From his
childhood the world of ideas seems to have been at least as real
and familiar to him as the material world. The fabulous beings of
whom he talked to his young sisters--the Great Tortoise in
Warnham Pond, the snake three hundred years old in the garden at
Field Place, the grey-bearded alchemist in his garret[90]--had
probably for him as much meaning and interest as the living
people around him. Urged by a restless desire to evade the
natural and encounter the supernatural, he wandered by night
under the "perilous moonshine," haunted graveyards in the hope of
"high talk with the departed dead," dabbled in chemical
experiments and pored over ancient books of magic. It was to be
expected that an imagination reaching out so eagerly towards the
unknown should find refuge from the uncongenial life of Sion
House School in the soul-stirring region of romance. Transported
by sixpenny "blue books" and the many volumed novels in the
Brentford circulating library, Shelley's imagination fled
joyously to that land of unlikelihood, where the earth yawns with
bandits' caverns inhabited by desperadoes with bloody daggers,
where the air continually resounds with the shrieks and groans of
melancholy spectres, and where the pale moon ever gleams on dark
and dreadful deeds.
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