Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume XIV.djvu/870

 844 SHELLEY tricity and acids after his return home in 1809. In 1810 he went to Oxford, and became an un- dergraduate of University college. At first de- voted to physics, he abandoned them for meta- physics. Hume and the French exponents of Locke were his text books, and he soon rushed to materialism and atheism. At the age of 17, says De Quincey, satisfied that atheism was the sheet anchor of the world, he determined to accomplish a general apostasy successively in the university, the church of England, and the whole Christian world. He began with printing a pamphlet of two pages on the " Ne- cessity of Atheism," setting forth the defective logic of the usual arguments for the divine existence. He sent it with a letter to the heads of colleges and professors of the univer- sity, inviting them to notify him of their as- sent to the accompanying argument ; for this he was expelled, and ordered to quit the col- lege by the next morning. His father at first forbade his appearance at Field Place. All communication was forbidden between him and Miss Grove, who soon married another. He took lodgings in Poland street, London, and his sisters, who were at school at Bromp- ton, sent him small sums saved from their pocket money, the bearer being their school- mate Harriet Westbrook, a beautiful daughter of a retired hotel-keeper, residing in London ; and after his reconciliation with his father, who settled upon him an allowance of 200 a year, he suddenly eloped with her and married her at Gretna Green. He was aged 19, and she 16. The young pair went to Edinburgh, thence to York, and at length fixed their resi- dence at Keswick. There Shelley became in- timate with Southey and De Quincey, and re- ceived many favors from the duke of Norfolk. He had already obtained the friendship of Leigh Hunt, and proposed to him a scheme for form- ing an association of liberals ; and he began a correspondence with Godwin, whose advice probably saved him from extreme imprudence in the championship of Irish wrongs, when soon after he removed to Dublin. There, in February, 1812, he published a pamphlet en- titled " An Address to the Irish People," copies of which he threw from his window and distributed to passers on the street. The police suggested to him the propriety of quit- ting Ireland, and he resided successively in the isle of Man, in North Wales, and in Lyn- nioutli. From the last named place he ad- dressed an eloquent letter to. Lord Ellenbor- ough against his sentence on the publisher of the third part of Paine's "Age of Reason." Soon afterward he took a cottage in Tanyrallt, Carnarvonshire; and prior to May, 1813, he had visited London, resided again in Dublin, made a tour to the lakes of Killarney, and re- turned to London. In Tanyrallt, as elsewhere, he visited and relieved the poor and suffer- ing. A mysterious attempt on his life, which was never explained, occasioned his immediate removal. In London was born his daughter, 1 lanthe Eliza. He soon after removed to the i cottage of High Elms in Berkshire, where he passed the summer, with the exception of visits to London and Field Place. Toward the close of 1813 the estrangement which had been slow- ly growing between him and his wife resulted in their separation by mutual consent, and she , returned to her father's house, where she gave birth to a second child, which died in 1826. j He was soon after travelling abroad, chiefly in Switzerland, with Mary, afterward the sec- ond Mrs. Shelley, daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, all of whom deemed marriage a useless institution. His father, succeeding to the family estates, settled on him from this time an allowance of 1,000 a year. In the winter he frequented a hospital to acquire some knowledge of surgery, that he might become more serviceable to the poor; made several trips in England in 1815; and again visited Switzerland in 1816, where he first met Byron. The same year his wife drowned herself. He now married his second wife, who had been his companion for two years, and fixed his residence in the neighborhood of Mar- low in Buckinghamshire. He claimed the cus- tody of his children, which was refused by the court of chancery on the ground of the alleged depravity of his religious and moral opinions, and after this decision he again left England. He had become acquainted with Keats, whose genius he defended against the reviewers, and afterward wrote to his memory the dirge of "Adonais." In 1810 he had published at Oxford "Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson," a small volume of poems ; and in September of that year, in London, " Original Poetry, by Victor and Cazire," of which about 100 copies got into circulation before he sup- pressed it, but none can now be found. He had commenced at the age of 18, and com- pleted in 1812, a poem in the rhythm of Southey's " Thalaba," entitled " Queen Mab." It was printed privately in 1813, and an edi- tion was surreptitiously issued in 1821, when he was in Italy. He applied to chancery for an injunction to restrain the sale, which was refused on the ground that the law could give no protection to a heretical book, nor even recognize it except by prosecution. In 1815 he wrote at Bishopsgate, on the Thames, his poem of " Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude." At Marlow he wrote " The Revolt of Islam." There he suffered a severe attack of ophthal- mia, caught while visiting the cottages of the poor. In 1818 he left England, never to re- turn. At Lucca he completed the poem of "Julian and Maddalo," a dialogue between himself and Lord Byron, and began his " Pro- metheus Unbound," which was finished in Rome in 1819 (London, 1821). His next pro- duction was " The Cenci," a tragedy repulsive in its subject, but the most elaborate in exe- cution orall his writings. In 1819 he wrote "The Witch of Atlas" in three days after a pedestrian excursion, and in 1821 produced his