should have prevailed on you to be thus harsh and cruel. I lamented also over my ruined hopes of all that your genius once taught me to expect from your virtue, when I found that for yourself, your family, and your creditors, you would submit to that communication with me which you once rejected and abhorred, and which no pity for my poverty and sufferings, assumed willingly for you, could avail to extort. Do not talk of forgiveness again to me, for my blood boils in my veins, and my gall rises against all that bears the human form when I think of what I, their benefactor and ardent lover, have endured of enmity and contempt from you and from all mankind.

To this Godwin answered in his lofty and unrelenting vein, and Shelley rejoined:

The hopes which I had conceived of receiving from you the treatment and consideration which I esteem to be justly due to me were destroyed by your letter dated the 5th. The feelings occasioned by this discovery were so bitter and so excruciating that I am resolved for the future to stifle all those expectations which my sanguine temper too readily erects on the slightest relaxation of the contempt and the neglect in the midst of which I live. I must appear the reverse of what I really am, haughty and hard, if I am not to see myself and all that I love trampled upon and outraged. Pardon me, I do entreat you, if, pursued by the conviction that where my true character is most entirely known I there meet with the most systematic injustice, I have expressed myself with violence. Overlook a fault caused by your own equivocal politeness, and I will offend no more. We will confine our communications to business.

In May, 1816, Shelley, accompanied by Mary and Miss Clairmont, made a second journey to Switzerland, and rented a cottage on the shore of the Lake of Geneva. In the neighboring villa lived Byron, and the two households were much together. Shelley had a profound admiration for Byron's genius; of his morals and principles he did not

approve. Together, he and Byron circumnavigated the lake. In no amusement did Shelley take more delight than in boating; water had a special fascination for him; in his poetry he loves to follow the course of a river, and dwells with peculiar fondness on scenery reflected in the water. There was a kindred but more childish pursuit in which he delighted to indulge. "He had a passion," says Peacock, "for sailing paper boats. . . . The best spot he had ever found for it was a large pool of transparent water on a heath above Bracknell, with determined borders free from weeds, which admitted launching the miniature craft on the windward and running round to receive it on the leeward side. On the Serpentine he would sometimes launch a boat constructed with more than usual care and freighted with half-pence. He delighted to do this in presence of boys, who would run round to meet it, and when it landed in safety, and the boys scrambled for the prize, he had difficulty in restraining himself from shouting as loudly as they did."

Enjoyable though Shelley's visit to Switzerland was, he soon yearned for his native land. "My present intention," he writes, "is to return to England and to make that most excellent of nations my perpetual resting place." Accordingly, at the end of September, the Shelleys returned, and whilst seeking for a suitable house took temporary lodgings at Bath. It would appear that when they reached England, Harriet was no longer at her father's house, and Shelley's efforts to discover her were futile. In the middle of December, he suddenly learned that her body had been found in the Serpentine. There she had drowned herself a month before. Whatever may have been the immediate causes of this deed, it cannot be doubted that Shelley's desertion of her was a remote antecedent. And, though through life he continued to believe that his action towards her was justi

fiable, her suicide was at the time a terrible shock and continued to haunt him with horror.

Shelley's two children, Ianthe and Charles, were in the hands of their maternal grandfather and aunt, who refused to surrender them. The consequence was a suit in Chancery, which dragged itself out for many months, and caused Shelley wearing anxieties during its continuance, and bitter pain by its result. On the grounds that Shelley had published immoral views with regard to marriage in Queen Mab, and had to some extent carried them out in practice, the Lord Chancellor, Eldon, decided that the latter was not a proper person to have the control of his children. Accordingly, it was decreed that they should be educated under the supervision of the court and by persons of whom the court approved. Shelley was permitted to nominate these persons, subject to the Chancellor's approval; but was not allowed to see his children more than twelve times a year, and then only in presence of their guardians. He was, therefore, virtually to have no influence in their upbringing, and they were to be instructed in those orthodox views in religious and social matters of which he utterly disapproved. His indignation found vent in his poem To the Lord Chancellor:

I curse thee by a parent's outraged love,

By hopes long cherished and too lately lost,
By gentle feelings thou couldst never prove,
By griefs which thy stern nature never crossed;

By those unpracticed accents of young speech,
Which he who is a father sought to frame
To gentlest lore, such as the wisest teach
Thou strike the lyre of mind!

O grief and shame;

By the false cant which on their innocent lips
Must hang like poison on an opening bloom,
By the dark creeds which cover with eclipse

Their pathway from the cradle to the tomb.

Another result of Harriet's death was the marriage of Shelley and Mary, and, in consequence, reconciliation with Godwin. During the early months of 1817 Shelley was detained in London by business connected with the suit; in March he took a house in Marlow on the Thames, some thirty miles from London, where he lived for a year. During this time he was visited by many of his friends, among them Leigh Hunt, who gives a description of his manner of life: "He was said to be keeping a seraglio at Marlow, and his friends partook of the scandal. This keeper of a seraglio, who, in fact, was extremely difficult to please in such matters, and who had no idea of love unconnected with sentiment, passed his days like a hermit. He rose early in the morning, walked and read before breakfast, took that meal sparingly, wrote and studied the greater part of the morning, walked and read again, dined on vegetables (for he took neither meat nor wine), conversed with his friends (to whom his house was ever open), again walked out, and usually furnished reading to his wife till ten o'clock, when he went to bed. This was his daily existence. His book was generally Plato or Homer or one of the Greek tragedies or the Bible, in which last he took a great, though peculiar, and often admiring, interest."

He was vexed as usual by the importunities of creditors; it was not mainly his own expenses that involved him with these. He was, indeed, a bad manager of money; his needs, however, were few; but he continually incurred obligations on behalf of his friends. His generosity brought endless claims upon him. Of his liberality to Godwin, we have already spoken; Hunt, too, was lavishly helped by Shelley,

and on Peacock, the poet conferred an annuity of £100 a year. Among the poor of Marlow he had numerous pensioners, and he gave freely to chance applicants. He caught ophthalmia visiting the cottagers, and on one occasion came home barefoot, having given his boots to some unfortunate. His charity extended to the brute creation; he is reported to have bought crayfish from peddlers that he might return them to their native haunts. He spent much time boating on the Thames and walking in the fields and woods. "I have often met him," wrote a lady, "going or coming from his island retreat near Medmenham Abbey. . . . He was the most interesting figure I ever saw; his eyes were like a deer's, bright, but rather wild. His white throat unfettered, his slender, but to me almost faultless, shape, his brown long coat with curling lamb's wool collar and cuffs-in fact, his whole appearance- are as fresh in my recollection as an occurrence of yesterday. . . . On his return his steps were often hurried, and sometimes he was rather fantastically arrayed: . . . on his head would be a wreath of what in Marlow we call 'old man's beard' and wild flowers intermixed; at these times he seemed quite absorbed, and he dashed along regardless of all he met or passed."

The time Shelley spent at Marlow was a period of great literary activity. His health was ailing, and he thought that this was his last opportunity of instilling his peculiar views. These views he embodied in the longest poem he ever wrote, Laon and Cythna. This work, completed in the autumn of 1817, failed to find a publisher, but several booksellers undertook to sell it at Shelley's risk. Only a few copies had been issued when one of these booksellers, Ollier, noted some passages certain to excite the abhorrence of most readers, and likely to bring down legal penalties on those engaged in circulating the book. The issue was stopped;