Editing Doppelgänger (section)

===Percy Bysshe Shelley===
[[File:Percy Bysshe Shelley by Alfred Clint.jpg|thumb|upright|[[Percy Bysshe Shelley|Percy Shelley]], per [[Mary Shelley]], had claimed to have met his own doppelgänger.]]

On 8 July 1822, the English poet [[Percy Bysshe Shelley]] drowned in the [[La Spezia|Bay of Spezia]] near [[Lerici]] in [[Italy]]. On 15 August, while staying at [[Pisa]], Percy's wife [[Mary Shelley]], an author and editor, wrote a letter to [[Maria Gisborne]] in which she relayed Percy's claims to her that he had met his own doppelgänger. A week after Mary's nearly fatal [[miscarriage]], in the early hours of 23 June, Percy had had a [[nightmare]] about the house collapsing in a flood, and also

{{blockquote|... talking it over the next morning he told me that he had had many visions lately—he had seen the figure of himself which met him as he walked on the terrace and said to him—"How long do you mean to be content"—No very terrific words & certainly not prophetic of what has occurred. But Shelley had often seen these figures when ill; but the strangest thing is that Mrs. Williams saw him. Now Jane, though a woman of sensibility, has not much imagination & is not in the slightest degree nervous—neither in dreams or otherwise. She was standing one day, the day before I was taken ill, [15 June] at a window that looked on the Terrace with Trelawny—it was day—she saw as she thought Shelley pass by the window, as he often was then, without a coat or jacket—he passed again—now as he passed both times the same way—and as from the side towards which he went each time there was no way to get back except past the window again (except over a wall twenty feet from the ground) she was struck at seeing him pass twice thus & looked out & seeing him no more she cried—"Good God can Shelley have leapt from the wall?.... Where can he be gone?" Shelley, said Trelawny—"No Shelley has past—What do you mean?" Trelawny says that she trembled exceedingly when she heard this & it proved indeed that Shelley had never been on the terrace & was far off at the time she saw him.<ref>Betty T. Bennett. ''The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.'' [[Johns Hopkins University Press]], [[Baltimore]], 1980. Volume 1, page 245.</ref>}}

Percy Shelley's drama ''[[Prometheus Unbound (Shelley)|Prometheus Unbound]]'' (1820) contains the following passage in Act I: "Ere Babylon was dust, / The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child, / Met his own image walking in the garden. / That apparition, sole of men, he saw. / For know there are two worlds of life and death: / One that which thou beholdest; but the other / Is underneath the grave, where do inhabit / The shadows of all forms that think and live / Till death unite them and they part no more...."<ref>''Prometheus Unbound'', lines 191–199.</ref>