flights.

The story of Percy Bysshe Shelley is a singular one. The
circumstances of his early marriage were strange. The breaking of
his marriage-bond was also strange. Shelley himself was an
extraordinary creature. He was blamed a great deal in his lifetime
for what he did, and since then some have echoed the reproach. Yet
it would seem as if, at the very beginning of his life, he was put
into a false position against his will. Because of this he was
misunderstood until the end of his brief and brilliant and erratic
career.

SHELLEY AND MARY GODWIN

In 1792 the French Revolution burst into flame, the mob of Paris
stormed the Tuileries, the King of France was cast into a dungeon
to await his execution, and the wild sons of anarchy flung their
gauntlet of defiance into the face of Europe. In this tremendous
year was born young Shelley; and perhaps his nature represented
the spirit of the time.

Certainly, neither from his father nor from his mother did he
derive that perpetual unrest and that frantic fondness for revolt
which blazed out in the poet when he was still a boy. His father,
Mr. Timothy Shelley, was a very usual, thick-headed, unromantic
English squire. His mother--a woman of much beauty, but of no
exceptional traits--was the daughter of another squire, and at the
time of her marriage was simply one of ten thousand fresh-faced,
pleasant-spoken English country girls. If we look for a strain of
the romantic in Shelley's ancestry, we shall have to find it in