ing season will make me begin my journey as quickly as pos sible. I should in any case have feared an Italian summer for my delicate child. The climate of England will agree with him. Adieu, my dear friend!

“Affectionately yours,

"MARY W. SHELLEY."

FROM GODWIN TO MRS. SHELLEY.

"No. 195 Strand, May 6th, 1823.

"It certainly is, my dear Mary, with great pleasure that I anticipate that we shall once again meet. It is a long, long time now since you have spent one night under my roof. You are grown a woman, have been a wife, a mother, a widow. You have realized talents which I but faintly and doubtfully anticipated. I am grown an old man, and want a child of my own to smile on and console me.

"When you first set your foot in London, of course I expect that it will be in this house; but the house is smaller, one floor less, than the house in Skinner-street; it will do well enough for you to make shift with for a few days; but it would not do for a permanent residence. But I hope we shall at least have you near us within a call-how different from your being on the shores of the Mediterranean! "Your novel has sold five hundred copies - -half the impression. I ought to have written to you sooner. Your letter reached me on the 18th ult.; but I have been unusually surrounded with perplexities.

"Your affectionate father,

"WM. GODWIN."

Mrs. Shelley and her child arrived in England early in the autumn of 1823. After an absence in Italy of nearly six years, the climate of this country struck her with a painful sense of gloom and oppression; and she

records in her journal her ardent desire to return as soon as possible to the South. She mentions that one word of the Italian language, heard by chance, brings tears into her eyes, though she describes Italy as the murderess of those she loved, and of all her happiness.

For some time after her arrival in London, Mrs. Shelley resided with her father, who was now living in the Strand; but she subsequently removed to Kentish Town, and then to Harrow, in order that she might be near her son, who was being educated at the school there. The expenses incidental to tuition tried her severely; besides which, she contributed towards the support of her aged father; but, with a noble energy of character and entire self-devotion, she worked incessantly with her pen, and met her liabilities by the fruits of her literary industry.

The novels which she published after the death of her husband were Valperga, in 1823; The Last Man, 1824; Perkin Warbeck, 1830; Lodore, 1835; and Falkner, 1837. She wrote all the Italian and Spanish lives in Lardner's Encyclopædia, with the exception of Tasso and Galileo; and she greatly regretted that the former did not fall to her share. She also wrote two volumes, under the title of Rambles in Germany and Italy, giving an account of her travels with her son, his tutor, and some companion, in later years; contributed several short productions to the annuals, and edited (1839–40) Shelley's poetical works, his letters, and his prose writings.

During the earlier days of her return to England,

she had to fight hard against a sense of despondency, which at times almost overcame her. On the 14th of May, 1824, she writes in her journal:—

“Amidst all the depressing circumstances that weigh upon me, none sinks deeper than the failure of my intellectual powers. Nothing I write pleases me. Whether

I am just in this, or whether it is the want of Shelley's encouragement, I can hardly tell; but it seems to me as if the lovely and sublime objects of Nature had been my best inspirers, and, wanting these, I am lost. Although so utterly miserable at Genoa, yet what reveries were mine as I looked on the aspect of the ravine the sunny deep and its boats

the promontories clothed in purple the fire-flies - the uprising

the starry heavens

of Spring! Then I could think; and my imagination could invent and combine; and self became absorbed in the grandeur of the universe I created. Now, my mind is a blank a gulf filled with formless mist. "The Last Man!** Yes, I may well describe that solitary being's feelings; I feel myself as the last relic of a beloved race, my companions extinct before me.

"Mine own Shelley! what a horror you had of returning to this miserable country! To be here without you, is to be doubly exiled; to be away from Italy, is to lose you twice!"

On the following day, she records the death of Byron, news of which had just reached England. The recollection of his association with her husband, and of his kindness to herself after her great calamity, makes her

* She was at that time writing the novel so called. — ED.

-

exclaim:

"God grant I may die young! A new race is springing about me. At the age of twenty-six, I am in the condition of an aged person. All my old friends are gone; I have no wish to form new; I cling to the few remaining; but they slide away, and my heart fails when I think by how few ties I hold to the world."

Yet the sight of natural beauty could always soothe her into temporary forgetfulness of grief, and at the same time rouse her intellect into the activity of genius. On the 8th June, 1824, she writes : — "What a divine night it is! A calm twilight pervades the clear sky; the lamp-like moon is hung out in heaven, and the bright west retains the dye of sunset. If such weather would continue, I should again write; the lamp of thought is again illuminated in my heart, and the fire descends from heaven that kindles it. I feel my powers again; and this is of itself happiness. The eclipse of winter is passing from my mind; I shall again feel the enthusiastic glow of composition-again, as I pour forth my soul upon paper, feel the winged ideas arise, and enjoy the delight of expressing them. Study and occupation will be a pleasure, and not a task; and this I shall owe to the sight and companionship of trees and meadows, flowers and sunshine."

Though in some measure secluded from the world, Mrs. Shelley was remembered by her friends. Charles Lamb, in the course of the year 1827, addressed to her one of his grotesquely humorous and amusing letters:

"DEAR MRS. SHELLEY,

66

Enfield, July 26th, 1827.

"AT the risk of throwing away some fine thoughts, I must write to say how pleased we were with your very kind remembering of us (who have unkindly run away from all our friends) before you go. Perhaps you are gone, and then my tropes are wasted. If any piece of better fortune has lighted upon you than you expected, but less than we wish you, we are rejoiced. We are here trying to like solitude, but have scarce enough to justify the experiment. We get some, however. The six days are our Sabbath; the seventh — why, Cockneys will come for a little fresh air, and so

"But by your month, or October at furthest, we hope to see Islington; I, like a giant refreshed with the leaving off of wine; and Mary pining for Mr. Moxon's books and Mr. Moxon's society. Then we shall meet.

“I am busy with a farce in two acts, the incidents tragicomic. I can do the dialogue, commey for;* but the damn'd plot — I believe I must omit it altogether. The scenes come after one another like geese, not marshalling like cranes, or a Hyde-park review. The story is as simple as G. D.,† and the language plain as his spouse. The characters are three women to one man; which is one more than laid hold on him in the Evangely. I think that prophecy squinted towards my drama.

"I want some Howard Paine to sketch a skeleton of artfully succeeding scenes through a whole play; as the courses are arranged in a cookery-book. I to find wit, passion, sentiment, character, and the like trifles. To lay in the dead colors; I'd Titianesque 'em up. To mark the channel in a

† Lamb here refers to an excellent, but single-minded, scholarly friend of his, now dead. Mr. George Dyer, known as the author of many erudite works. He was one of Lamb's stock subjects for joking, and is introdnced into the Elia Essays.—ED.