Percy Bysshe Shelley | Page 6

utterly deficient; and perhaps we ought to regard it as
his misfortune that fate made him the father of a man who was among
the greatest portents of originality and unconventionality that this
century has seen. Toward an ordinary English youth, ready to sow his
wild oats at college, and willing to settle at the proper age and take his
place upon the bench of magistrates, Sir Timothy Shelley would have
shown himself an indulgent father; and it must be conceded by the
poet's biographer that if Percy Bysshe had but displayed tact and
consideration on his side, many of the misfortunes which signalized his
relations to his father would have been avoided.
Shelley passed his childhood at Field Place, and when he was about six
years old began to be taught, together with his sisters, by Mr. Edwards,
a clergyman who lived at Warnham. What is recorded of these early
years we owe to the invaluable communications of his sister Hellen.
The difference of age between her and her brother Bysshe obliges us to
refer her recollections to a somewhat later period--probably to the
holidays he spent away from Sion House and Eton. Still, since they
introduce us to the domestic life of his then loved home, it may be
proper to make quotations from them in this place. Miss Shelley tells us
her brother "would frequently come to the nursery, and was full of a
peculiar kind of pranks. One piece of mischief, for which he was
rebuked, was running a stick through the ceiling of a low passage to
find some new chamber, which could be made effective for some
flights of his vivid imagination." He was very much attached to his
sisters, and used to entertain them with stories, in which "an alchemist,
old and grey, with a long beard," who was supposed to abide
mysteriously in the garret of Field Place, played a prominent part.
"Another favourite theme was the 'Great Tortoise,' that lived in

Warnham Pond; and any unwonted noise was accounted for by the
presence of this great beast, which was made into the fanciful
proportions most adapted to excite awe and wonder." To his friend
Hogg, in after-years, Shelley often spoke about another reptile, no mere
creature of myth or fable, the "Old Snake," who had inhabited the
gardens of Field Place for several generations. This venerable serpent
was accidentally killed by the gardener's scythe; but he lived long in the
poet's memory, and it may reasonably be conjectured that Shelley's
peculiar sympathy for snakes was due to the dim recollection of his
childhood's favourite. Some of the games he invented to please his
sisters were grotesque, and some both perilous and terrifying. "We
dressed ourselves in strange costumes to personate spirits or fiends, and
Bysshe would take a fire-stove and fill it with some inflammable liquid,
and carry it flaming into the kitchen and to the back door." Shelley
often took his sisters for long country rambles over hedge and fence,
carrying them when the difficulties of the ground or their fatigue
required it. At this time "his figure was slight and beautiful,--his hands
were models, and his feet are treading the earth again in one of his race;
his eyes too have descended in their wild fixed beauty to the same
person. As a child, I have heard that his skin was like snow, and bright
ringlets covered his head." Here is a little picture which brings the boy
vividly before our eyes: "Bysshe ordered clothes according to his own
fancy at Eton, and the beautifully fitting silk pantaloons, as he stood as
almost all men and boys do, with their coat-tails near the fire, excited
my silent though excessive admiration."
When he was ten years of age, Shelley went to school at Sion house,
Brentford, an academy kept by Dr. Greenlaw, and frequented by the
sons of London tradesmen, who proved but uncongenial companions to
his gentle spirit. It is fortunate for posterity that one of his biographers,
his second cousin Captain Medwin, was his schoolfellow at Sion House;
for to his recollections we owe some details of great value. Medwin
tells us that Shelley learned the classic languages almost by intuition,
while he seemed to be spending his time in dreaming, now watching
the clouds as they sailed across the school-room window, and now
scribbling sketches of fir-trees and cedars in memory of Field Place. At
this time he was subject to sleep-walking, and, if we may credit this

biographer, he often lost himself in reveries not far removed from
trance. His favourite amusement was novel-reading; and to the many
"blue books" from the Minerva press devoured by him in his boyhood,
we may ascribe the style and tone of his first compositions. For
physical sports he showed no inclination.