d. The effect was far greater on his mind than on
his body; and the intellectual being greater than the physical
power, the healthy reaction was greater. But that reaction was
also, especially in early youth, principally marked by horror and
antagonism. Conscientious, far beyond even the ordinary maximum
amongst ordinary men, he felt bound to denounce the mischief from
which he saw others suffer more severely than himself, since in them
there was no such reaction. I have no doubt that he himself would have
spoken even plainer language, though to me his language is perfectly
transparent, if he had not been restrained by a superstitious notion
of his own, that the true escape from the pestilent and abhorrent
brutalities which he detected around him in "real" life is found in
"the ideal" form of thought and language. Ardent and romantic, he was
eager to discover beauty "beneath" every natural aspect. Of all men
living, I am the one most bound to be aware of the inconsistency; but
you will see it reconciled a little later.

Shelley left college prone "to fall in love,"--having already, indeed,
gone through some very slight experiences of that process. In his
wanderings, in a humble position which conciliated rather than
repelled him, he met with Harriet Westbrooke, a very comely, pleasing,
and simple type of girlhood. She was at some disadvantage, under some
kind of domestic oppression; so she served at once as an object for
his disengaged affection, and a subject for his liberating theories,
and as a substratum for the idealizing process upon which he
constructed a fictitious creation of Harriet Westbrooke. His dreams
bearing but a faint and controversial resemblance to the Harriet
Westbrooke of daily life, the fictitious image prevented him from
knowing her, until the reality broke through the poetical vision only
to shock him by its inferiority or repulsiveness. As to the poor girl
herself, she never had the capacity for learning to know him. In the
sequel she proved to be the not unwilling slave of a petty domestic
intrigue,--oppression from which he would have rescued her. Married
life enabled him to discover that she was the reverse of the being
that he had fancied. They were first married in Scotland in 1811.
Shelley made acquaintance with the Godwins in 1812, before his eldest
child was born. I am not sure whether he was acquainted with Mary at
that time; but some circumstances which I cannot verify make me doubt
i