denounced the tyranny of the larger boys. At Oxford he
decried the tyranny of the church over freedom of thought, and was
promptly expelled for his pamphlet, _The Necessity of Atheism_. This
act so increased his hatred for despotic authority that he almost
immediately married Harriet Westbrook, a beautiful school girl of
sixteen, to relieve her from the tyranny of her father who wanted her
to return to school. Shelley was then only nineteen and very
changeable. He would make such a sudden departure from a place where
he had vowed "to live forever," that specially invited guests
sometimes came to find him gone. He soon fell in love with Mary
Wollstonecraft Godwin, the brilliant woman who later wrote the weird
romance _Frankenstein_, and he married her after Harriet Shelley had
drowned herself. These acts alienated his family and forced him to
forfeit his right to Field Place.

[Illustration: SHELLEY'S BIRTHPLACE, FIELD PLACE.]

His repeatedly avowed ideas upon religion, government, and marriage
brought him into conflict with public opinion. Unpopular at home, he
left England in 1818, never to return. Like Byron, he was practically
an exile.

The remaining four years of Shelley's life were passed in comparative
tranquillity in the "Paradise of exiles," as he called Italy. He lived
chiefly at Pisa, the last eighteen months of his life. Byron rented
the famous Lanfranchi Palace in Pisa and became Shelley's neighbor,
often entertaining him and a group of English friends, among whom were
Edward Trelawny, the Boswell of Shelley's last days, and Leigh Hunt,
biographer and essayist.

On July 7, 1822, Shelley said: "If I die to-morrow, I have lived to be
older than my father. I am ninety years of age." The young poet was
right in claiming that it is not length of years that measures life.
He had lived longer than most people who reach ninety. The next day he
started in company with two others to sail across the Bay of Spezzia
to his summer home. Friends watching from the shore saw a sudden
tempest strike his boat. When the cloud passed, the craft could not be
seen. Not many months before, he had written the last stanza of
_Adonais_:--

"...my spirit's bark is driven
Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng
Whose sails were never to the tempest given;
The massy earth and sphered skies are riven!
I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar;
Whilst, burning through the inmost veil of heaven,
The soul of A