On ill terms with his father, he married Miss Harriet Westbrook, a very young girl, more from a sense of duty and honour than from love; and in various rural places he lived, wrote, read Godwin, corresponded with him, preached his ideas in Ireland, and idealized and quarrelled with various friends of both sexes, till he met Mary Godwin, the very young daughter of the philosopher.
Shelley had grown passing weary of his wife, who now declined to live with him as a sister while Mary took her natural place; he retired with Mary and her stepsister, Jane Clairmont, calling herself Claire, to Switzerland, and returned to England—because the stove in his room smoked badly.
Reconciled to Hogg (whom he had accused, truly or falsely, of trying to put his own ideas of free love into practice with Mrs. Shelley), he wrote "Queen Mab" (1813), (in which his natural genius shines unmistakably,) and "Alastor" (1816), the story of a lonely spirit fleeing from itself through scenes of grandeur and desolation; homeless, like Shelley, and like him unsatisfied. His own wanderings were restless rather than remote; to Geneva, where Claire Clairmont carried out his ideas with the aid of the reluctant Byron; back to Great Marlow; and thence, after marrying Mary Godwin, on the suicide of his injured wife, to various parts of Italy, Claire being still his camp-follower.
He had become the friend and benefactor of Leigh Hunt; Godwin's demands for money followed him like harpies; he was deprived of his children by his first marriage; his long romance in Spenserian stanzas, "Laon and Cythna," though expurgated and rechristened "The Revolt of Islam" (1818), attracted little but unfriendly attention, despite its many and extraordinary beauties and radiant visions of storm and rainbow, clouds and winds and fire. With unwonted humour Shelley said that you might as well ask for a leg of mutton in a gin shop as apply to him for studies in human nature. Madness, said Medwin, a man who was much in his company, hung over Shelley like the sword of Damocles.
In his earlier years he was like an Æolian harp on which all the winds of the spirit played, making strange music and strange discords. He was even too fluent, Keats told him; as Jonson said of Shakespeare, sufflaminandus erat. Ideas of beauty springing up in his mind, he followed them, followed the cloud, the shower, the meteor, the evanescent loveliness, was borne up by the "wild west wind, the breath of autumn's being," leaving his narrative of human fortunes. He was a born visionary and mystic, beholding things unapparent; believing in experiences that never were actual. Yet withal, when control was needed, he could control himself wonderfully, as was especially notable in his difficult and dangerous relations with the wild Claire Clairmont and Byron.
In his poetic art, this growing power of control is especially manifest in his drama, "The Cenci" (1819), and his swan-song, the matchless "Adonais" (1821), the lament for Keats. But "The Cenci," a drama on a theme which was made to the hand of Ford or Webster,—the story of a soul more devilish in limitless cruelty and desire of evil than the soul of Volpone; of a maiden martyr more cruelly entreated than Jeanne d'Arc,—was not possible on the modern stage.
The polemics of "Prometheus Unbound" against the world as it is, and in favour of suffering and oppressed humanity, lost themselves, the contradictions vanished unreconciled in the music of the immortal lyrics. The escape from a world in which "as God made it ye canna hae everything as ye wad like it," to reach an undisturbed haven of love and loneliness, "to live for climate and the affections" inspires "The Witch of Atlas" (1820) and "Epipsychidion" (1821). Shelley's soul was always seeking its predestined and ideal mate, with whom "the wilderness were paradise enow," and then these ideal friends or mistresses, in a moment, became horrors to him,—and Mary remained; Mary and "a song in the ears of men yet to be born".
In his many immortal lyrics the poetry of Shelley is most accessible to all; in them he is not baffled and foiled by the world as it is. What his powers might have become, for they were maturing rapidly, cannot be guessed. By a death in strange harmony with his genius, portended by omens, and predicted in his own words, he "was borne darkly fearfully afar," being drowned in a brief sudden tempest in the Gulf of Spezzia (19 July, 1822). The fire received what the water returned to earth, and his ashes sleep beside those of Keats in "a place so beautiful that it makes one in love with death".
Byron.