It is a tempest in which every one must steer for
himself, after all; and Shelley "was borne darkly, fearfully afar,"
into unplumbed seas of thought and experience. When Mr. Hogg
complains that his friend was too much left to himself to study and
think as he pleased, let us remember that no one could have helped
Shelley. He was better at Oxford without his old Dr. Lind, "with
whom he used to curse George III. after tea."
There are few chapters in literary history more fascinating than
those which tell the story of Shelley at Oxford. We see him entering
the hall of University College--a tall, shy stripling, bronzed with
the September sun, with long elf-locks. He takes his seat by a
stranger, and in a moment holds him spell-bound, while he talks of
Plato, and Goethe, and Alfieri, of Italian poetry, and Greek
philosophy. Mr. Hogg draws a curious sketch of Shelley at work in
his rooms, where seven-shilling pieces were being dissolved in acid
in the teacups, where there was a great hole in the floor that the
poet had burned with his chemicals. The one-eyed scout, "the
Arimaspian," must have had a time of tribulation (being a
conscientious and fatherly man) with this odd master. How
characteristic of Shelley it was to lend the glow of his fancy to
science, to declare that things, not thoughts, mineralogy, not
literature, must occupy human minds for the future, and then to leave
a lecture on mineralogy in the middle, and admit that "stones are
dull things after all!" Not less Shelleyan was the adventure on
Magdalen Bridge, the beautiful bridge of our illustration, from which
Oxford, with the sunset behind it, looks like a fairy city of the
Arabian Nights--a town of palaces and princesses, rather than of
proctors.
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