... We came at last To a small chamber, which with mosses rare Was tapestried, where me his soft hands placed Upon a couch of grass and oak-leaves interlaced. * * * * * Thus slowly from my brain the darkness rolled, My thoughts their due array did re-assume Thro' the inchantments of that Hermit old; Then I bethought me of the glorious doom Of those who sternly struggle to relume The lamp of Hope o'er man's bewildered lot; And, sitting by the waters, in the gloom Of eve, to that friend's heart I told my thought-- That heart which had grown old, but had corrupted not.' From these passages of the puerile romance and the mature poem, readers may see how Shelley nursed and nourished every fancy that entered his brain; how, growing gradually in form and beauty under his fostering egotism, the conceits of his puerile inventiveness developed into the conceptions of his poetical genius; and how he weaved the story of his own life out of imaginations as baseless, and in the earlier stages of their development as grotesque, as the phantasies of departing slumber. The imprisonment of Laon was the outgrowth of Verezzi's imprisonment. The hero of the poem resembles the hero of the romance in being the victim of secret and unscrupulous enemies; and in that respect they resembled the poet who created them,--the poet who only escaped captivity such as theirs by repeatedly flying from foes, bent on throwing him into a dungeon. The fever that seized Laon in the grated cage, and the fever that nearly killed Verezzi in the gloomy forest were romantic reproductions of the fever Percy Bysshe Shelley endured at Field Place. The tyrant who put Laon between brazen bars, and the villain who chained Verezzi in the darksome cavern, had their prototype in the unnatural father (of the poet's 'marvellous story' to his second wife), who was set on sending his wretched heir to a madhouse. The physician who, braving a tyrant's vengeance, rescued Laon from confinement and ministered to his mental disease, was the same hard-swearing Windsor doctor who, facing the malicious despot of Field Place, saved Percy Bysshe Shelley from his appointed doom, and carried him out of brain-fever. It was thus that Shelley wrote his wild views of his own story into the Byronic 'egotisms' of his literary productions:--the 'egotisms' which the Shelleyan enthusiasts would have the world accept as pieces of substantially veracious autobiography. CHAPTER VII. BETWEEN ETON AND OXFORD.