among mankind.
Thus power and hope were strengthened more and more
Within me, till there came upon my mind
A sense of loneliness, a thirst with which I pined.

The second is a fragment on friendship preserved by Hogg. After defining
that kind of passionate attachment which often precedes love in fervent
natures, he proceeds: "I remember forming an attachment of this kind at
school. I cannot recall to my memory the precise epoch at which this
took pace; but I imagine it must have been at the age of eleven or
twelve. The object of these sentiments was a boy about my own age, of a
character eminently generous, brave, and gentle; and the elements of
human feeling seemed to have been, from his birth, genially compounded
within him. There was a delicacy and a simplicity in his manners,
inexpressibly attractive. It has never been my fortune to meet with him
since my school-boy days; but either I confound my present recollections
with the delusions of past feelings, or he is now a source of honour and
utility to every one around him. The tones of his voice were so soft and
winning, that every word pierced into my heart; and their pathos was so
deep, that in listening to him the tears have involuntarily gushed from
my eyes. Such was the being for whom I first experienced the sacred
sentiments of friendship." How profound was the impression made on his
imagination and his feelings by this early friendship, may again be
gathered from a passage in his note upon the antique group of Bacchus
and Ampelus at Florence. "Look, the figures are walking with a
sauntering and idle pace, and talking to each other as they walk, as you
may have seen a younger and an elder boy at school, walking in some
grassy spot of the play-ground with that tender friendship for each
other which the age inspires."

These extracts prove beyond all question that the first contact with the
outer world called into activity two of Shelley's strongest moral
qualities--his hatred of tyranny and brutal force in any form, and his
profound sentiment of friendship. The admiring love of women, which
marked him no less strongly, and which made him second only to
Shakespere in the sympathetic delineation of a noble feminine ideal, had
been already developed by his deep affection for his mother and sisters.
It is said that he could not receive a letter from them without manifest
joy.

"Shelley," says Medwin, "was at this time tall for his age, slightly and