How Shelley and Williams acted, as the schooner was already sinking beneath them, one may infer confidently from the characters and mutual affection of the two men; from the notable difference in respect to the clothing of what was recovered of their disfigured bodies; and from what we know of Shelley’s demeanour on previous occasions (notably and especially on the occasion of the squall off St. Gingoux in the summer of 1816), when he was in danger of death from drowning. It cannot be doubted that, whilst hastily stripping himself of his raiment, Williams proposed to do his best to save his friend as well as himself. To this proposal it is certain that the poet (who on the former occasion had firmly refused the help of so expert a swimmer as Byron) answered calmly that he was ready for death, was even glad to embrace the fate so mercifully offered to him; and that, after so refusing to diminish his comrade’s chance of escape, and after enjoining him to bear his love to Mary and Jane and Claire at the Casa Magni, he anticipated without dismay or vain regret, on the contrary, welcomed with mingled complacence and curiosity, the moment when he should pass through the veil that divides the here from the hereafter,—the moment that would give him the knowledge for which he had so long hungered and thirsted.
Possibly in that last minute or two, his mind was visited momentarily by tender and subduing thoughts of old joys and interests, former sorrows and ambitions, exhausted enmities and profitless contentions, disappointed hopes and unachieved aspirations. I conceive that thoughts of the old home and parents, from whose love he had severed himself, of Eton and poor old Keate, of Oxford and Hogg, of scenes about Keswick and Killarney, together with thoughts of more recent friends and less distant places, flitted across his brain, ever so quick and imaginative, now so abnormally active, and in a trice to be still for ever. Doubtless he thought of his little boy at San Terenzo, his other boy whom he had buried at Rome; possibly also of his children in England, and of the lovely girl who had given birth to them,—the sweet, bright, radiant girl who died in the water of the cold Serpentine, even as he would now die in the water of the angry sea. As he sate calmly on the sinking boat, and studied the successive visions of his own life’s panorama, he may be conceived to have remembered things he had done, and things he had left undone, to his regret. In his doubt and curiosity he may also be conceived to have hoped that, should death prove the gateway to another life for him, it would be a life, in which the ways of duty and righteousness are more clearly marked and more easily discovered, than the ways of righteousness and duty in this darksome, and troublous, and perplexing existence. Thus, as he sate a-thinking in the foundering boat, Shelley sunk beneath the turbulent and cruel waves, so remorseless for the woe they work, so heedless of the lives they devour.
To tell all that needs yet to be told requires few words. All the world knows how Shelley’s torn, and wasted, and disfigured corpse was reduced to ashes, and a few fragments of bone (with the exception of the heart that would not be burnt) on the pyre, that was piled and lit for its cremation, on the sands of the seashore, to which the relenting waves carried him all too late. Again and again it has been told how, under the fierce light of a southern sky and sun, at the marge of the whispering sea, and within view of the remote Apennines, this revival of a classic rite was performed with precise care for classic requirements, in the presence of Byron, Trelawny, Leigh Hunt, and a guard of soldiers. Who needs to be told again, how the copy of Keats’s last book (found in Shelley’s pocket, doubled back at the Eve of St. Agnes, as though he had been perusing it, till death’s summons made him put it aside hurriedly) was thrown upon the blazing pyre? What reader of Mr. Rossetti’s description of the burning of the great poet’s body has not heard the cries of the curlew, that wheeling close about the pyre, and screaming miserably, refused to be driven away? It is the story of every household, where poetry is prized and genius is honoured, that Shelley’s ashes were conveyed to Rome, and there deposited in the new Protestant Cemetery (not the old burial-ground, that holds the dust of Keats and Mary Godwin’s first-born son), at a spot planted by Trelawny, with laurels and cypresses, and marked by the stone of this record:—
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
Cor Cordium
Natus iv Aug. MDCCXCII
Obiit viii Jul. MDCCCXXII
——
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
CHAPTER XVII.
SHELLEY’S WIDOW AND HER SISTER-BY-AFFINITY.
The Widow in Italy—Her Return to England—Sojourn in the Strand—Life at Kentish Town—Residence at Harrow—She is forbidden to write her Husband’s ‘Life’—‘Moonshine’ and ‘Celestial Mate’—Her closing Years—Claire in her later Time—Trelawny’s inaccurate Talk about Shelley’s Will—Claire’s double Legacy—She becomes a Catholic—Dies in the Catholic Faith.
At the close of this attempt to exhibit the Real Shelley, so unlike the Shelley of biographical romance, a few more words should be said of William Godwin’s daughter and of Claire.