y
applied to." This high-soaring ambition was the source both of his
weakness and his strength in art, as well as in his commerce with the
world of men. The boy who despised discipline and sought to extort her
secrets from nature by magic, was destined to become the philanthropist
who dreamed of revolutionizing society by eloquence, and the poet who
invented in "Prometheus Unbound" forms of grandeur too colossal to be
animated with dramatic life.

A strong interest in experimental science had been already excited in
him at Sion House by the exhibition of an orrery; and this interest grew
into a passion at Eton. Experiments in chemistry and electricity, of the
simpler and more striking kind, gave him intense pleasure--the more so
perhaps because they were forbidden. On one occasion he set the trunk of
an old tree on fire with a burning-glass: on another, while he was
amusing himself with a blue flame, his tutor came into the room and
received a severe shock from a highly-charged Leyden jar. During the
holidays Shelley carried on the same pursuits at Field Place. "His own
hands and clothes," says Miss Shelley, "were constantly stained and
corroded with acids, and it only seemed too probable that some day the
house would be burned down, or some serious mischief happen to himself
or others from the explosion of combustibles." This taste for science
Shelley long retained. If we may trust Mr. Hogg's memory, the first
conversation which that friend had with him at Oxford consisted almost
wholly of an impassioned monologue from Shelley on the revolution to be
wrought by science in all realms of thought. His imagination was
fascinated by the boundless vistas opened to the student of chemistry.
When he first discovered that the four elements were not final, it gave
him the acutest pleasure: and this is highly characteristic of the
genius which was always seeking to transcend and reach the life of life
withdrawn from ordinary gaze. On the other hand he seems to have
delighted in the toys of science, playing with a solar microscope, and
mixing strangest compounds in his crucibles, without taking the trouble
to study any of its branches systematically. In his later years he
abandoned these pursuits. But a charming reminiscence of them occurs in
that most delightful of his familiar poems, the "Letter to Maria
Gisborne."

While translating Pliny and dabbling in chemistry, Shelley was not
wholly neglectful of Etonian studies. He acqu