Shelley: The Pursuit Read Online Free PDF Page B

years I have dreamed of this scene. It hashung on my memory; it has haunted my thoughts at intervals with the pertinacity of an object connected with human affections. I have visited this scene again. Neither the dream could be dissociated from the landscape, nor the landscape from the dream, nor feelings, such as neither singly could have awakened, from both. But the most remarkable event of this nature which ever occurred to me happened five years ago at Oxford. I was walking with a friend in the neighbourhood of that city engaged in earnest and interesting conversation. We suddenly turned the corner of a lane, and the view which its banks and hedges had concealed presented itself. The view consisted of a windmill, standing in one among many plashy meadows, inclosed with stone walls; the irregular and broken ground between the wall and the road on which we stood; a long low hill behind the windmill, and a grey covering of uniform cloud spread over the evening sky. It was that season when the last leaf had just fallen from the scant and stunted ash. The scene surely was a common scene; the season and the hour little calculated to kindle lawless thought; it was a tame uninteresting assemblage of objects, such as would drive the imagination for refuge in serious and sober talk, to the evening fireside and the dessert of winter fruits and wine. The effect which it produced on me was not such as could have been expected. I suddenly remembered to have seen that exact scene in some dream of long . . .
    At this point the manuscript breaks off, and the whole ‘Catalogue’ ends, with the single startling note by Shelley: ‘Here I was obliged to leave off, overcome by thrilling horror.’ Mrs Shelley, in her later editorial footnote, remarks: ‘I remember well his coming to me from writing it, pale and agitated, to seek refuge in conversation from the fearful emotions it excited. No man, as these fragments prove, had such keen sensations as Shelley.’ 16
    This curious incident, recalled as it obviously is, from a walk with Hogg in the autumn of 1810, is difficult to interpret. Hogg’s Life offers no clues, and the image of the windmill, with its outstretched vanes, against the long low hill and grey sky, does not recur anywhere in the rest of Shelley’s writing. The only clue to the nature of the ‘lawless thought’ is Shelley’s earlier remark about the pertinacity of objects ‘connected with human affection’. It is perhaps possible that something revisited at Oxford during the river trip recalled his passionate feelings for Hogg, and set off this powerful reaction.
    Despite this surprising setback, Shelley was able to write to Hogg at the end of the month that the boat trip had done him good, and he was now busily at work. ‘The exercise & dissipation of mind attached to such an expedition have produced so favourable an effect on my health, that my habitual dejection & irritability have almost deserted me, & I can devote 6 hours in the day to studywithout difficulty. I have been engaged lately in the commencement of several literary plans, which if my present temper of mind endures I shall probably complete in the winter. . . . The East Wind, the wind of Autumn is abroad, & even now the leaves of the forest are shattered at every gust. When may we expect you?’ 17 From October onwards, Hogg made several visits, walking down from London, while Peacock walked across from Marlow frequently. Otherwise Shelley was alone with Mary.
    This was the first time since his marriage to Harriet that he had lived alone in one other woman’s company for more than a few days at a stretch. This was a decisive change in itself, and indicates the increased emotional maturity of the relationship. Mary was pregnant again, which she probably knew for certain at the end of July, and the baby was due early in the following year. She fitted in easily with Shelley’s studious routine, not troubling him when he spent hours alone in Windsor