Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Percy Bysshe Shelley
With some fellow-rhymer a volume of verse (now known only through reviews), Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire. Possibly his collaborator was his cousin Harriet Grove, whom Shelley loved with a boy's passion. Her parents, alarmed by Shelley's religious scepticism, put a stop to the correspond ence between the cousins. In April 1810 Shelley matriculated at University College, Oxford, and in Michaelmas term entered on residence. His chief friend was a student from Durham, Thomas Jefferson Hoog, who has left a most vivid account of Shelley's C ford life. Hogg was shrewd, sar castic, unimpassioned, and withal a genuine lover of literature. He aided Shelley in putting forth a slender volume of poems, originally written by Shelley with a serious intention, now retouched with a View to burlesque - Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson - the pretended authoress being a mad washerwoman who had attempted the life of the king. In February 1811 a small pam phlet by Shelley, entitled The Necessity of Atheism, was printed. When it was offered for sale in Oxford, the college authorities conceived it their duty to interfere Shelley and Hogo' were interro gated respecting its authorship, and having refused to reply, were expelled from University College (march 25, 1811) for contumacy and for declining to disavow the pamphlet. For a time the friends lived together in London lodgings; then Hogg departed to the country and Shelley remained alone. In his solitude he found some pleasure in the society of a schoolfellow of his sisters at Clap ham, Harriet Westbrook, a fresh and pretty girl of Sixteen, daughter of a'retired coffee-house keeper. She moved under the tutelage of an unmarried sister nearly twice her own age. When summer came Shelley was with cousins in Wales; letters reached him from Harriet in London complaining of domestic persecution, and speaking of suicide as a possible means of escape; a letter followed in which she threw herself on Shelley's protection, and proposed to ?y with him from her home. Shelley hastened to see her, but at the same time assured a cousin that he did not love Harriet, though he was prepared to devote himself to her through a sentiment of chivalry. On meeting him she avowed her passion, and he left her with a promise that if she summoned him he would come at her call and make her his. The summons came.
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