him friends to whom he was attached; but cares of various kinds, many of them springing from his lavish generosity, crowded round him in his native country, and the climate afflicted him with extreme suffering. His greatest pleasure-the free enjoyment of natural scenery was marred by this sensitiveness to the influence of English weather.

The very first aspect of Italy (as Mrs. Shelley has recorded) enchanted him. The land appeared like “ a garden of delight placed beneath a clearer and brighter heaven than any he had lived under before. He wrote long descriptive letters during the first year of his residence;" and in these we see not merely the consummate handling of a master of prose composition, but a poet's appreciation of all forms of loveliness, whether of nature or of art.

A very romantic story touching this period of Shelley's life is told by Captain Medwin. He asserts that a married lady introduced herself to the poet in the year 1816, shortly before his departure for Switzerland, and, concealing her name, told him that his many virtues and the grandeur of his opinions in politics, morals, and religion, had inspired her with such an ardent passion for him, that she had resolved on abandoning her husband, her family, and her friends, with a view to linking her fortunes to those of Shelley.

Of this strange narrative, it will be sufficient to say here that not the slightest allusion to it is to be found in any of the family documents.

The Shelleys stayed a month at Milan; and, after

visiting the Lake of Como, proceeded to Leghorn, where they became acquainted with Mrs. Gisborne, a lady who had formerly been a most intimate friend of Mary Wollstonecraft (Mrs. Shelley's mother). The thoughtful character and amiable disposition of this lady seem to have bound the whole party in ties of friendship, which continued unbroken till the end.

At the Baths of Lucca, where the poet and his wife next went, Rosalind and Helen, begun at Marlow, was finished, at the request of Mrs. Shelley. Thence, in August, Shelley visited Venice; and, circumstances rendering it advisable that he should remain near at hand for a few weeks, he resided during that time at a villa which Lord Byron rented at Este, and which was kindly placed at his disposal. Here he was joined by his family, and here also more than one literary work was prosecuted. I Capuccini (such was the name of the residence) is described by Mrs. Shelley as "a villa built on the site of a Capuchin convent, demolished when the French suppressed religious houses. It was situated on the very overhanging brow of a low hill at the foot of a range of higher ones. The house was cheerful and pleasant: a vine-trellised walk-a Pergola, as it is called in Italian-led from the hall door to a summer-house at the end of the garden, which Shelley made his study, and in which he began the Prometheus ; and here also, as he mentions in a letter, he wrote Julian and Maddalo. A slight ravine, with a road in its depth, divided the garden from the hill, on which stood the ruins of the ancient castle of Este; whose

dark massive wall gave forth an echo, and from whose ruined crevices owls and bats flitted forth at night, as the crescent moon sank behind the black and heavy battlements. We looked from the garden over the wide plain of Lombardy, bounded to the west by the far Apennines, while, to the east, the horizon was lost in misty distance."

Julian and Maddalo is one of the most fervent, dramatic, and intense, of its author's productions; and yet one of the most compact, highly wrought, and mature. The descriptions of Italian scenery are wonderfully minute and particular, when we consider that the poet had been only about half a year in the country. Of the magnificence of the word-pictures-especially in that gorgeous vision of a Venetian sunset, sphering in a transitory glory the sea, the ships, the palaces, the distant hills, and the ghastly mad-house-it would be difficult to say too much; while the soliloquy of the poor maniac is dusky and thick with human passion and pathos-the whole tragedy of a sorrowful life brought within the compass of a few pages. The poem, moreover, is interesting on account of the portraiture given by Shelley of Lord Byron, who is figured under the name of Maddalo―Julian being Shelley himself. The little Allegra is also described in lines of gentle pathos which have never been surpassed:

The following morn was rainy, cold, and dim:
Ere Maddalo arose, I call'd on him;
And, whilst I waited, with his child I play'd ;-
A lovelier toy sweet Nature never made;

A serious, subtle, wild, yet gentle being,
Graceful without design, and unforeseeing;
With eyes-oh! speak not of her eyes, which seem
Twin mirrors of Italian heaven, yet gleam
With such deep meaning as we never see
But in the human countenance. With me
She was a special favourite: I had nurs'd

Her fine and feeble limbs, when she came first
To this bleak world; and yet she seemed to know,
On second sight, her ancient playfellow,

Less changed than she was, by six months or so.
For, after her first shyness was worn out,

We sat there, rolling billiard balls about,
When the Count enter'd.

While they were at Este, their little daughter, Clara, showed signs of suffering from the heat of the climate. Her indisposition being increased to an alarming extent by teething, the parents hastened to Venice for the best advice, but discovered at Fusina that, in their agitation, they had forgotten the passport. The soldiers on duty attempted to prevent their crossing the lagune; but Shelley, with his usual vehemence, augmented by the urgent nature of the case, broke through, and they reached Venice. Unhappily, it was too late; the little creature died just as they arrived.

At this period Shelley composed his exquisite descriptive poem, Lines written among the Euganean Hills. In November, he and Mrs. Shelley started southward, and on the 1st of December they arrived at Naples. In the meanwhile, they had hastily visited Ferrara, Bologna, and Rome, as well as other towns of less note. The winter was spent in the hot and indolent

city of the south; and here the Shelleys lived very solitarily too much so, according to the opinion of his widow, who thinks that a little intellectual society would have done great service to the spirits of her husband, now once more in a bad state of health, and often plunged into extreme gloom. He records this state of mind in his Stanzas written in Dejection near Naples (December, 1818), giving vent to his sorrow in lines which unite the utmost gentleness of pathos to the most lovely conceptions of poetry and the finest harmonies of verse:

Yet now despair itself is mild,

Even as the winds and waters are:
I could lie down like a tired child,
And weep away the life of care

Which I have borne, and yet must bear,
Till death, like sleep, might steal on me,
And I might feel in the warm air
My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea

Breathe o'er my dying brain its last monotony.

But this dejection-the result of many causes-gave place to a happier mood before the poet was snatched away from life.

The letters pertaining to this year may now follow in their regular sequence.

From Godwin to Shelley.

MY DEAR SHELLEY,

Skinner Street, June 8th, 1818. You are in a new country, and must be from day to day seeing objects and experiencing sensations, of which I should be delighted to hear. Write as to your equal, and, if that word is not discordant to your feelings, your friend. It would be