Part 9 (1/2)

If a final word were needed to utter the unutterable sense of waste excited in us by Sh.e.l.ley's premature absorption into the mystery of the unknown, we might find it in the last lines of his own _Alastor_:--

Art and eloquence, And all the shows o' the world, are frail and vain To weep a loss that turns their light to shade.

It is a woe ”too deep for tears,” when all Is reft at once, when some surpa.s.sing spirit, Whose light adorned the world around it, leaves Those who remain behind nor sobs nor groans.

The pa.s.sionate tumult of a clinging hope; But pale despair and cold tranquillity, Nature's vast frame, the web of human things, Birth and the grave, that are not as they were.

APPENDIX.

(_To replace pages 79-83 in text._)

That Sh.e.l.ley, early in 1814, had formed no intention of abandoning his wife is certain; for he was re-married to her on the 24th of March (eight days after the letter I have just quoted) at St. George's, Hanover Square.

This ratification of the Scotch marriage was no doubt meant to place the legitimacy of a possible heir beyond all question. Yet, if we may base conjecture upon ”Stanzas, April, 1814,” which undoubtedly refer to his relations with the Boinville family, it seems that in the very month after this new ceremony Sh.e.l.ley found the difficulties of his wedded life intolerable. He had not, however, lost his affection for Harriet. He still sought to recover her confidence and kindness. In spite of his wife's apparent coldness and want of intellectual sympathy, in spite of his own increasing alienation from the atmosphere in which she now lived, he still approached her with the feelings of a suitor and a lover. This is proved beyond all doubt by the pathetic stanzas ”To Harriet: May, 1814,” which have only recently been published. I may add that these verses exist in Harriet's own autograph, whence I infer that she, on her side, was not indifferent to the emotion they express.[35] Sh.e.l.ley begins with this apostrophe:

Thy look of love has power to calm The stormiest pa.s.sion of my soul; Thy gentle words are drops of balm In life's too bitter bowl.

He then immediately adds that his cruellest grief is to have known and lost ”those choicest blessings”; Harriet is proving by her coldness that she repays his most devoted love with scorn. Nevertheless he will appeal to her better nature:

Be thou, then, one among mankind Whose heart is harder not for state, Thou only virtuous, gentle, kind, Amid a world of hate; And by a slight endurance seal A fellow-being's lasting weal.

The next stanza paints a moving picture of his own wretchedness, and beseeches her, before it is too late, to avert the calamity of an open rupture:

In mercy let him not endure The misery of a fatal cure.

She has been yielding to false counsels and obeying the impulse of feelings which represent not her real and n.o.bler, but her artificial and lower self:

O trust for once no erring guide!

Bid the remorseless feeling flee; 'Tis malice, 'tis revenge, 'tis pride, 'Tis anything but thee; O deign a n.o.bler pride to prove, And pity if thou canst not love.

Whatever opinion the student of Sh.e.l.ley's history may form regarding his previous and his subsequent conduct, due weight must always be given to the accent of sincerity, of pleading sorrow, of ingenuous self-humiliation, in these touching lines. It must also be remembered that Harriet, although she treasured them and copied them in her own handwriting, apparently turned a deaf ear to their appeal, and that it was not until several weeks of solitude and misery had pa.s.sed that Sh.e.l.ley finally sought the ”fatal cure” of separation by flinging himself into the arms of Mary G.o.dwin.

We may now affirm with confidence that in the winter and spring of 1814 an estrangement had gradually been growing up between Sh.e.l.ley and Harriet.