in chemical experiments. As often happens to queer boys, his
school-fellows herded against him, pursuing him with blows and
cries of "Mad Shelley." But the holidays were happy. There
must have been plenty of fun at Field Place when he told his
sisters stories about the alchemist in the attic or "the Great
Tortoise that lived in Warnham Pond," frightened them with
electric shocks, and taught his baby brother to say devil.
There is something of high-spirited fun even in the raptures
and despairs of his first love for his cousin, Harriet Grove.
He tried to convert her to republican atheism, until the
family, becoming alarmed, interfered, 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