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 boy who despised discipline and sought to extort her
secrets from nature by magic, was destined to become the philanthropist
who dreamed of revolutionizing society by eloquence, and the poet who
invented in "Prometheus Unbound" forms of grandeur too colossal to be
animated with dramatic life.

A strong interest in experimental science had been already excited in
him at Sion House by the exhibition of an orrery; and this interest grew
into a passion at Eton. Experiments in chemistry and electricity, of the
simpler and more striking kind, gave him intense pleasure--the more so
perhaps because they were forbidden. On one occasion he set the trunk of
an old tree on fire with a burning-glass: on another, while he was
amusing himself with a blue flame, his tutor came into the room and
received a severe shock from a highly-charged Leyden jar. During the
holidays Shelley carried on the same pursuits at Field Place. "His own
hands and clothes," says Miss Shelley, "were constantly stained and
corroded with acids, and it only seemed too probable that some day the
house would be burned down, or some serious mischief happen to himself
or others from the explosion of combustibles." This taste for science
Shelley long retained. If we may trust Mr. Hogg's memory, the first
conversation which that friend had with him at Oxford consisted almost
wholly of an impassioned monologue from Shelley on the revolution to be
wrought by science in all realms of thought. His imagination was
fascinated by the boundless vistas opened to the student of chemistry.
When he first discovered that the four elements were not final, it gave