"Between his old feelings towards Harriet, from whom he was not then separated, and his new passion for Mary, he showed in his looks, in his gestures, in his speech, the state of a mind suffering, like a little kingdom, the nature of an insurrection. His eyes were bloodshot, his hair and dress disordered. He frequently repeated the lines from Sophocles,—
'Man's happiest lot is not to be;
And when we tread life's thorny steep,
Most blest are they who, earliest free,
Descend to death's eternal sleep.'"
Godwin, it appears, tried hard to re-unite Shelley and Harriet, and disapproved entirely of the new connection. Mary was but seventeen years old, very beautiful, and possessed of genius; and her father, moral considerations entirely aside, did not look upon Shelley as a suitable husband for her. But Shelley had conceived for her the one violent, uncontrollable passion of his life, and she was very easily brought under his influence, in spite of the disapproval of her father. Mary had not been brought up with conventional ideas upon the subject of marriage (her own mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, having had very unusual opinions upon that subject), and she fell an easy victim to Shelley's impassioned eloquence, when he urged her to flee with him from an uncongenial home. Shelley appeared to Mary as almost a divine being, and her worshipful love never waned, even during her long widowhood of thirty years' duration. For Shelley, in the whole matter, there seems to be no valid excuse. He deliberately defied the world and the world's ways, and even his memory must bear the fatal consequences. If we allow his genius to excuse his acts, we are setting up a precedent which we have only to imagine universally carried out to produce not only moral revolution but chaos throughout the social world. He sinned like an ordinary mortal, he suffered also in the same wise, and in the memory of man he must be held to the same responsibility as his fellows. But his unworldliness may well be taken into the account. He lived in a sort of dreamworld of his own, and the thoughts and opinions and feelings of ordinary men upon matters of life and conduct were so different from his that he could hardly comprehend the value they had in the eyes of their possessors. Born to rank and wealth, he desired to induce every rich man to despoil himself of superfluity, and to create a brotherhood of property and service, and was ready to be the first one to lay down the advantages of his birth. Born with the most fanatical love of liberty, he looked upon all the conventionalities of the world as tyranny, and defied all restraints of authority from his earliest youth. He believed the opinions he entertained to be true, and he loved truth with a martyr's love; he was ready to sacrifice station and fortune and his dearest affections at her shrine. With the rashness of youth he proclaimed all the wildest of his opinions, and upheld them with uncompromising zeal. In his acts he rushed into the face of the world in the same defiant manner; and the world did not fail to take her revenge upon him. But posterity will do him justice; it will see him, noble, kind, passionate, generous, tender, brave, with an unbounded and unquestioning love for his fellow-men, with a holy and fervid hope in their ultimate virtue and happiness, and an intense and passionate scorn for all baseness and oppression.
Already about his grave in a foreign land there gather many pilgrims, not only from his own country, but from beyond the sea; and as they read the inscription there,—
"Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea change into something rich and strange,"—
they think that the misconceptions which hung over him during life are gradually suffering such a change, and they thank God amid their tears.
