In his Preface to Prometheus Unbound (1820) Percy Bysshe Shelley declares that his imagery drawn from operations of human mind. Similarly in The Revolt of Islam (1818) Shelley attempts to translate imagery of labouring brain, inherently incommunicable, into a language of sense (e.g., Canto I, stanzas 40-50). The narrative strategy in both works is to re-enact verbally processes of perception and cognition, with particular attention to physical pathology that causes aberration. While other poets of period relish natural world and seek to demonstrate a seemingly spontaneous and unencumbered access through senses, Shelley exhibits experiencing mind as subject to influence of shock, diet, and other external circumstances. Shelley's narratives of revolution in Prometheus Unbound and The Revolt of Islam, not unlike those of William Blake in Jerusalem, trace an interaction and interdependence of internal and external events. Only rarely, however, did Blake conjure as instruments or agents. His psychological narrative is dominated by Four Zoas, their Emanations and progeny. Shelley, by contrast, refers repeatedly to obstinate trespasses of ghosts. In Shelley's vocabulary, ghosts refer most often to thoughts, fantasies, memories that haunt mind, rather than to spirits of dead; and for Shelley terrors of mind have physical causes. When asked whether he believed in ghosts, Coleridge replied that he had seen far too many to believe in them. Shelley might well have answered in same terms. Ghosts flit through his best known poems. At Castle Diodati on Lake Geneva, in June, 1816, occurred that well known episode in which Shelley, Lord Byron, John Polidori, Claire Claremont, and Mary Godwin Shelley amused themselves with ghost stories, giving rise to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) and Polidori's The Vampyre (1819). As a child Shelley delighted in telling ghost stories to his sisters, and habit persisted when he grew up. Two gothie tales, Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne were among his earliest publications (both in 1810). With his macabre fantasies he deliberately played on credulity of Harriet Westbrook Shelley. On some occasions, Richard Holmes says, Shelley became so enraptured with his own ghost stories, that the fantasies came near to hallucinations. (1) Certainly two are intermixed in crisis at Tanenyenrallt on January 19, 1812. On January 26, 1812, one week after attack, Harriet Westbrook Shelley wrote to Elizabeth Hitchener to assure her that all was quiet and tranquil. (2) Enclosed within her husband's own letter to Elizabeth, Harriet's note was written at request of Shelley, who has made me fill up this large-sheet. She must express her regret for sending an earlier account on morning immediately following event: have sent you a letter which I am afraid will add to your melancholy, yet it is true what I have said, and now I am angry that I sent it yet I was afraid you might hear circumstance much more dreadful than it was. The reason for Harriet's apology, as this letter makes evident, was not to provide a less terrifying version of assault, but rather to declare that Shelley's mental condition was not undermined. In this note Harriet made no mention of physical by intruders on Shelley's person. Her reassurances were concerned rather with severity of attack on his mental stability. In a postscript to Harriet's note, Shelley insisted on his recovery: am as Harriet can tell you recovered from little nervous attack. But Harriet had not pronounced him quite recovered. Instead, she declared that He is much better than he been for some time, and I hope as he gets stronger he will outgrow his nervous complaints. (3) How unstable was Shelley's psychological state? On January 16, 1812, just a few days before Shelley raised alarm of a physical attack, he confessed to Elizabeth Hitchener that he had obliged by an accession of nervous to take a quantity of opium which I did very unwillingly or reluctantly. …