As soon as I entered his rooms, I knew that I was in the abode of an ardent spirit: on the floor, on the carpet, on the desk, on every available surface, lay a scattered profusion of objects of every description. There were papers, books, prints, and boxes innumerable with stockings, boots, shirts and other linen crammed among them. I observed that the carpet had already been stained and scorched in several places, which instinctively I ascribed to scientific experiment. He noticed my glance, and laughed. He had an immoderate laugh. “Sal ammoniac,” he said. “Come and see my laboratory.”

I followed him into the next room, where a narrow bed was lodged in a corner. He had set up a bench, upon which he had placed an electrical machine that I took to be a voltaic battery. Beside it was a solar microscope as well as several large glass jars and phials. “You are an experimenter,” I said.

“Of course. And so should be every inquirer after knowledge. We do not need to read Aristotle. We need to look into the world.”

“I also have a solar microscope.”

“Do you? Did you hear that, Hogg?”

“I have been studying the corpuscles of life.”

“And where have you found them?”

“In the water of the glaciers. In my own blood. The world is full of energy.”

“Bravo!” He had become very eager, and he took my shoulders in a tight grasp. “There is another place where you will find life. In the storm!” I thought that he was about to embrace me, but he released me from his grip. I recognised later that he was curiously, almost unnaturally, sensitive to the very thoughts that passed through my mind. With some people there is no need whatsoever for words. Seeing a slight tremor in my eyes, he would always look away.

“Have you noticed the voltaic battery?” he asked me now. “It recreates the lightning flash. I have been like Isaac Newton. Staring into the light.”

Bysshe was openly contemptuous of the regimen of the university, and attended no lectures. I was unsure, in fact, what studies he was meant to be pursuing. To him they did not matter in the slightest. There was one task that we were assigned by rote, that of translating each week an essay from the Spectator into Latin. This he accomplished with the greatest ease, and indeed he could write Latin with as much facility and fluency as he wrote English. He told me that the secret was to imagine himself a Roman orator in the first years of the Republic. This inspired him with such fervour that the words came naturally to him in their proper order. I did not doubt it. His imagination was like the voltaic battery from which lightning issued forth.

We would take long walks in the country outside Oxford, often following the Thames upward past Binsey and Godstow, or downstream to Iffley and its curious twelfth-century church. Bysshe loved the river with a passion I have seldom seen equalled, and would extol its merits over the languid Nile and the turbid Rhine. I had thought him all fire, but there were other elements in his constitution-fluent, pliant, fertile, like the water around us. On these expeditions he would often declaim to me the poetry of Coleridge on the powers of the imagination. “The poet dreams of that which the scientist deems to be impossible,” he told me. “Once it is envisaged, then it is made true.” He knelt down to examine a small flower, the name of which I did not know. “It is magnificent to aspire beyond the common reach of man.”

“In what endeavour?”

“Who knows? Who can tell? The great poets of the past were philosophers or alchemists. Or magicians. They cast off the vesture of the body, and in their pursuits, became pure spirit. Do you know of Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus?” I noted them as worthy of study. “We must make a pilgrimage, you and I, to Folly Bridge and worship at the shrine of Roger Bacon. There is a house there said to be his laboratory. Do you know the legend? If a man wiser than Friar Bacon ever walks beside it, then it will collapse and fall. In this city of dunces, it has already stood for six hundred years. Shall we test it? We will walk over the bridge in turn, and see which one of us performs the miracle.”

“It was Bacon who created the talking head, was it not?”

“Yes. The head that spoke and said, ‘Time is.’ Except that it spoke in Latin. It had studied the classical authors. That may account for the spirit of animation.”

“But how did the lips move?”

I would put questions to Bysshe, simply to delight in the extravagance of his answers. I am quite convinced that he invented as he talked, but that did not dispel the enchantment. Indeed it contributed to it. I followed his meaning as if it were a firefly glowing in the darkness.

He would often talk to himself, in a low muttered voice. It seemed to be some form of communication with his inward being, but there were some of course who questioned his sanity. “Mad Shelley” was the epithet often used against him. I never saw any sign of madness, unless it be insanity to possess a highly charged and sensitive spirit alert to every delicate change in the atmosphere around him. His eyes would often fill with tears, when his feelings were touched by some generous gesture or by the story of another’s misfortune. In that respect, at least, he did not have a common sensibility. He had the temperament of a Rousseau or of a Werther.

IN THOSE DAYS I was more than ever intent upon exploring the secrets of nature, and I gave myself up to the study of the source where life began. Bysshe and I would argue into the night over the respective merits of the Italians Galvani and Volta. He favoured the animal electricity of Signor Galvani, while I was deeply excited by the success of the voltaic plates.

“Do you not see,” I told him one winter evening, “that the electrical battery is a new engine of immense promise?”

“My dear Victor, Galvani has proved that there is electricity in the world around us. Nature is electricity itself. By the simple expedient of a metallic thread, he has brought life back into a frog. Why could he not achieve the same with the human frame?”

“I have not thought of it.” I went over to the window, and looked out at the snow falling onto the quad.

Bysshe was lying on the sofa, and I heard him murmuring to himself some lines of poetry:

“Happy is he who lives to understand

Not human nature only, but explores

All natures, to the end that he may find

The law that governs each.”

“Do you know who wrote that, Victor?”

“I have no idea.”

“Wordsworth.”

“He is one of your new poets.”

“He is the poet. Consider the lightning flash,” he continued. “Of all the powers in nature, it is the most tremendous. In its light you can see the fiery breath of the universe!”

“And how can you harness the lightning?”

“If you were to send into the atmosphere some electrical kite, it would draw down from the sky an immense volume of electricity. Think of it. The whole ammunition of a mighty thunderstorm directed at a certain point. Can you imagine the stupendous results?”

“We have come a long way from the humble frog.”

“Don’t you see? The smallest thing has life and energy.”

“Why not call it spiritual force?”

“What is the difference between body and spirit? In the lightning flash they are the same. Incandescent!”

I must admit that his words had a tremendous effect upon me. But Bysshe began to speculate upon balloon trips over the continent of Africa. His mind could not remain on one course for very long. When I returned to my rooms, however, I brooded over our conversation. What if it were possible to endow the human form with life by means of the immortal spark? Would it be deemed unholy? This claim I dismissed. No. All progress in electrical science will be condemned as irreligious by those who have no faith in human progress. If I could harness the ethereal flame to practical and benign use, I would consider myself to be a benefactor of the human race. More than that. I would be considered a hero. To bring life to dead or dormant matter-to invest mere clay with the fire of life-this would be an admirable and wonderful triumph!