It is probably to this event that Mrs. Norton refers in the following note of congratulation—
Mrs. Norton to Mrs. Shelley.
Dear Mrs. Shelley—I cannot tell you how sincerely glad I was to get a note so cheerful, and cheerful on such good grounds as your last. I hope it is the dawn, that your day of struggling is over, and nothing to come but gradually increasing comfort. With tolerable prudence, and abroad, I should hope Percy would find his allowance quite sufficient, and I think it will be a relief that may lift your mind and do your health good to see him properly provided for.
I am too ill to leave the sofa or I should (by rights) be at Lord Palmerston’s this evening, but, when I see any one likely to support the very modest request made to Lord P., I will speak about it to them; I have little doubt that, since they are not asked for a paid attachéship, you will succeed.
... In three weeks I am to set up the magnificence of a “one ’orse chay” myself, and then Fulham and the various streets of London where friends and foes live will become attainable; at present I have never stirred over the threshold since I came up from Brighton.—Ever yours very truly,
Car. Norton.
They began their second tour by a residence at Kissingen, where Mrs. Shelley had been advised to take the waters for her health. The “Cur” over (by which she benefited a good deal), they proceeded to Gotha, Weimar, Leipzig, Berlin, and Dresden—all perfectly new ground to Mary. Dresden and its treasures of art were a delight to her, only marred by the overwhelming heat of the summer.
Through Saxon Switzerland they travelled to Prague, and Mary was roused to enthusiasm by the intense romantic interest of the Bohemian capital, as she was afterwards by the magnificent scenery of the approach to Linz (of which she gives in her letters a vivid description), and of Salzburg and the Salzkammergut.
Through the Tyrol, over the Brenner Pass, by the Lake of Garda, they came to Verona, and finally to Venice—another place fraught to Mary with associations unspeakable.
Many a scene which I have since visited and admired has faded in my mind, as a painting in a diorama melts away, and another struggles into the changing canvass; but this road was as distinct in my mind as if traversed yesterday. I will not here dwell on the sad circumstances that clouded my first visit to Venice. Death hovered over the scene. Gathered into myself, with my “mind’s eye” I saw those before me long departed, and I was agitated again by emotions, by passions—and those the deepest a woman’s heart can harbour—a dread to see her child even at that instant expire, which then occupied me. It is a strange, but, to any person who has suffered, a familiar circumstance, that those who are enduring mental or corporeal agony are strangely alive to immediate external objects, and their imagination even exercises its wild power over them.... I have experienced it; and the particular shape of a room, the progress of shadows on a wall, the peculiar flickering of trees, the exact succession of objects on a journey, have been indelibly engraved in my memory, as marked in and associated with hours and minutes when the nerves were strung to their utmost tension by endurance of pain, or the far severer infliction of mental anguish. Thus the banks of the Brenta presented to me a moving scene; not a palace, not a tree of which I did not recognise, as marked and recorded, at a moment when life and death hung upon our speedy arrival at Venice.