A strong interest in experimental science had been already excited in him at Sion House by the exhibition of an orrery; and this interest grew into a passion at Eton.  Experiments in chemistry and electricity, of the simpler and more striking kind, gave him intense pleasure—­the more so perhaps because they were forbidden.  On one occasion he set the trunk of an old tree on fire with a burning-glass:  on another, while he was amusing himself with a blue flame, his tutor came into the room and received a severe shock from a highly-charged Leyden jar.  During the holidays Shelley carried on the same pursuits at Field Place.  “His own hands and clothes,” says Miss Shelley, “were constantly stained and corroded with acids, and it only seemed too probable that some day the house would be burned down, or some serious mischief happen to himself or others from the explosion of combustibles.”  This taste for science Shelley long retained.  If we may trust Mr. Hogg’s memory, the first conversation which that friend had with him at Oxford consisted almost wholly of an impassioned monologue from Shelley on the revolution to be wrought by science in all realms of thought.  His imagination was fascinated by the boundless vistas opened to the student of chemistry.  When he first discovered that the four elements were not final, it gave him the acutest pleasure:  and this is highly characteristic of the genius which was always seeking to transcend and reach the life of life withdrawn from ordinary gaze.  On the other hand he seems to have delighted in the toys of science, playing with a solar microscope, and mixing strangest compounds in his crucibles, without taking the trouble to study any of its branches systematically.  In his later years he abandoned these pursuits.  But a charming reminiscence of them occurs in that most delightful of his familiar poems, the “Letter to Maria Gisborne.”

While translating Pliny and dabbling in chemistry, Shelley was not wholly neglectful of Etonian studies.  He acquired a fluent, if not a correct, knowledge of both Greek and Latin, and astonished his contemporaries by the facility with which he produced verses in the latter language.  His powers of memory were extraordinary, and the rapidity with which he read a book, taking in seven or eight lines at a glance, and seizing the sense upon the hint of leading words, was no less astonishing.  Impatient speed and indifference to minutiae were indeed among the cardinal qualities of his intellect.  To them we may trace not only the swiftness of his imaginative flight, but also his frequent satisfaction with the somewhat less than perfect in artistic execution.