March. ... Illness did ensue. What an illness! driving me to the verge of insanity. Often I felt the cord would snap, and I should no longer be able to rule my thoughts; with fearful struggles, miserable relapses, after long repose I became somewhat better.
October 5, 1839.—Twice in my life I have believed myself to be dying, and my soul being alive, though the bodily functions were faint and perishing, I had opportunity to look Death in the face, and I did not fear it—far from it. My feelings, especially in the first and most perilous instance, was, I go to no new creation. I enter under no new laws. The God that made this beautiful world (and I was then at Lerici, surrounded by the most beautiful manifestation of the visible creation) made that into which I go; as there is beauty and love here, such is there, and I feel as if my spirit would when it left my frame be received and sustained by a beneficent and gentle Power.
I had no fear, rather, though I had no active wish but a passive satisfaction in death. Whether the nature of my illness—debility from loss of blood, without pain—caused this tranquillity of soul, I cannot tell; but so it was, and it had this blessed effect, that I have never since anticipated death with terror, and even if a violent death (which is the most repugnant to human nature) menaced me, I think I could, after the first shock, turn to the memory of that hour, and renew its emotion of perfect resignation.
The darkest moment is that which precedes the dawn. These unhappy years were like the series of “clearing showers” which often concludes a stormy day. The clouds were lifting, and though Mary Shelley could never be other than what sorrow and endurance had made her, the remaining years of her life were to bring alleviations to her lot,—slanting rays of afternoon sunshine, powerless, indeed, to warm into life the tender buds of morning, but which illumined the landscape and lightened her path, and shed over her a mild radiance which she reflected back on others, affording to them the brightness she herself could know no more, and diffusing around her that sensation of peace which she was to know now, perhaps, for the first time.
CHAPTER XXIV
October 1839-February 1851
Mrs. Shelley’s annotated edition of Shelley’s works was completed by the appearance, in 1840, of the collected prose writings; along with which was republished the Journal of a Six Weeks’ Tour (a joint composition) and her own two letters from Geneva, reprinted in the present work.
Mary’s correspondence with Carlyle on the subject of a motto for her book was the occasion of the following note—