In the summer of 1816 Shelley wrote two extraordinary poems, ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ (M&E 522–32) and ‘Mont Blanc’ (M&E 532–49). ‘Hymn’ and ‘Mont Blanc’ are now known to have existed in at least two main manuscript versions, the ones used for publication (the B-texts in the citations that follow) and others written earlier in a notebook entrusted for return to England to Byron's friend, Scrope Davies (the A-texts). Scrope Davies then appears to have mislaid the notebook, which was unearthed from a Pall Mall vault of Barclays bank in 1976. Place, predictably, greatly influenced the creativity of a poet fascinated by affinities between his inner and outer life, and by the exemplary association they represented for society and politics. By June 1816 Shelley, Mary Godwin, and their new baby, William, found themselves living by Lake Geneva, just below the Villa Diodati, once briefly stayed in by Milton and now occupied by Byron. The memory of Alpine scenery from his six weeks’ continental tour with Mary in 1814 had partly energized the landscapes of Alastor, and poetically exaggerated the riverscapes around Bishopsgate, near Windsor, where it was written. Now it surrounded him. He and Byron were quickly on friendly enough terms to plan a circumnavigation of the lake on which they enjoyed stormy dangers together and paid homage at Clarens and Lausanne to Rousseau and Gibbon respectively. Clarens, scene of Rousseau's La Nouvelle Héloise, was of more importance to Shelley than the house at Lausanne where in the 1780s Gibbon had finished his admirably (to Shelley's mind) anti- Christian The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. A later expedition to Chamonix, without Byron this time, inspired the topographical response called ‘Mont Blanc’. But ‘A Hymn’ is thought to have been conceived on the boat-trip with the other poet, a journey on which Shelley spent much of the time reading La Nouvelle Héloise. He wrote letters to Peacock describing both outings and claimed that it was on the earlier voyage that he ‘first knew the divine beauty of Rousseau's imagination’, which came from ‘a mind so powerfully bright as to cast a shade of falsehood on the records that are called reality ’ (Letters, i. 480, 485).