Shelley married his second wife legally December 30, 1816. He probably was not madly in love with her. Mention should be made of two cases of unreciprocated affection for him on the part of the poet's two sisters-in-law, Fanny Godwin, who committed suicide, and Jane Clairmont, the daughter of Mrs. Godwin by a previous marriage, and also known as the mistress of Byron.
The two women whom Shelley loved after his marriage and who inspired some of his best poetry were Emilia Viviani and Mrs. James Williams. Shelley met Miss Viviani about December, 1820. That winter he wrote the Epipsychidion, which was a love poem to her; here he also told us the history of his love affairs. In June, 1822, he refers to his disillusionment with her. About this time his feeling for his friend's wife, Mrs. Williams, overpowered him, and he wrote a number of lyrics to her. He was drowned July 8, 1822, with Mr. Williams.
Shelley never had a satisfactory love affair in his life. He was discarded by his first love, for whom his affection was strong. He did not love his first wife at all, and his second wife did not give him that satisfaction in love for which he craved. Hence he yearned after others. His new affairs brought him no happiness, as he was disillusioned in his Emilia, while Mrs. Williams was married to his friend; social intercourse was for a while stopped between Shelley and the Williamses on account of Shelley's love. Two other women who cared for him did not attract him. This whole state of affairs led to some of his best poems, brought out some of his views on free love, and influenced his lyrics. We will examine how his poetry arose from the depths of his unconscious.
Julian and Maddalo was first sketched in 1814. The maniac's soliloquy, which is one of the most forceful outcries of love disappointment in poetry, inspired by personal experience, and is, with Swinburne's The Triumph of Time, among the greatest of all such products in literature, is Shelley's own outburst. It is his full fury cast at Harriet Grove, and was not, as surmised by Arabella Shore (Gentleman's Magazine [1887], v. 263, p. 329). and H. S. Salt (Shelley Society Papers [1888], p. 325), directed against his first wife. He never loved her as that maniac loved; besides, it was not true of Harriet Westbrook that she ceased to love Shelley. It is said that the poet believed her guilty of adultery while living with him, but even if this were so (and we have no evidence to warrant such a belief), the poet had been casting longing eyes at Mary Godwin, his future second wife, for some time before he left his first wife; we have no proof that the poet was heartbroken after he left Harriet Westbrook, though he sympathised with her.
His affair with Harriet Grove was not the ephemeral thing that William Sharp deems it, in his biography of the poet. For even when married to Harriet Westbrook, he was still chagrined about the first Harriet. When Miss Grove married a cousin in the fall of 1811, a few months after his own marriage, the poet wrote to her brother, asking how he liked his brother-in-law, and added sarcastically and bitterly, "A new brother as well as a new cousin must be an invaluable acquisition." This was in October 28, 1811. Harriet Grove's conduct had caused him to spend many sleepless nights, and only a few months before his marriage to Miss Westbrook he had suicidal thoughts. He wrote sad love verses and a complaint against love's perfidy. Captain Kennedy describes Shelley, in June, 1813, as playing on the piano a favourite tune which Harriet Grove used to play for him. (Dowden's Life of Shelley, p. 390.) It was in the next year that he sketched the poem, Julian and Maddalo, and while it is likely that in the final version, which was written four years later though published after his death, unconscious emotions regarding Harriet Westbrook were fused into the poem along with the indignation at Harriet Grove. The reference to the tomb for which the lady addressed in the poem deserted the poet, may have been suggested by the dead Harriet Westbrook; but this fact is not sufficient reason for regarding her the subject of the poem, as Miss Shore and Mr. Salt do. We should look for truth beyond such incidental references. The pain in this poem is the memory of a far greater and earlier agony than that Shelley experienced by Harriet Westbrook's infidelity; rather of the grief that Harriet Grove caused him. The passages in the letters to Hogg prove that the poet's sorrow was too keen for him to forget; he could not help but put them unconsciously in this poem.
There are references to Harriet Grove in Epipsychidion written in the early winter of 1821. Mr. Flea, in an article on The Story of Shelley's Life in Epipsychidion, contends correctly that Harriet Grove is the "one with the voice which was envenomed melody," from whose cheeks flew a killing air which lay upon the leaves of the poet's heart and made him feel the ruins of age. The bitterness of this passage is equal to that in Julian and Maddalo, and hence the lines do not refer to some vulgar affair as some critics think.
Shelley had written some of his earliest sad and lugubrious love poems to Harriet Grove, and they appeared in 1810, in the volume Victor and Cazir, a copy of which book the poet presented to Harriet Grove. In the November of the same year, when he was losing her, he published Posthumous fragments of Margaret Nicholson, and the concluding poem, "Melody to a Scene of Former Times," has all the pain of the Maniac's soliloquy in Julian and Maddalo, and was, no doubt, written to Harriet Grove. It has passages of reproach like those in that poem.
The best-known lines in the latter poem are:
"Most wretched men