met for the first time. Shelley, though jarred by Byron's
worldliness and pride, was impressed by his creative power, and
the days they spent sailing on the lake, and wandering in a
region haunted by the spirit of Rousseau, were fruitful. The
'Hymn to Intellectual Beauty' and the 'Lines on Mont Blanc'
were conceived this summer. In September the Shelleys were
back in England.

But England, though he had good friends like Peacock and the
Leigh Hunts, was full of private and public troubles, and was
not to hold him long. The country was agitated by riots due to
unemployment. The Government, frightened and vindictive, was
multiplying trials for treason and blasphemous libel, and
Shelley feared he might be put in the pillory himself. Mary's
sister Fanny, to whom he was attached, killed herself in
October; Harriet's suicide followed in December; and in the
same winter the Westbrooks began to prepare their case for the
Chancery suit, which ended in the permanent removal of
Harriet's children from his custody, on the grounds that his
immoral conduct and opinions unfitted him to be their guardian.
His health, too, seems to have been bad, though it is hard to
know precisely how bad. He was liable to hallucinations of all
kinds; the line between imagination and reality, which ordinary
people draw quite definitely, seems scarcely to have existed
for him. There are many stories as to which it is disputed how
far, if at all, reality is mixed with dream, as in the case of
the murderous assault he believed to have been made on him one
night of wind and rain in Wales; of the veiled lady who offered
to join her life to his; of the Englishman who, hearing him ask
for letters in the post-office at Pisa or Florence, exclaimed,