this folly, takes it all with fatal seriousness. In appearance
he is no ordinary being. A shock of dark brown hair makes his
small round head look larger than it really is; from beneath a
pale, freckled forehead, deep blue eyes, large and mild as a
stag's, beam an earnestness which easily flashes into
enthusiasm; the nose is small and turn-up, the beardless lips
girlish and sensitive. He is tall, but stoops, and has an air
of feminine fragility, though his bones and joints are large.
Hands and feet, exquisitely shaped, are expressive of high
breeding. His expensive, handsome clothes are disordered and
dusty, and bulging with books. When he speaks, it is in a
strident peacock voice, and there is an abrupt clumsiness in
his gestures, especially in drawing-rooms, where he is ill at
ease, liable to trip in the carpet and upset furniture.
Complete absence of self-consciousness, perfect
disinterestedness, are evident in every tone; it is clear that
he is an aristocrat, but it is also clear that he is a saint.

The catastrophe of expulsion from Oxford would have been
impossible in a well-regulated university, but Percy Bysshe
Shelley could not have fitted easily into any system. Born at
Field Place, Horsham, Sussex, on August 4, 1792, simultaneously
with the French Revolution, he had more than a drop of wildness
in his blood. The long pedigree of the Shelley family is full
of turbulent ancestors, and the poet's grandfather, Sir Bysshe,
an eccentric old miser who lived until 1815, had been married
twice, on both occasions eloping with an heiress. Already at
Eton Shelley was a rebel and a pariah. Contemptuous of
authority, he had gone his own way, spending pocket-money on
revolutionary literature, trying to raise ghosts, and dabbling