Percy Bysshe Shelley | Page 8

large and prominent.
They were at times, when he was abstracted, as he often was in
contemplation, dull, and as it were, insensible to external objects; at
others they flashed with the fire of intelligence. His voice was soft and
low, but broken in its tones,--when anything much interested him,
harsh and immodulated; and this peculiarity he never lost. He was
naturally calm, but when he heard of or read of some flagrant act of
injustice, oppression, or cruelty, then indeed the sharpest marks of
horror and indignation were visible in his countenance."
Such as the child was, we shall find the man to have remained
unaltered through the short space of life allowed him. Loving, innocent,
sensitive, secluded from the vulgar concerns of his companions,
strongly moralized after a peculiar and inborn type of excellence,
drawing his inspirations from Nature and from his own soul in solitude,
Shelley passed across the stage of this world, attended by a splendid
vision which sustained him at a perilous height above the kindly race of
men. The penalty of this isolation he suffered in many painful episodes.
The reward he reaped in a measure of more authentic prophecy, and in
a nobler realization of his best self, than could be claimed by any of his
immediate contemporaries.
CHAPTER 2.
ETON AND OXFORD.
In 1805 Shelley went from Sion House to Eton. At this time Dr. Keate
was headmaster and Shelley's tutor was a Mr. Bethel, "one of the
dullest men in the establishment." At Eton Shelley was not popular
either with his teachers or his elder school-fellows, although the boys
of his own age are said to have adored him. "He was all passion,"
writes Mrs. Shelley; "passionate in his resistance to an injury,

passionate in his love:" and this vehemence of temperament he
displayed by organizing a rebellion against fagging, which no doubt
won for him the applause of his juniors and equals. It was not to be
expected that a lad intolerant of rule and disregardful of restriction,
who neglected punctuality in the performance of his exercises, while he
spent his leisure in translating half of Pliny's history, should win the
approbation of pedagogues. At the same time the inspired opponent of
the fagging system, the scorner of games and muscular amusements,
could not hope to find much favour with such martinets of juvenile
convention as a public school is wont to breed. At Eton, as elsewhere,
Shelley's uncompromising spirit brought him into inconvenient contact
with a world of vulgar usage, while his lively fancy invested the
commonplaces of reality with dark hues borrowed from his own
imagination. Mrs. Shelley says of him, "Tamed by affection, but
unconquered by blows, what chance was there that Shelley should be
happy at a public school?" This sentence probably contains the pith of
what he afterwards remembered of his own school life, and there is no
doubt that a nature like his, at once loving and high-spirited, had much
to suffer. It was a mistake, however, to suppose that at Eton there were
any serious blows to bear, or to assume that laws of love which might
have led a spirit so gentle as Shelley's, were adapted to the common
stuff of which the English boy is formed. The latter mistake Shelley
made continually throughout his youth; and only the advance of years
tempered his passionate enthusiasm into a sober zeal for the
improvement of mankind by rational methods. We may also trace at
this early epoch of his life that untamed intellectual ambition--that
neglect of the immediate and detailed for the transcendental and
universal--which was a marked characteristic of his genius, leading him
to fly at the highest while he overleaped the facts of ordinary human
life. "From his earliest years," says Mrs. Shelley, "all his amusements
and occupations were of a daring, and in one sense of the term, lawless
nature. He delighted to exert his powers, not as a boy, but as a man; and
so with manly powers and childish wit, he dared and achieved attempts
that none of his comrades could even have conceived. His
understanding and the early development of imagination never
permitted him to mingle in childish plays; and his natural aversion to
tyranny prevented him from paying due attention to his school duties.

But he was always actively employed; and although his endeavours
were prosecuted with puerile precipitancy, yet his aim and thoughts
were constantly directed to those great objects which have employed
the thoughts of the greatest among men; and though his studies were
not followed up according to school discipline, they were not the less
diligently applied to." This high-soaring ambition was the source both
of his weakness and his strength in art, as well as in his commerce with
the world of men. The