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Park, and coped well with both Hogg and Peacock. Both remained slightly in awe of her, the demure intellectual who remained in Shelley’s boat. She went on with her study of Latin authors under Shelley’s direction. In the evenings they read out loud to each other. For his part Shelley was embarking on his first concentrated study of Greek writers, especially the dramatists Aeschylus and Euripides, with the encouragement of Peacock who already read and translated fluently and was able to lend and recommend him texts. Hogg called this winter ‘a mere Atticism’.
    Peacock recalled that ‘one or two persons called upon him’, but they were not to his mind, and were not encouraged to reappear. The only exception was a physician whom he had called in; the Quaker, Dr Pope of Staines. This worthy old gentleman came more than once, not as a doctor, but as a friend. He liked to discuss theology with Shelley. Shelley at first avoided the discussion, saying his opinions would not be to the doctor’s taste, but the doctor answered, ‘I like to hear thee talk, friend Shelley; I see thee art very deep.’ 18 The friendship is not so surprising, considering Shelley’s natural reverence for eccentric doctors and sages, and the zealous, puritan cast to his own temperament.
    With these few interruptions, Shelley continued the course of his exploration into the caverns of the mind. It was now apparent to him that the way was blocked through a straightforward autobiographical account of his own sensations and dreams, and he turned to more formal types of philosophical essay to describe the problems. These, equally, had little success. In a 2,000-word essay ‘On Life’, he moved awkwardly between academic notes on the distinction between Berkeleian idealism and Humean scepticism as philosophical systems, and much broader semi-poetic formulations. ‘What is life? Thoughts and feelings arise, with or without our will, and we employ words to express them. We are born, and our birth is unremembered, and our infancy remembered but infragments; we live on, and in living we lose the apprehension of life. How vain it is to think that words can penetrate the mystery of our being!’ 19 But this was merely to surrender the problem as an insoluble one, and apart from rejecting a simple materialist philosophy — which he had never really held anyway — and remarking on the book of philosophical commentaries which he always subsequently stood by, Academical Questions by Sir William Drummond, the essay took him little further. [5] Towards the end of the essay, Shelley once again found himself turning back upon his own past, and suddenly, almost unexpectedly, for it links with little that had gone before, Shelley managed to define the condition of one of those ‘abnormal states’ which seemed to him to offer the key, both to self-knowledge and to artistic creation.
Let us recollect our sensations as children. What a distinct and intense apprehension had we of the world and of ourselves. Many of the circumstances of social life were then important to us which are now no longer so. But that is not the point of comparison on which I mean to insist. We less habitually distinguished all that we saw and felt, from ourselves! They seemed, as it were, to constitute one mass. There are some persons who in this respect are always children. Those who are subject to the state called reverie feel as if their nature were dissolved into the surrounding universe, or as if the surrounding universe were absorbed into their being. They are conscious of no distinction. And these are states which precede, or accompany, or follow an unusually intense and vivid apprehension of life. As men grow up this power commonly decays, and they become mechanical and habitual agents. 20
    The identification of this creative condition of ‘reverie’, linked with the continuation of childhood states and the cultivation of the ‘intense’ experience in adult life was a striking