Shelley | Page 7

and Harriet was
disposed of otherwise. "Married to a clod of earth!" exclaims Shelley.
He spent nights "pacing the churchyard," and slept with a loaded pistol

and poison beside him.
He went in to residence at University College, Oxford, in the
Michaelmas term of 1810. The world must always bless the chance
which sent Thomas Jefferson Hogg a freshman to the same college at
the same time, and made him Shelley's friend. The chapters in which
Hogg describes their live at Oxford are the best part of his biography.
In these lively pages we see, with all the force of reality, Shelley
working by fits in a litter of books and retorts and "galvanic troughs,"
and discoursing on the vast possibilities of science for making mankind
happy; how chemistry will turn deserts into cornfields, and even the air
and water will year fire and food; how Africa will be explored by
balloons, of which the shadows, passing over the jungles, will
emancipate the slaves. In the midst he would rush out to a lecture on
mineralogy, and come back sighing that it was all about "stones, stones,
stones"! The friends read Plato together, and held endless talk of
metaphysics, pre-existence, and the sceptical philosophy, on winter
walks across country, and all night beside the fire, until Shelley would
curl up on the hearthrug and go to sleep. He was happy because he was
left to himself. With all his thoughts and impulses, ill-controlled indeed,
but directed to the acquisition of knowledge for the benefit of the world,
such a student would nowadays be a marked man, applauded and
restrained. But the Oxford of that day was a home of "chartered
laziness." An academic circle absorbed in intrigues for preferment, and
enlivened only by drunkenness and immorality, could offer nothing but
what was repugnant to Shelley. He remained a solitary until the hand of
authority fell and expelled him.
He had always had a habit of writing to strangers on the subjects next
his heart. Once he approached Miss Felicia Dorothea Browne
(afterwards Mrs. Hemans), who had not been encouraging. Now half in
earnest, and half with an impish desire for dialectical scores, he printed
a pamphlet on 'The Necessity of Atheism', a single foolscap sheet
concisely proving that no reason for the existence of God can be valid,
and sent it to various personages, including bishops, asking for a
refutation. It fell into the hands of the college authorities. Summoned
before the council to say whether he was the author, Shelley very
properly refused to answer, and was peremptorily expelled, together
with Hogg, who had intervened in his behalf.

The pair went to London, and took lodgings in a house where a
wall-paper with a vine-trellis pattern caught Shelley's fancy. Mr.
Timothy Shelley appeared on the scene, and, his feelings as a Christian
and a father deeply outraged, did the worst thing he could possibly
have done--he made forgiveness conditional on his son's giving up his
friend. The next step was to cut off supplies and to forbid Field Place to
him, lest he should corrupt his sisters' minds. Soon Hogg had to go to
York to work in a conveyancer's office, and Shelley was left alone in
London, depressed, a martyr, and determined to save others from
similar persecution. In this mood he formed a connection destined to
end in tragedy. His sisters were at a school at Clapham, where among
the girls was one Harriet Westbrook, the sixteen-year-old daughter of a
coffee-house keeper. Shelley became intimate with the Westbrooks,
and set about saving the soul of Harriet, who had a pretty rosy face, a
neat figure, and a glib school-girl mind quick to catch up and reproduce
his doctrines. The child seems to have been innocent enough, but her
elder sister, Eliza, a vulgar woman of thirty, used her as a bait to
entangle the future baronet; she played on Shelley's feelings by
encouraging Harriet to believe herself the victim of tyranny at school.
Still, it was six months before he took the final step. How he could save
Harriet from scholastic and domestic bigotry was a grave question. In
the first place, hatred of "matrimonialism" was one of his principles,
yet it seemed unfair to drag a helpless woman into the risks of illicit
union; in the second place, he was at this time passionately interested in
another woman, a certain Miss Hitchener, a Sussex school mistress of
republican and deistic principles, whom he idealised as an angel, only
to discover soon, with equal falsity, that she was a demon. At last
Harriet was worked up to throw herself on his protection. They fled by
the northern mail, dropping at York a summons to Hogg to join them,
and contracted a Scottish marriage at Edinburgh on August 28, 1811.