and in the way of his dream. To the latter
class belongs Shelley, a man perpetually at war with the present world, a
martyr and exile, simply because of his inability to sympathize with men
and society as they are, and because of his own mistaken judgment as to the
value and purpose of a vision.

Shelley was born in Field Place, near Horsham, Sussex, in 1792. On both his
father's and his mother's side he was descended from noble old families,
famous in the political and literary history of England. From childhood he
lived, like Blake, in a world of fancy, so real that certain imaginary
dragons and headless creatures of the neighboring wood kept him and his
sisters in a state of fearful expectancy. He learned rapidly, absorbed the
classics as if by intuition, and, dissatisfied with ordinary processes of
learning, seems to have sought, like Faustus, the acquaintance of spirits,
as shown in his "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty":

While yet a boy, I sought for ghosts, and sped
Through many a listening chamber, cave and ruin,
And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing
Hopes of high talk with the departed dead.

Shelley's first public school, kept by a hard-headed Scotch master, with
its floggings and its general brutality, seemed to him like a combination
of hell and prison; and his active rebellion against existing institutions
was well under way when, at twelve years of age, he entered the famous
preparatory school at Eton. He was a delicate, nervous, marvelously
sensitive boy, of great physical beauty; and, like Cowper, he suffered
torments at the hands of his rough schoolfellows. Unlike Cowper, he was
positive, resentful, and brave to the point of rashness; soul and body rose
up against tyranny; and he promptly organized a rebellion against the
brutal fagging system. "Mad Shelley" the boys called him, and they chivied
him like dogs around a little coon that fights and cries defiance to the
end. One finds what he seeks in this world, and it is not strange that
Shelley, after his Eton experiences, found causes for rebellion in all
existing forms of human society, and that he left school "to war among
mankind," as he says of himself in the _Revolt of Islam_. His university
days are but a repetition of his earlier experiences. While a student at
Oxford he read some scraps of Hume's philosophy, and immediately published
a pamphlet called "The Necessity of Atheism." It was a crude, foolish piece
of work,