For
this there were many reasons, and amongst them that Shelley entered
more unreservedly into the sports and even the thoughts of children.
I had probably awakened interest in him, not only because I was my
father's eldest child, but still more because I had already begun to
read with great avidity, and with an especial sense of imaginative
wonders and horrors; and, familiarized with the conversation amongst
literary men, I had really been able to understand something of his
position, insomuch that no doubt he saw the intense interest I took in
himself and his sufferings.
The emotions that he underwent were but too manifest in the
unconcealed anxiety and the eager recital of newly awakened hopes,
with intervals of the deepest depression. He suffered also from
physical causes, which I then only in part understood. This suffering
was traced to the attack made upon him at Tanyralt, in Wales, when, on
the night of February the 26th, 1813, some man who had been prowling
about the house in which he lived first fired at him through the
window, and then entered the room, escaping when the man-servant was
called in by the tumult and the screams of Mrs. Shelley.
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