APPENDIX.
(To replace pages [79-83] in text.)
That Shelley, early in 1814, had formed no intention of abandoning his wife is certain; for he was re-married to her on the 24th of March (eight days after the letter I have just quoted) at St. George’s, Hanover Square. This ratification of the Scotch marriage was no doubt meant to place the legitimacy of a possible heir beyond all question. Yet, if we may base conjecture upon “Stanzas, April, 1814,” which undoubtedly refer to his relations with the Boinville family, it seems that in the very month after this new ceremony Shelley found the difficulties of his wedded life intolerable. He had not, however, lost his affection for Harriet. He still sought to recover her confidence and kindness. In spite of his wife’s apparent coldness and want of intellectual sympathy, in spite of his own increasing alienation from the atmosphere in which she now lived, he still approached her with the feelings of a suitor and a lover. This is proved beyond all doubt by the pathetic stanzas “To Harriet: May, 1814,” which have only recently been published. I may add that these verses exist in Harriet’s own autograph, whence I infer that she, on her side, was not indifferent to the emotion they express.[35] Shelley begins with this apostrophe:
Thy look of love has power to calm
The stormiest passion of my soul;
Thy gentle words are drops of balm
In life’s too bitter bowl.
He then immediately adds that his cruellest grief is to have known and lost “those choicest blessings”; Harriet is proving by her coldness that she repays his most devoted love with scorn. Nevertheless he will appeal to her better nature:
Be thou, then, one among mankind
Whose heart is harder not for state,
Thou only virtuous, gentle, kind,
Amid a world of hate;
And by a slight endurance seal
A fellow-being’s lasting weal.
The next stanza paints a moving picture of his own wretchedness, and beseeches her, before it is too late, to avert the calamity of an open rupture:
In mercy let him not endure
The misery of a fatal cure.
She has been yielding to false counsels and obeying the impulse of feelings which represent not her real and nobler, but her artificial and lower self:
O trust for once no erring guide!
Bid the remorseless feeling flee;
’Tis malice, ’tis revenge, ’tis pride,
’Tis anything but thee;
O deign a nobler pride to prove,
And pity if thou canst not love.