But Harriet remained away, settling now at Bath, while Shelley walked despairingly the streets of London. He called not infrequently at the home of his master, Godwin, whose financial condition was even worse than his own, and whom he was devotedly anxious to relieve. One midsummer day he met probably then for the first time - Godwin's daughter Mary,1 seventeen years of age, pale, earnest, and beautiful. Their intellectual sympathy was immediate, and after but a month of acquaintance each knew but too certainly the feeling of the other. As yet no word of disloyalty to Harriet was uttered on either side. Shelley did not at the moment believe that an honourable release was open to him, and Harriet, for her part, was now beginning to regret their division. By July, however, Shelley had come into possession of what he thought unquestionable evidence of his wife's unfaithfulness to him, evidence which he continued to believe, though it was later modified in some important particulars, until he died. Concerning its actual value it is difficult if not impossible to pronounce, but there can be no doubt of Shelley's pain and sincerity in relation to it. Neither he nor Mary Godwin hesitated to accept what seemed to them a justifying condition of their present love and, indeed, of their later union. Writing to Southey in 1820, Shelley declares himself "innocent of ill, either done or intended; the consequences you allude to flowed in no respect from me. If you were my friend, I could tell you a history that would make you open your eyes; but I shall certainly never make the public my familiar confidant."

When Shelley, about July 14, suggested to Harriet the desirability of an understood separation, she did not openly oppose him, thinking it probable that his regard for Mary

1 Harriet's first reference to Mary, in her correspondence with Mrs. Nugent, has pathetic interest: "There is another daughter of hers, who is now in Scotland. She is very much like her mother, whose picture hangs up in his (Godwin's) study. She must have been a most lovely woman. Her countenance speaks her a woman who would dare to think and act for herself."

Godwin would shortly cease and that he would return to her. This attitude of compliance gave Shelley a wrong impression; he arranged for her material welfare, and withdrew with a feeling that all would be well, and that Harriet concurred in the course he had resolved to pursue. That he was mistaken in this supposition made Harriet's loss only the more grievous, but both Shelley and Mary believed that the new union was to prove best not merely for them but for Harriet as well, whose "interests," as he conceived them, Shelley constantly consulted. On July 28, 1814, Mary Godwin and Percy Bysshe Shelley, accompanied by Clara Jane Clairmont, left London for the Continent, and the next day, at Calais, the poet wrote in his journal: "Suddenly the broad sun rose over France."

The tour that followed was a brief one, cut short by lack of funds and by difficulties arising in England. While it lasted, however, Shelley and Mary had opportunity to realize the strength and virtue of their love, in a time of physical and mental stress. Spending but a few days in Paris, they proceeded on foot (Mary riding a donkey) to Charenton. There they replaced their little beast by a sturdy mule, and on reaching Troyes bought an open carriage. By these means, after many annoyances, they at length arrived at Neuchâtel, and at Brunnen on Lake Lucerne. En route Shelley had written to Harriet, urging her to meet them in Switzerland, and assuring her of his intention to remain her friend. At Brunnen he began the fragment entitled The Assassins, a romantic tale of some power. After a brief stay here and at Lucerne, the travellers turned homeward, following the Reuss and the Rhine. The beauty of the latter river, from Mayence to Bonn, greatly impressed Shelley and influenced the scenic setting of Alastor. Rotterdam was reached September 8, and London once again a week later.

During the remainder of the year Shelley and Mary suffered seriously from the want of income. Although Godwin indignantly refused to condone Shelley's course, he

freely accepted money from his scant purse and even asked for more. There is unconscious dramatic irony lurking in a passage concerning Godwin in one of Shelley's early letters to Miss Hitchener: "He remains unchanged. I have no soul-chilling alteration to record of his character." Harriet, too, was losing patience and troubling both Shelley and the God wins with increasing demands. On November 30 she gave birth to a boy, Charles Bysshe, who, with Ianthe, was soon to become the subject of Chancery litigation. Peacock was proving himself an old friend; Fanny Godwin was secretly kind; but for the most part Shelley and Mary were let severely alone save for the companionship of Hogg, who called often, and Jane Clairmont (Claire), who declined to return home. Omnivorous reading solaced the evil time, Anacreon, Coleridge, Spenser, Byron, Browne of Norwich, Gibbon, Godwin, etc. Claire, alert and olive-hued, often disturbed the household with her fears and doubts concerning the supernatural, and they were not unrelieved to see her depart, in May, 1815, for a stay in Lynmouth. Shelley, for his part, had other fears, and was now moving from spot to spot in London, protecting himself as he might against the vigilance of the bailiffs. The new year brought important changes. Sir Bysshe passed away on January 6, Mr. Timothy Shelley became a baronet in his stead, and the poet succeeded his father as heir-apparent to the title and a great estate. He went down to Field Place, but was not welcomed. The question of entail again came up, and though Shelley declined to change his attitude, he was willing to sell his own reversion. Eventually he planned to dispose of his interest in a small part of the property for an annual income of £1000 during the joint survival of his father and himself, but Chancery would not later permit this plan to be realized. Money was advanced to meet his most pressing needs, and it is worthy of note that he immediately settled £200 a year upon Harriet, a like sum having been continued by Mr. Westbrook.

Shelley's health had of late become seriously impaired, and was not improved by the shock consequent upon the death, March 6, of Mary's first infant, hardly more than a fortnight old, and by the continued alienation of Godwin, whom he was aiding steadily. He bore Godwin's bitter letters very patiently save for one final outbreak of feeling: "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." A trip of several days' duration up the Thames to Lechlade, in the company of Mary, Peacock, and Charles Clairmont, Claire's brother, did much to restore the poet to health and good spirits. On his return to Bishopsgate he conceived and that autumn wrote the moving revelatory poem, Alastor, the first of his really sure and vital works, published the following March. Peaceful months followed, of study and composition, whose sunshine was made the brighter by the birth of William, Mary's second child, January 24, 1816. But Godwin's attitude, the coldness of others, and the failure of the lawyers satisfactorily to adjust financial matters, he was again dependent upon his father's voluntary advances, led Shelley to heed the invitation of a voice of whose charms he could no longer be insensible. It was Switzerland's recall of him that he heard and obeyed. Byron, whom he had not yet met, but with whom Claire had become only too well acquainted, was soon to arrive in Geneva, and the infatuated girl, keeping her secret from Shelley and Mary, asked and was permitted to become one of the party. Early in May, 1816, the trio, with little William, started again for Paris. They reached Geneva about the 14th, and shortly afterward Byron appeared. The two poets, though associated as contemporary apostles of revolution, were yet of very different fibres, Byron, proud, passionate, fitfully purposive, like an alien. bird oaring and flapping close to earth; Shelley, keen,

luminous, mild, sun-adventuring, sailing the upper ether of thought and love with tense but tireless wings. Each knew the other for a poet, Shelley has drawn the two portraits for us in Julian and Maddalo, and they spent eager hours together and with Polidori, Byron's young Anglo-Indian physician, cruising about the lake, or exploring its shores. During this time Byron wrote some of the best stanzas of his Childe Harold, Shelley conceived his Mont Blanc and Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, and Mary began her famous romance, Frankenstein, inspired by a ghostly conversation between the poets and Polidori. The Shelley group had meanwhile secured a cottage near Coligny, and Byron was living at the Villa Diodati. While they circumnavigated the lake, Byron produced his Prisoner of Chillon and Shelley stored up countless memories of joy and beauty. After a visit of high emotion to Chamouni, Shelley and Mary received a rather melancholy letter from Fanny Godwin, and a month later left Geneva for Versailles, Havre, and Portsmouth.

The year 1816 was a fatal one for several of Shelley's friends and connections. The death of Sir Bysshe was followed during the autumn by those of Fanny Godwin and Harriet Shelley, each of these women dying by her own hand. Fanny, who had been growing of late more and more dejected, feeling the unkindness of her stepmother and other relatives, and deprived of the immediate counsel of Shelley and Mary, decided that she was a useless cumberer of the ground, and took laudanum at Swansea, October 10. She had written only a week earlier an affectionate letter to Mary, who with Shelley was now staying at Bath, in which all her thoughts unselfishly went out to the welfare of Godwin and the Shelleys. These were her sincere mourners. “Our feelings are less tumultuous than deep," wrote Godwin to Mary; and she to Shelley, who went to Swansea suffering great anguish of spirit: "If she had lived until this moment, she would have been saved, for my house would