what was in conception grotesque; and the persons of this romantic fragment live and move. It was not for nothing that Shelley, his whole being aroused into new emotional life, had passed through Europe just after the battle of Waterloo and seen with his own eyes the devastations caused by a great war. It was not for

nothing that he came face to face with mountain and lake and rapid and mighty river. His new experiences of man and nature were made at a fortunate moment, impressing him with large conceptions and confirming the bent of his faculties towards the liberation of his kind. The river navigation whereby the poet and his two companions returned from Brunnen homewards gave him a great opportunity of seeing fine scenery. Passing by the Reuss to Lauffenburg, and thence to Mumpf in a leaky canoe, they proceeded to Basle and descended the Rhine to Mayence and Cologne, thence by way of Cleves, Rotterdam, and Marsluys to Gravesend, where they arrived on the 13th of September 1814.

During the rest of the year lack of funds was keenly felt. In October Shelley attempted to continue The Assassins, but gave up the enterprise, constrained by untoward circumstances. In November Harriett bore him a son, Charles Bysshe; and there were times when, with the material and moral anxieties of two households on his hands, he was so hardly pressed by creditors that he had to keep in hiding and be separated from Mary. Unfavourable as the conditions were for literary production, he did complete one task before the end of 1814, namely, a criticism of a book by Hogg called Memoirs of Prince Alexy Haimatoff. This

paper appeared anonymously in The Critical Review for December.

At the turn of the year there "shone deliverance so far as ways and means were concerned. Sir Bysshe died full of years and gout, and leaving a large amount of money. The poet became the immediate heir to the baronetcy and the entailed estates; and he was enabled to effect an arrangement with his father whereby he eventually came into possession of £1,000 a year, of which he allowed Harriett £200. In order to make himself more useful to the poor, he now studied medicine and surgery at a hospital in London, at a time, too, when his own health had become indifferent. Again in the summer of 1815 he visited Devonshire; and at last he and Mary settled at Bishopsgate, near Windsor Park, whence they set off with Thomas Love Peacock and Charles Clairmont to explore the Thames, ascending it as far as Lechlade. On their return, mainly in the seclusion of Windsor Great Park, he composed his first truly great poem, Alastor. Coloured by the sombre experiences through which he had passed and especially by the state of physical suffering into which he had fallen, a state not free from the sense of approaching death, the poem depicted a morbid character, and one whom he recognized and lamented as morbid; but the large vision of man and nature, the intense feeling for phases of the inner life, the exquisite gift of landscape painting in words, and the perfect music and mastery of blank verse are all furthest removed from morbid, and render the gift of Alastor precious for all time.

Let the censorious say what they will of

Shelley's relations with the two women to whom, successively, he gave his name, one thing is certain,-that the world is the richer for his contact with Mary Godwin. Harriett Westbrook had not the energy, the intellect, or the tact to awaken his highest nature. It was not her good hap to inspire in him a grand passion. It was Mary Godwin's-" a sudden, violent, irresistible, uncontrollable passion"; and she had the energy, the intellect and the tact to call the inmost spirit of poesy into play where it slumbered amid the complex forces that went to make up that wondrous being. At an age when Harriett was aspiring to soar out of her companionship in Shelley's unworldly ways into a region of coaches and liveries, costly dresses and plate, gaiety and tinsel and frivolity, Mary was writing Frankenstein, a work which obviously owes something to that same contact of spirits, but which is assuredly as much her work as Shelley's poems are his,-a work which inspired Shelley with a respect for her gifts only surpassed by his affection for her person. Of that respect ample evidence exists in the Preface which he wrote and in the short review of the work, published after his death.

The anti-matrimonial philosopher Godwin, though still drawing upon Shelley's resources for his needs, was in great dudgeon with the young couple who had acted upon his theories; and their chief friends now were Hogg and Peacock. Late in the year Shelley was preparing Alastor and a few minor poems for the press of Hamilton of Weybridge, from which the little volume issued early in 1816. On the 24th of January Mary's first son was born.

They called him William in honour of Godwin, whose hard attitude did not prevent Shelley from esteeming him to be "glorious," though it was among the causes which induced the next decisive step-that of seeking a residence abroad. Early in May they started Iwith the infant William and Claire Clairmont for Geneva, passing through Paris. Shelley and Mary were not aware that Claire was already among the many young lady intimates of Byron: nevertheless it was this circumstance that induced her to persuade Shelley to take her to Switzerland. Here, at Sécheron on Lake Leman, Byron and Shelley met. They boated together on the Lake, and saw each other constantly; and there can be no doubt that the contact with so great an intellectual energy must have had a powerful effect on Shelley. He and Mary visited Chamouni together; and the chief poetic outcome of this second visit to Switzerland is to be found in his Mont Blanc (Lines written in the Vale of Chamouni), and the Hymn to. Intellectual Beauty. He wrote some powerful descriptive letters to Peacock; and Mary kept a bright diary of incidents and impressions.

On the shores of Lake Leman, "Victor" had an opportunity of making some sort of restitution for the freedom which "Cazire had taken with "Monk Lewis's property. On the 20th of August Lewis, who was staying with Byron, indited a codicil to his will, framed to give protection to his negroes in the West Indies,-a codicil which reads as if it had been written under the influence of Shelley's enthusiastic philanthropy. At all events the

terms of the codicil appear to have been discussed by Shelley, Byron, and Lewis in conclave; and Lewis's signature was witnessed by both of the great poets. This was not long before the end of the second visit to Switzerland, the record of which, the joint work of Shelley and Mary, was embodied in a little volume entitled History of a Six Weeks' Tour through a Part of France, Switzerland, Germany, and Holland: with Letters descriptive of a Sail round the Lake of Geneva, and of the Glaciers of Chamouni. It was not till the close of 1817 that this volume was published, though Shelley and Mary were back in England by the beginning of September 1816.

The intervening period was eventful. Not to speak of the negotiations in which Byron associated him with Mr. Kinnaird, for the publication of The Prisoner of Chillon, Manfred, and Canto III of Childe Harold, there was plenty to occupy the poet's mind, and harrow his feelings. While living at Bath he was startled by the tone of a letter from Fanny Godwin, Mary's half sister, the elder daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft. Fearing that this amiable girl, to whom Shelley was warmly attached, contemplated following her mother's footsteps in an attempt on her own life, he hurried to Swansea, but only in time to find Fanny already dead at the inn there.

This was early in October. In the following month, his health broken and his spirit utterly disquieted, he was further harassed by the disappearance of Harriett, whom he sought in vain, until at length, on the 10th of December 1816, she was found drowned in the Serpentine. When she had come to know that there was no