By the false cant which on their innocent lips 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; was Shelley, though most reluctantly, at length consented to certain alterations, which, in his opinion, spoiled the poem. These changes having been made, it appeared under a new title, The Revolt of Islam. "It is," says the author, “a tale illustrative of such a revolution as might be supposed to take place in a European nation acted upon by the opinions of what has been called (erroneously, as I think) the modern philosophy, and contending with ancient notions and the supposed advantage derived from them to those who support them." "This poem," he says in a letter to Godwin, " produced by a series of thoughts which filled my mind with unbounded and sustained enthusiasm. I felt the precariousness of my life, and I resolved in this book to leave some records of myself. Much of what the volume contains was written with the same feeling — as real, though not so prophetic-as the communications of a dying man. I never presumed, indeed, to consider it anything approaching to faultless, but when I considered contemporary productions of the same apparent pretensions, I will own that I was filled with confidence. I felt that it was in many respects a genuine picture of my own mind. ments were true, not assumed. believed that my power consists in sympathy, and that part of the imagination which relates to sympathy and contemplation. I am formed, if for anything not in common with the herd of mankind, to apprehend minute and remote distinctions of feeling, whether relative to external nature or the living beings which surround us, and to communicate the conceptions which result from considering either the moral or material universe as a whole." I felt that the senti And in this I have long Two prose pamphlets referring to the state of the nation were produced during the year 1817. The earlier of the two proposed that the sense of the nation in regard to Parliamentary Reform (of which Shelley was an advocate) should be ascertained by a plebiscite under the care of a voluntary association. Towards the expenses of such a plan Shelley offered a subscription of £100. The moderation and good sense of the pamphlets are remarkable when we consider the ardor of Shelley's feelings. "Nothing," he says, "can less consist with reason or afford smaller hopes of any beneficial issue than the plan which should abolish the regal or aristocratical branches of our constitution before the public mind, through many gradations of improvement, shall have arrived at the maturity which can disregard these symbols of its childhood." Again: "Political institution is undoubtedly susceptible of such improvement as no rational person can consider possible as long as the present degraded condition to which the vital imperfections in the existing system of government has reduced the vast multitude of men shall subsist. The securest method of arriving at such beneficial innovations is to proceed gradually and with caution." For various reasons, Shelley had for some time been contemplating a visit to Italy; thither he set out on March 11, 1818, accompanied by his family. There the remaining years of his short life, the years of his best poetic work, were spent. In Italy, as in England, he continually changed his place of abode. At first, the Shelleys were drawn to Leghorn by the presence of a Mrs. Gisborne. This lady had been the friend both of Mary's father and of her mother. She attracted Shelley by various qualities. "Mrs. Gisborne," he writes in 1819, "is a sufficiently amiable and very accomplished woman; she is nuoкрaтiкη and abeŋ-how far she may be pλav@pwrη I don't know, for she is the antipodes of enthusiasm. Her husband, a man with little thin lips, receding forehead, and a prodigious nose, is an excessive bore. His nose is something quite Slawkenbergian — it weighs on the imagination to look at it. . . . It is a nose once seen never to be forgotten, and which requires the utmost strength of Christian charity to forgive. I, you know, have a little turn-up nose; Hogg has a large hook one; but add them both together. square them, cube them, you will have but a faint idea of the nose to which I refer." The son of Mrs. Gisborne by a former marriage, Henry Reveley, was an engineer and inventor. Shelley became interested in the construction of a steamboat which Reveley was engaged in working out, and furnished some of the needful money. In August he visited Byron at Venice. Byron offered him the use of his villa at Este. Shelley accepted, and was joined by Mary and her two children. But no sooner had the latter arrived in Venice than the infant daughter died; hence sadness hung over them during their stay at Este, a sadness which is apparent in Lines Written among the Euganean Hills. The poet's creative activity, which had been dormant during the first months in Italy, revived. He wrote Julian and Maddalo, which contains idealized portraits of Byron and himself, a veiled account of some of his personal experiences, and reminiscences of Venetian scenes. Here, also, he began the Prometheus Unbound, and completed the first act. Winter and spring were spent in southern Italy, in Naples, and in Rome. In the former city he suffered much from depression of spirits, partly the result of ill health and isolation; partly, perhaps, arising from a connection with a certain mysterious lady which is vaguely hinted at but cannot now be elucidated.1 In March he took up his residence in Rome. He read classical writers and diligently visited the galleries and antiquities. "You know not," he writes to Peacock, "how delicate the imagination becomes by dieting with antiquity day after day." Most of all he delighted in 1 See note on Stanzas Written in Dejection. |