Again, accident has made me aware of facts which give me to understand, that, in passing through the usual curriculum of a college life in all its paths, Shelley did not go scathless,—­but that, in the tampering with venal pleasures, his health was seriously, and not transiently, injured.  The effect was far greater on his mind than on his body; and the intellectual being greater than the physical power, the healthy reaction was greater.  But that reaction was also, especially in early youth, principally marked by horror and antagonism.  Conscientious, far beyond even the ordinary maximum amongst ordinary men, he felt bound to denounce the mischief from which he saw others suffer more severely than himself, since in them there was no such reaction.  I have no doubt that he himself would have spoken even plainer language, though to me his language is perfectly transparent, if he had not been restrained by a superstitious notion of his own, that the true escape from the pestilent and abhorrent brutalities which he detected around him in “real” life is found in “the ideal” form of thought and language.  Ardent and romantic, he was eager to discover beauty “beneath” every natural aspect.  Of all men living, I am the one most bound to be aware of the inconsistency; but you will see it reconciled a little later.

Shelley left college prone “to fall in love,”—­having already, indeed, gone through some very slight experiences of that process.  In his wanderings, in a humble position which conciliated rather than repelled him, he met with Harriet Westbrooke, a very comely, pleasing, and simple type of girlhood.  She was at some disadvantage, under some kind of domestic oppression; so she served at once as an object for his disengaged affection, and a subject for his liberating theories, and as a substratum for the idealizing process upon which he constructed a fictitious creation of Harriet Westbrooke.  His dreams bearing but a faint and controversial resemblance to the Harriet Westbrooke of daily life, the fictitious image prevented him from knowing her, until the reality broke through the poetical vision only to shock him by its inferiority or repulsiveness.  As to the poor girl herself, she never had the capacity for learning to know him.  In the sequel she proved to be the not unwilling slave of a petty domestic intrigue,—­oppression from which he would have rescued her.  Married life enabled him to discover that she was the reverse of the being that he had fancied.  They were first married in Scotland in 1811.  Shelley made acquaintance with the Godwins in 1812, before his eldest child was born.  I am not sure whether he was acquainted with Mary at that time; but some circumstances which I cannot verify make me doubt it.  Harriet’s daughter was born early in the summer of 1813, and it was before the close of that year that the couple began to disagree.  The wife was evidently under the dominion of a relative whose influence was injurious to her.  I do not