’Twas his ambition generous and great.
A life to life’s great end to consecrate.”
“Stranger,” said the American, studying the speaker, his shrewd eye bright with honest pleasure, “truer words were never spoken. There is dry rot in all the timbers of the old world, and none of you will do any good till you are docked, refitted and annexed to the new. You must log that song you sang; there ain’t many Britishers will say as much of the man that whipped them, so just set down those lines in the log or it won’t go for nothing.”
A little shy, perhaps, yet glad that his words had given pleasure, the youth with the yellow hair sat down to write. The quill pen made almost no sound; and the faint noises of the harbor,—the voices of sailors heard across the water from other ships, the chuckling of little waves alongside, and the passing of bare feet on the deck overhead,—filled the polite quiet. Yielding to some fancy or inspiration, the visitor did not enter the lines he had quoted, but some others which pleased him even more. This done, the Englishmen parted from their Yankee host, and regained the dust, the street cries, the uniforms, and the hot yellow sun of the old Italian town.
A musing mind pauses to wonder as to what might have been the name of this Yankee ship anchored in Leghorn bay sometime in 1822. The hospitable mate, “a smart specimen of a Yankee,” who was he? And above all, what became of the ship’s log? Did it vanish from earthly eyes in the stormy tumult and breaking timbers of a wreck, was it tossed away as old rubbish, or does it still lie at the bottom of a sea chest in the piney dark of some attic in New England, an attic whose roof is brushed by elm boughs on windy summer days? Will the little mystery ever be solved? What a log book it would be to possess! For the young man with the crown of mutinous fair hair who wrote the lines and refused the plug tobacco was Shelley, and the Arab-looking oarsman his friend and companion, Edward John Trelawny.
A mysterious fellow, this “good friend Tre” of the piercing eyes. A word from Shelley’s comrade and admirer, Edward Elliker Williams, had served him as an introduction to the Shelley group, and his first visit to them had taken place late one evening while the family was at Pisa. One sees the Italian room in lamplight, a room to which sensible Mary Shelley must have given something of an English air; one hears the English voices through the quiet of provincial Italy. Trelawny enters, and the surprised Shelleys see a personage who is not at all English-looking; their visitor is a character out of Byronic romance, blazing eyes, pirate brows, bronzed skin and all. He looked like “a young Othello.” The newcomer, for his part, saw a rather bookish family gathered about a bookish young man “habited like a boy in a black jacket and trousers which he seemed to have outgrown”; it is Shelley he sees, reading as always, slender, bent a little, and “extraordinarily juvenile.”
“Is it possible that this mild, beardless boy can be the monster at war with all the world?” thought the young Othello.
While Shelley, as was his custom, went in and out of the room, as silently and strangely as a spirit, Mrs. Shelley asked Trelawny of news from London and Paris,—the new books and the operas, the new bonnets and the new styles, the marriages and the murders. A domestic scene. When Trelawny had gone, they spoke of him. Where had Mr. Williams encountered this remarkable person? In Switzerland. And was he not a sailor? Yes, he had been a sailor, and some said a pirate. A pirate, indeed! He could tell the most wonderful stories of gory battles on the Java seas, and expeditions to native strongholds in the jungles of Malaysia. Quite a remarkable person, “our friend Tre.”
“Trelawny,” says a distinguished biographer of Byron, “was a liar and a cad.” The judgment is prejudiced and severe. Whatever his faults, the man acted a leading rôle in one of the most romantic episodes in English literary history, and was well liked and respected by the great figures of the play. The world recalls his association with Shelley and Byron, his recovery of Shelley’s body after the storm, and the cremation in classical style he arranged on the sands of Villareggio; it remembers his flight with Byron to the aid of rebellious Greece. A marvellous chapter, but only one of a life romance which is still something of an enigma.