disposition to indolence which might still linger if we were permitted to remain by the fireside. To pass some minutes in society, yet in solemn silence, is like the Pythagorean initiation, and we auspicate the day happily by commencing with sacred things. I scarcely ever visited Shelley before one o’clock; when I met him in the morning at chapel, he used studiously to avoid all communication, and, as soon as the doors were opened, to effect a ludicrously precipitate retreat to his rooms.

“The country near Oxford,” he continued, as we reposed after our meagre supper, “has no pretensions to peculiar beauty, but it is quiet, and pleasant, and rural, and purely agricultural after the good old fashion. It is not only unpolluted by manufactures and commerce, but it is exempt from the desecration of the modern husbandry, of a system which accounts the farmer a manufacturer of hay and corn. I delight to wander over it.” He enlarged upon the pleasure of our pedestrian excursions, and added, “I can imagine few things that would annoy me more severely than to be disturbed in our tranquil course. It would be a cruel calamity to be interrupted by some untoward accident, to be compelled to quit our calm and agreeable retreat. Not only would it be a sad mortification, but a real misfortune, for if I remain here I shall study more closely and with greater advantage than I could in any other situation that I can conceive. Are you not of the same opinion?”

“Entirely.”

“I regret only that the period of our residence is limited to four years. I wish they would revive, for our sake, the old term of six or seven years. If we consider how much there is for us to learn,” here he paused and sighed deeply through that despondency which sometimes comes over the unwearied and zealous student, “we shall allow that the longer period would still be far too short!”