Meeting at one or two p.m., they seldom separated before one or two a.m. In foul weather they read, talked, wrote letters in each other's company, without going out of college. They read together Locke's _Essay concerning Human Understanding_, Hume's _Essays_, several of Plato's Dialogues (by means of Dacier's translations), several of the works of Scotch metaphysicians, not worthy of being mentioned in the same sentence with Hume, treatises of Logic, and divers English poets and Latin poets. But Plato, Locke, and Hume were the authors who held their attention most often, stirred their minds most deeply, provoking them at every turn to pass from study to talk, and argue out the questions raised by printed text. Of Locke's and Hume's writings they made careful notes, that in some cases were precise abstracts of the author's several arguments on a question of supreme importance. That Hume whetted Shelley's appetite for sceptical literature may be inferred from the note, in which (on November 11th, 1810, _Sunday_) he begged Stockdale to look out for a translation into Greek, Latin, or any of the European languages, of a certain 'Hebrew essay, demonstrating that the Christian religion is false, that was mentioned in one of the numbers of the _Christian Observer_, last spring, by a clergyman, as an unanswerable, yet sophistical argument.' When the weather was fair, or not so foul as absolutely to prohibit exercise in the open air, the two friends went for walks in the country,--sometimes for very long walks, that kept them for four, or even six hours, in the open air. Excellent pedestrians, they delighted in walking; and Shelley was never happier than when he and his peculiar comrade started out for the country in the early afternoon for an unusally long walk, with the intention of 'cutting hall' (the hour for the college-dinner in those days was 4 p.m.), and returning in the evening, for the equally welcome and needful supper, ordered to be ready for them on their return to the poet's first-floor rooms,[4] in the principal quadrangle of their college. In these long walks it was that the two inseparable undergraduates walked repeatedly over and about Shotover Hill; threaded meandering ways through Bagley Wood; traversed the farmstead in which the furious dog seized with his teeth, and almost tore off, the tail of the poet's brand-new blue coat; and leaped through the gap of an aged fence into the trim garden,--leafless on that mid-winter day, had it not been for the evergreen shrubs; flowerless, had it not been for the brumal flowers here and there faintly visible; but still trim, daintily kept, and eloquent of peacefulness, seclusion, and human care,--the garden where the poet gathered the first of those seeds of pathos and delicate sentiment, that slowly germinating in his fancy, bore fruit long years afterwards in _The Sensitive Plant_.