A sense of loneliness, a thirst with which I pined."

The fruits born of this seed are discernible in every line of his
works. While having all reverence for his college companions,
Aristotle, Aeschylus, and Demosthenes, his mind instinctively turns
towards the deemed heretical works of the later French philosophers,
D'Holbach, Condillac, La Place, Rousseau, the encyclopaedists, and
other members of that school. His intellect he furbishes with stores
of logic and of chemistry, in which his greatest love was to
experimentalize; of botany and astronomy, in which he was more than a
mere adept; from Hume, too, whose essay on "Miracles," wrong as it is
in the main on many important points, was one of the alphas of his
creed--and with deep draughts from his great instructor, Plato, of
whom he always spoke with the greatest adoration, as, for instance, in
the preface to the Symposium:

"Plato is eminently the greatest among the Greek
philosophers; and from, or rather perhaps through him and
his master, Socrates, have proceeded those emanations of
moral and metaphysical knowledge, on which a long series and
an incalculable variety of popular superstitions have
sheltered their absurdities from the slow contempt of
mankind."

It is desirable to call attention to the great minds from whom the
student of the early part of this century could only cull his
knowledge--he had no Spencer and no Mill, at whose feet to sit--he had
in science none of the conclusions of Darwin, of Huxley, of Tyndall,
of Murchison, of Lyell, to refer to, and yet I think, that the careful
reader will, like myself, find prefigured in Shelley's works much of