Wordsworth's writings were at that time by no means to his taste. It was not sufficiently refined to enjoy his simplicity, he wanted something more exciting. Chatterton was then one of his great favourites; he enjoyed very much the literary forgery and successful mystification of Horace Walpole and his contemporaries; and the Immortal Child's melancholy and early fate often suggested his own. One of his earliest effusions was a fragment beginning-it was indeed almost taken from the pseudo Rowley : Hark! the owlet flaps his wings In the pathless dell beneath; Hark! 'tis the night-raven sings Tidings of approaching death.

I had had lent me the translation of Burgher's "Leonora," with Lady Diana Beauclerk's talented illustrations, which so perfectly breathe the spirit of that wild, magical, romantic, fantastic ballad, perhaps without exception the most stirring in any language. It produced on Shelley a powerful effect; and I have in my possession a

copy of the whole poem, which he made with his own hand. The story is by no means original, if not taken from an old English ballad. For the refrain,

How quick ride the dead,

which occurs in so many stanzas, Burgher is indebted to an old Volkslied, was indeed inspired by hearing in the night sung from the church-yard: Der mond, der scheint so helle

Die Todten reiten so snelle

Feinliebschen, graut dir nicht?

Situate as Horsham is on the borders of St. Leonard's Forest, into which we used frequently to extend our peregrinations, a forest that has ever been the subject of the legends of the neighbouring peasantry, in whose gloomy mazes

The adders never stynge,

Nor ye nightyngales synge,—

Shelley very early imbibed a love of the mar vellous, and, according to one of those legends, "Wo to the luckless wight who should venture to cross it alone on horseback during the night,

for no sooner has he entered its darksome precincts, than a horrible decapitated spectre, disregarding all prayers and menaces, leaps behind him on his good steed, and accompanies the affrighted traveller to the boundaries, where his power ceases." It was only another, and perhaps a more poetical version of the story of Leonora, and which Shelley had at one time an idea of working out himself. But St. Leonard's is equally famous for its dragon, or serpent, of which a "True and Wonderful Discourse" was printed at London in 1614, by John Trundle, and to the truth of which three persons then living affixed their signatures. Who could resist a faith in the being of a monster so well certificated? Certainly Shelley was not inclined to do so, as a boy; and if he had read Schiller's Fight of the Dragon at Rhodes, where, by the way, one of his ancestors was slain, in the words of the pedigree, "at winning the battle of the said Isle by the Turks," he would have been still more confirmed in his belief.

Many of these details may appear trivial, but they are not so to the physiologist, inasmuch as they serve to show how the accidental incidents of early impressions, if they did not model, influenced the direction of his mind. Admitting that "Poeta nascitur, non fit," I am firmly persuaded of the truth of the above observation ; for as all animals have brains like ourselves, dependent on organization, and an instructive kind of knowledge, adapted accordingly; and this instructive knowledge, although perfect in its way at the first, being capable of being influenced by new and altered circumstances; why should not, then, the different circumstances of early life assist the character, and give the bent to a poetical imagination? Animals, as well as ourselves, have intellectual qualities,—the difference is in degree, not in kind; but over and above this, they must have a something superadded, to make the difference, which is the faculty of taking cognizance of things wholly above the senses, of things spiritual and moral-a sense

independent of the bodily brain, independent of themselves, and having a natural supremacy in the mind over and above all its other powers. I do not mean to say that a La Place, a Newton, or a Shakspeare, if we had sufficient data to trace the progress of their education, could be reproduced, according to the Helvetian doctrine, by following the same course, for as men are born with different constitutions, features, and habits of body, mental organization must be of course also differently organized. Yet no mind can be developed without preliminary education, and, consequently, all the minutiae of this education must more or less exercise a modifying influence on it, as every physiologist in the natural history of animals can testify.

Shelley, like Byron, knew early what it was to love-almost all great poets have. It was in the summer of this year, that he became acquainted with our cousin, Harriet Grove. Living in distant counties, they then met for the first time, since they had been children, at Field-place,