We were strolling once in the neighbourhood of Oxford when Shelley was attracted by a little girl. He turned aside, and stood and observed her in silence. She was about six years of age, small and slight, bare-headed, bare-legged, and her apparel variegated and tattered. She was busily employed in collecting empty snail-shells, so much occupied, indeed, that some moments elapsed before she turned her face towards us. When she did so, we perceived that she was evidently a young gipsy; and Shelley was forcibly struck by the vivid intelligence of her wild and swarthy countenance, and especially by the sharp glance of her fierce black eyes. “How much intellect is here!” he exclaimed; “in how humble a vessel, and what an unworthy occupation for a person who once knew perfectly the whole circle of the sciences; who has forgotten them all, it is true, but who could certainly recollect them, although most probably she will never do so, will never recall a single principle of all of them!”
As he spoke he turned aside a bramble with his foot and discovered a large shell which the alert child instantly caught up and added to her store. At the same moment a small stone was thrown from the other side of the road; it fell in the hedge near us. We turned round and saw on the top of a high bank a boy, some three years older than the girl, and in as rude a guise. He was looking at us over a low hedge, with a smile, but plainly not without suspicion. We might be two kidnappers, he seemed to think; he was in charge of his little sister, and did not choose to have her stolen before his face. He gave the signal, therefore, and she obeyed it, and had almost joined him before we missed her from our side. They both disappeared, and we continued our walk.
Shelley was charmed with the intelligence of the two children of nature, and with their marvellous wildness. He talked much about them, and compared them to birds and to the two wild leverets, which that wild mother, the hare, produces. We sauntered about, and, half an hour afterwards, on turning a corner, we suddenly met the two children again full in the face. The meeting was unlooked for, and the air of the boy showed that it was unpleasant to him. He had a large bundle of dry sticks under his arm; these he gently dropped and stood motionless with an apprehensive smile—a deprecatory smile. We were perhaps the lords of the soil, and his patience was prepared, for patience was his lot—an inalienable inheritance long entailed upon his line—to hear a severe reproof with heavy threats, possibly even to receive blows with a stick gathered by himself not altogether unwittingly for his own back, or to find mercy and forbearance. Shelley’s demeanour soon convinced him that he had nothing to fear. He laid a hand on the round, matted, knotted, bare and black head of each, viewed their moving, mercurial countenances with renewed pleasure and admiration, and, shaking his long locks, suddenly strode away. “That little ragged fellow knows as much as the wisest philosopher,” he presently cried, clapping the wings of his soul and crowing aloud with shrill triumph at the felicitous union of the true with the ridiculous, “but he will not communicate any portion of his knowledge. It is not from churlishness, however, for of that his nature is plainly incapable; but the sophisticated urchin will persist in thinking he has forgotten all that he knows so well. I was about to ask him myself to communicate some of the doctrines Plato unfolds in his Dialogues; but I felt that it would do no good; the rogue would have laughed at me, and so would his little sister. I wonder you did not propose to them some mathematical questions: just a few interrogations in your geometry; for that being so plain and certain, if it be once thoroughly understood, can never be forgotten!”
A day or two afterwards (or it might be on the morrow), as we were rambling in the favourite region at the foot of Shotover Hill, a gipsy’s tent by the roadside caught Shelley’s eye. Men and women were seated on the ground in front of it, watching a pot suspended over a smoky fire of sticks. He cast a passing glance at the ragged group, but immediately stopped on recognising the children, who remembered us and ran laughing into the tent. Shelley laughed also and waved his hand, and the little girl returned the salutation.
There were many striking contrasts in the character and behaviour of Shelley, and one of the most remarkable was a mixture or alternation of awkwardness with agility, of the clumsy with the graceful. He would stumble in stepping across the floor of a drawing-room; he would trip himself up on a smooth-shaven grass-plot, and he would tumble in the most inconceivable manner in ascending the commodious, facile, and well-carpeted staircase of an elegant mansion, so as to bruise his nose or his lip on the upper steps, or to tread upon his hands, and even occasionally to disturb the composure of a well-bred footman; on the contrary, he would often glide without collision through a crowded assembly, thread with unerring dexterity a most intricate path, or securely and rapidly tread the most arduous and uncertain ways. As soon as he saw the children enter the tent he darted after them with his peculiar agility, followed them into their low, narrow and fragile tenement, penetrated to the bottom of the tent without removing his hat or striking against the woven edifice. He placed a hand on each round, rough head, spoke a few kind words to the skulking children, and then returned not less precipitously, and with as much ease and accuracy as if he had been a dweller in tents from the hour when he first drew air and milk to that day, as if he had been the descendant, not of a gentle house, but of a long line of gipsies. His visit roused the jealousy of a stunted, feeble dog, which followed him, and barked with helpless fury; he did not heed it nor, perhaps, hear it. The company of gipsies were astonished at the first visit that had ever been made by a member of either University to their humble dwelling; but, as its object was evidently benevolent, they did not stir or interfere, but greeted him on his return with a silent and unobserved salutation. He seized my arm, and we prosecuted our speculations as we walked briskly to our college.
The marvellous gentleness of his demeanour could conciliate the least sociable natures, and it had secretly touched the wild things which he had thus briefly noticed.
We were wandering through the roads and lanes at a short distance from the tent soon afterwards, and were pursuing our way in silence. I turned round at a sudden sound—the young gipsy had stolen upon us unperceived, and with a long bramble had struck Shelley across the skirts of his coat. He had dropped his rod, and was returning softly to the hedge.
Certain misguided persons, who, unhappily for themselves, were incapable of understanding the true character of Shelley, have published many false and injurious calumnies respecting him—some for hire, others drawing largely out of the inborn vulgarity of their own minds, or from the necessary malignity of ignorance—but no one ever ventured to say that he was not a good judge of an orange. At this time, in his nineteenth year, although temperate, he was less abstemious in his diet than he afterwards became, and he was frequently provided with some fine samples. As soon as he understood the rude but friendly welcome to the heaths and lanes, he drew an orange from his pocket and rolled it after the retreating gipsy along the grass by the side of the wide road. The boy started with surprise as the golden fruit passed him, quickly caught it up and joyfully bore it away, bending reverently over it and carrying it with both his hands, as if, together with almost the size, it had also the weight of a cannon-ball.
His passionate fondness of the Platonic philosophy seemed to sharpen his natural affection for children, and his sympathy with their innocence. Every true Platonist, he used to say, must be a lover of children, for they are our masters and instructors in philosophy. The mind of a new-born infant, so far from being, as Locke affirms, a sheet of blank paper, is a pocket edition containing every dialogue, a complete Elzevir Plato, if we can fancy such a pleasant volume, and moreover a perfect encyclopedia, comprehending not only the newest discoveries, but all those still more valuable and wonderful inventions that will hereafter be made.
One Sunday we had been reading Plato together so diligently that the usual hour of exercise passed away unperceived. We sallied forth hastily to take the air for half an hour before dinner. In the middle of Magdalen Bridge we met a woman with a child in her arms. Shelley was more attentive at that instant to our conduct in a life that was past or to come than to a decorous regulation of the present, according to the established usages of society in that fleeting moment of eternal duration styled the nineteenth century. With abrupt dexterity he caught hold of the child. The mother, who might well fear that it was about to be thrown over the parapet of the bridge into the sedgy waters below, held it fast by its long train.