -- in the succinct formulation of Wordsworth, "The budding rose above
the rose full blown" (The Prelude, XI.121). Here Mary Shelley
quietly signals the dangers of engaging oneself totally in such a realm of
"discovery and wonder."
