“piercing,” “penetrating,” frequently recur in the descriptions given of it.  At the same time its quality seems to have been less dissonant than thrilling; there is abundance of evidence to prove that he could modulate it exquisitely in the reading of poetry, and its tone proved no obstacle to the persuasive charms of his eloquence in conversation.  Like all finely tempered natures, he vibrated in harmony with the subjects of his thought.  Excitement made his utterance shrill and sharp.  Deep feeling of the sense of beauty lowered its tone to richness; but the timbre was always acute, in sympathy with his intense temperament.  All was of one piece in Shelley’s nature.  This peculiar voice, varying from moment to moment, and affecting different sensibilities in divers ways, corresponds to the high-strung passion of his life, his fine-drawn and ethereal fancies, and the clear vibrations of his palpitating verse.  Such a voice, far-reaching, penetrating, and unearthly, befitted one who lived in rarest ether on the topmost heights of human thought.

The acquaintance begun that October evening soon ripened into close friendship.  Shelley and Hogg from this time forward spent a large part of their days and nights together in common studies, walks and conversations.  It was their habit to pass the morning, each in his own rooms, absorbed in private reading.  At one o’clock they met and lunched, and then started for long rambles in the country.  Shelley frequently carried pistols with him upon these occasions, and would stop to fix his father’s franks upon convenient trees and shoot at them.  The practice of pistol shooting, adopted so early in life, was afterwards one of his favourite amusements in the company of Byron.  Hogg says that in his use of fire-arms he was extraordinarily careless.  “How often have I lamented that Nature, which so rarely bestows upon the world a creature endowed with such marvellous talents, ungraciously rendered the gift less precious by implanting a fatal taste for perilous recreations, and a thoughtlessness in the pursuit of them, that often caused his existence from one day to another to seem in itself miraculous.”  On their return from these excursions the two friends, neither of whom cared for dining in the College Hall, drank tea and supped together, Shelley’s rooms being generally chosen as the scene of their symposia.

These rooms are described as a perfect palace of confusion—­chaos on chaos heaped of chemical apparatus, books, electrical machines, unfinished manuscripts, and furniture worn into holes by acids.  It was perilous to use the poet’s drinking-vessels, less perchance a seven-shilling piece half dissolved in aqua regia should lurk at the bottom of the bowl.  Handsome razors were used to cut the lids of wooden boxes, and valuable books served to support lamps or crucibles; for in his vehement precipitation Shelley always laid violent hands on what he found convenient to the purpose of the moment.