Harriet Westbrook was a school-girl sixteen years old.  Shelley was teeming with advanced thought.  He believed that Christianity was a degrading and selfish superstition, and he had a deep and sincere desire to rescue one of his sisters from it.  Harriet was impressed by his various philosophies and looked upon him as an intellectual wonder—­ which indeed he was.  He had an idea that she could give him valuable help in his scheme regarding his sister; therefore he asked her to correspond with him.  She was quite willing.  Shelley was not thinking of love, for he was just getting over a passion for his cousin, Harriet Grove, and just getting well steeped in one for Miss Hitchener, a school-teacher.  What might happen to Harriet Westbrook before the letter-writing was ended did not enter his mind.  Yet an older person could have made a good guess at it, for in person Shelley was as beautiful as an angel, he was frank, sweet, winning, unassuming, and so rich in unselfishness, generosities, and magnanimities that he made his whole generation seem poor in these great qualities by comparison.  Besides, he was in distress.  His college had expelled him for writing an atheistical pamphlet and afflicting the reverend heads of the university with it, his rich father and grandfather had closed their purses against him, his friends were cold.  Necessarily, Harriet fell in love with him; and so deeply, indeed, that there was no way for Shelley to save her from suicide but to marry her.  He believed himself to blame for this state of things, so the marriage took place.  He was pretty fairly in love with Harriet, although he loved Miss Hitchener better.  He wrote and explained the case to Miss Hitchener after the wedding, and he could not have been franker or more naive and less stirred up about the circumstance if the matter in issue had been a commercial transaction involving thirty-five dollars.

Shelley was nineteen.  He was not a youth, but a man.  He had never had any youth.  He was an erratic and fantastic child during eighteen years, then he stepped into manhood, as one steps over a door-sill.  He was curiously mature at nineteen in his ability to do independent thinking on the deep questions of life and to arrive at sharply definite decisions regarding them, and stick to them—­stick to them and stand by them at cost of bread, friendships, esteem, respect, and approbation.

For the sake of his opinions he was willing to sacrifice all these valuable things, and did sacrifice them; and went on doing it, too, when he could at any moment have made himself rich and supplied himself with friends and esteem by compromising with his father, at the moderate expense of throwing overboard one or two indifferent details of his cargo of principles.