In chapter 10 of Frankenstein, as Victor climbs the mountain towards the summit of Montanvert, he philosophizes on the mutability of human emotions. Mary Shelley uses eight lines from Percy Shelley's poem “Mutability,” transformed into prose, to convey her meaning: “Let us rest; a dream has the power to poison sleep […] Nothing can last except mutability!” (Shelley, 41 years old). This can be interpreted as a move away from the romantic idea of ​​the natural sublime, towards a more subject-dependent definition of the same. This essay, however, attempts to establish the difficulty of reaching such a conclusion by exploring various literary and philosophical representations of the idea. While the Romantics sought inspiration in the solitude and grandeur of nature, it is difficult to say whether there is only one Romantic notion of the sublime. It is doubtful whether the sublime we encounter in Shelley's Ode to the West Wind is the same as the sublime in Tintern Abbey. Wordsworth tells us how “…in solitary rooms, and amidst the din / Of towns and cities” he received a “quiet restoration” from nature's memory, and how this sometimes led to the realization of a gift of “appearance most sublime,” which is a trance-like state, a “classical religious meditation” (Wlecke, 158) in which he can “see into the life of things” (lines 36-49). This appears to be a notion of the sublime that gradually reveals itself through the interaction between the human mind and the objects of its contemplation. Furthermore, this philosophical gift is an “abundant reward” (line 89) for something he has lost – the ability to be moved at a level lower than that of thought, before the sublime aspect of nature. At the time of his visit, five years earlier, he was “more like a man…… middle of paper…… addition which produced the 13th century text “O Fortuna / Velut Luna”, included in the Carmina Burana, or the fragmentary seventh canto of The Faerie Queene? Shelley may be complaining about the unstable nature not of the human mind, but of worldly circumstances. This passage from “To a Skylark” might proclaim a similar sentiment: We look before and after, and pine for what is not: Our truest laughter With a little pain is fraught; Our sweetest songs are those that tell the saddest thoughts. -90) All Shelley could do both here and in the verses of 'Mutability' (as perhaps also in 'Ozymandias') is to describe the imperfection and impermanence of worldly circumstances. Mary Shelley's purpose in using her husband's lines may be nothing more than a device to generate feelings of pathos in the reader's heart over the series of losses suffered by the protagonist..