“Away! away! to thy sad and silent home;
Pour bitter tears on its desolated hearth.”
. . . . . . . .
But he will have rest in the grave by-and-by. Until that time comes,
the charms of Bracknell will remain in his memory, along with Mrs.
Boinville’s voice and Cornelia Turner’s smile:
“Thou in the grave shalt rest–yet, till the phantoms flee
Which that house and hearth and garden made dear to thee ere while,
Thy remembrance and repentance and deep musings are not free
From the music of two voices and the light of one sweet smile.”
We cannot wonder that Harriet could not stand it. Any of us would have
left. We would not even stay with a cat that was in this condition.
Even the Boinvilles could not endure it; and so, as we have seen, they
gave this one notice.
“Early in May, Shelley was in London. He did not yet despair
of reconciliation with Harriet, nor had he ceased to love her.”
Shelley’s poems are a good deal of trouble to his biographer. They are
constantly inserted as “evidence,” and they make much confusion. As soon
as one of them has proved one thing, another one follows and proves quite
a different thing. The poem just quoted shows that he was in love with
Cornelia, but a month later he is in love with Harriet again, and there
is a poem to prove it.
“In this piteous appeal Shelley declares that he has now no
grief but one–the grief of having known and lost his wife’s
love.”
Exhibit F
“Thy look of love has power to calm
The stormiest passion of my soul.”
But without doubt she had been reserving her looks of love a good part of
the time for ten months, now–ever since he began to lavish his own on
Cornelia Turner at the end of the previous July. He does really seem to
have already forgotten Cornelia’s merits in one brief month, for he
eulogizes Harriet in a way which rules all competition out:
“Thou only virtuous, gentle, kind,
Amid a world of hate.”
He complains of her hardness, and begs her to make the concession of
a “slight endurance”–of his waywardness, perhaps–for the sake of
“a fellow-being’s lasting weal.” But the main force of his appeal is
in his closing stanza, and is strongly worded:
“O tract for once no erring guide!
Bid the remorseless feeling flee;
‘Tis malice, ’tis revenge, ’tis pride,
‘Tis anything but thee;
I deign a nobler pride to prove,
And pity if thou canst not love.”
This is in May–apparently towards the end of it. Harriet and Shelley
were corresponding all the time. Harriet got the poem–a copy exists in
her own handwriting; she being the only gentle and kind person amid a
world of hate, according to Shelley’s own testimony in the poem, we are
permitted to think that the daily letters would presently have melted
that kind and gentle heart and brought about the reconciliation, if there
had been time but there wasn’t; for in a very few days–in fact, before
the 8th of June–Shelley was in love with another woman.
And so–perhaps while Harriet was walking the floor nights, trying to get
her poem by heart–her husband was doing a fresh one–for the other girl
–Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin–with sentiments like these in it:
Exhibit G
To spend years thus and be rewarded,
As thou, sweet love, requited me
When none were near.
. . . thy lips did meet
Mine tremblingly; . . ,
” Gentle and good and mild thou art,
Nor can I live if thou appear
Aught but thyself.” . . .
And so on. “Before the close of June it was known and felt by Mary and
Shelley that each was inexpressibly dear to the other.” Yes, Shelley had
found this child of sixteen to his liking, and had wooed and won her in
the graveyard. But that is nothing; it was better than wooing her in her
nursery, at any rate, where it might have disturbed the other children.
However, she was a child in years only. From the day that she set her
masculine grip on Shelley he was to frisk no more. If she had occupied