"Partly from curiosity" Victor wandered into Professor Waldman's lecture and thence
into the scientific career that culminated in the birth of his Creature (I:2:14).
As this instance may indicate, the import of this essential human attribute for good
and bad—other examples will be found in I:L1:2, I:L4:11, I:L4:31, I:1:22, and I:7:1—has
been emphasized throughout the first volume of Frankenstein.

This spring appears to wipe the slate clean for Victor in Ingolstadt as well (I:4:19).
For the Creature, no less than for Victor Frankenstein, however, the past cannot be
so easily forgotten.

The Creature here quotes back to Victor a line from Percy Shelley's "Mutability" that
Victor had mused over that morning in ascending Montanvert (II:2:3). Although this
does stretch the imagination, it is indisputably another instance of the mirror effects
we discern in the relations of Creator and Creature.

That is, a family where seniority is honored for its wisdom and the generations respect
and support each other provides a model for a civilized community.

Although we have no guide to Mary Shelley's thought processes as she wrote this passage,
it is probable that the stanza from Percy Shelley's poetry she quotes at the end of
the paragraph caused her to think of another from the volume in which it was published
(or the causality might have been reversed, with that other passage first coming to
mind and prompting the remembrance of this stanza): whatever the case, this description
of mountain conifers strongly resembles the desolate final scene, actually drawn from
Shelley's experiences in Wales before he met Mary, of his poem "Alastor" (see lines
550-70). An early sketch of this same subject is contained in a poem in the early
notebook known as the Esdaile Notebook, a poem Shelley wrote in 1811 and never published,
called after its first line "Dark spirit of the desart rude."

On the other hand, the scenery of Switzerland, far more sublime than that of Wales,
afforded ample opportunity for Mary Shelley to observe the desolation that alpine
storms and glacial movement could visit on the pine forests of the mountains. There
is a description of such shattered trees in Letter 4 of A History of Six Weeks' Tour.
Byron offers another such passage in the second scene of Manfred, I.ii.66-74, which,
though begun later than Frankenstein, indicates at many points a common conceptual
origin.

Paradise Lost, John Milton's epic poem, was originally published in 1667 in ten books,
then revised by its author into the twelve-book form in which we read it today shortly
before his death in 1674. Containing the major creation myth of modern Europe, its
impact on Frankenstein is major and discernible from beginning to end. In the immediate
context of the Creature's discovery rather than of Mary Shelley's intertextual conception
of her novel, however, what is most significant is how he reads the epic as a key
to his self-understanding, even perhaps his self-fashioning.

The seven-year old William seems to be drawing his points of reference from reading
fairy tales and romances. This is of a piece with the experiences of the older members
of the household when they were his age, particularly Henry Clerval, who wrote a fairy
tale at the age of nine and was passionately fond of romances (see I:1:11).

Here the Creature unconsciously echoes the sentiments of Victor Frankenstein ("if
our impulses were confined to hunger, thirst, and desire, we might be nearly free")
from earlier the same morning of their conversation (II:2:3). That the Creature speaks
of heat where Victor uses "desire" reflects his very first conscious experiences (II:3:3,
II:3:6), but desire is also at this point very much on his mind, as the ensuing paragraphs
will stress.

It is one thing for the Creature to utter a pantheistic oath (previous paragraph),
but to put a second immediately into the mouth of Victor is to emphasize that where
man plays God, he has no other deity to whom to turn to right his injustices but himself.

The elder De Lacey, we will soon learn, is blind.