History Fact for August 4

A short focus on a person or event associated with this day in History.

Lizzie A. Borden

Lizzie A. Borden, was born in 1860 and died in 1927. She was a Sunday school teacher living with her father and stepmother in Fall River, Mass. She was charged with killing them with an ax on August 4, 1892. Although she was tried and acquitted in 1893, a doubting public continued to believe in her guilt and immortalized its belief by repeating the following verse:


Lizzie Borden took an ax
And gave her mother 40 whacks.
And when she saw what she had done,
She gave her father 41.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

One of the greatest English romantic poets, Percy Bysshe Shelley, was born August 4, 1792. He is popularly known for his shorter poems such as "Adonais" (1821)-an elegy on the death of Keats- that ranks with Milton's "Lycidas" as one of the finest elegiac poems in English. Scholars, however, are more inclined to praise the depth of thought displayed by Shelley's longer works. These works reflect Shelley's Neoplatonism and his quest for the ideal. Below are a few lines from Adonais.

Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep--
He hath awakened from the dream of life--
'Tis we who, lost in stormy visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife. ...


He has outsoared the shadow of our night;
Envy and calumny, and hate and pain,
And that unrest which men miscall delight,
Can touch him not, and torture not again. ...


The One remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-colored glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity

© Phillip Bower