Ardent and romantic, he was
eager to discover beauty "beneath" every natural aspect. Of all men
living, I am the one most bound to be aware of the inconsistency; but
you will see it reconciled a little later.
Shelley left college prone "to fall in love,"--having already, indeed,
gone through some very slight experiences of that process. In his
wanderings, in a humble position which conciliated rather than
repelled him, he met with Harriet Westbrooke, a very comely, pleasing,
and simple type of girlhood. She was at some disadvantage, under some
kind of domestic oppression; so she served at once as an object for
his disengaged affection, and a subject for his liberating theories,
and as a substratum for the idealizing process upon which he
constructed a fictitious creation of Harriet Westbrooke. His dreams
bearing but a faint and controversial resemblance to the Harriet
Westbrooke of daily life, the fictitious image prevented him from
knowing her, until the reality broke through the poetical vision only
to shock him by its inferiority or repulsiveness. As to the poor girl
herself, she never had the capacity for learning to know him. In the
sequel she proved to be the not unwilling slave of a petty domestic
intrigue,--oppression from which he would have rescued her.
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