AN ADDRESS, &c.[1]
I. The Princess Charlotte is dead. She no longer moves, nor thinks, nor feels. She is as inanimate as the clay with which she is about to mingle. It is a dreadful thing to know that she is a putrid corpse, who but a few days since was full of life and hope; a woman young, innocent, and beautiful, snatched from the bosom of domestic peace, and leaving that single vacancy which none can die and leave not.
II. Thus much the death of the Princess Charlotte has in common with the death of thousands. How many
- ↑ This work is constantly spoken of as being entitled We Pity the Plumage but Forget the Dying Bird. That this is not the title is evident from the fact that the opening of the address is headed An Address, &c.; and in the setting of the title-page by which alone we know the tract, that of the reprint, there is nothing to justify the supposition that the words employed as a motto were meant for the title. Mr. MacCarthy (Shelley's Early Life, p. 394) points out that Shelley may probably have adopted the words from the following passage in The Reflector (Vol. I, p. 17): "It was pertinently said of the pathetic language which Mr. Burke, in his later writings, occasionally held on constitutional topics, that he pitied the plumage, but neglected the wounded and suffering bird."
