"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 the only kind and gentle Harriet's place in March it would have been a thrilling spectacle to see her invade the Boinville rookery and read the riot act.That holiday of Shelley's would have been of short duration,and Cornelia's hair would have been as gray as her mother's when the services were over.
Hogg went to the Godwin residence in Skinner Street with Shelley on that 8th of June.They passed through Godwin's little debt-factory of a book-shop and went up-stairs hunting for the proprietor.Nobody there.
Shelley strode about the room impatiently,making its crazy floor quake under him.Then a door "was partially and softly opened.A thrilling voice called 'Shelley!'A thrilling voice answered,'Mary!'And he darted out of the room like an arrow from the bow of the far-shooting King.A very young female,fair and fair-haired,pale,indeed,and with a piercing look,wearing a frock of tartan,an unusual dress in London at that time,had called him out of the room."This is Mary Godwin,as described by Hogg.The thrill of the voices shows that the love of Shelley and Mary was already upward of a fortnight old;therefore it had been born within the month of May--born while Harriet was still trying to get her poem by heart,we think.I must not be asked how I know so much about that thrill;it is my secret.The biographer and I have private ways of finding out things when it is necessary to find them out and the customary methods fail.
Shelley left London that day,and was gone ten days.The biographer conjectures that he spent this interval with Harriet in Bath.It would be just like him.To the end of his days he liked to be in love with two women at once.He was more in love with Miss Hitchener when he married Harriet than he was with Harriet,and told the lady so with simple and unostentatious candor.He was more in love with Cornelia than he was with Harriet in the end of 1813and the beginning of 1814,yet he supplied both of them with love poems of an equal temperature meantime;he loved Mary and Harriet in June,and while getting ready to run off with the one,it is conjectured that he put in his odd time trying to get reconciled to the other;by-and-by,while still in love with Mary,he will make love to her half-sister by marriage,adoption,and the visitation of God,through the medium of clandestine letters,and she will answer with letters that are for no eye but his own.
