Ariel: A Shelley Romance

In what way does a marriage ceremony, religious or civil, add to the happiness of a pair of lovers, deeply smitten and full of confidence in one another? The event proved that i...

The clear sky of Italy, the constant cloudless sky. Once more the caravan of three went down towards the lands of forgetfulness and sunshine. The babies and nursemaids who this...

Shelley and the two girls, in their flight from the deplorable Hogg, had decided to go to the Lakes. There was a sentimental reason for this, very like his choice of Poland Stre...

Don Juan counted, however, without the energy of Elvira. Claire had made up her mind to follow him to Switzerland, and this dark-eyed girl was a flame and a force. She arranged...

Everything in life comes in series. One friend brings another. Mary and Percy, after suffering so much from loneliness, suddenly found themselves, without having sought it, the...

For a long time, Shelley had wished to bring out to Italy his friends the Hunts, to whom their creditors and political enemies gave a hard life in England. He offered to pay the...

The child was a girl, fair, with blue eyes. Her father named her Ianthe. Her mother added Elizabeth. Thus Ovid and Miss Westbrook clasped hands over the cradle. Shelley walked a...

On arriving in London, Shelley could not pay the cab fare, so with Mary, Jane, and the trunks, he drove round to his bankers, merely to learn that Harriet had withdrawn the enti...

Of the three young girls who had given life and gaiety to the house in Skinner Street, one only, Fanny Imlay, was left. She alone, who was neither Godwin’s child, nor yet Mrs. G...

There were days when Shelley, recalling the sweet and childlike face of his eighteen-year-old wife, thought it might still be possible to forget and make up. In a pathetic poem...

The Knight of the Rueful Countenance got stoned by the galley-slaves whom he wished to free. Shelley was greeted with cat-calls when, at a meeting of the friends of Catholic Ema...

Alone in London, without friends, work, or money, Shelley fell into despair. He passed his time in writing melancholy poems, or letters to Hogg. Not knowing what to do with his...

Shelley, invited by Lord Byron to come to Ravenna so that they might discuss important matters, found the Pilgrim in brilliant fettle. He looked in splendid health; for the reig...

But Mary felt lost and unhappy. Again pregnant, anxious, irritable, she would have much preferred to live in a city near a good doctor. She thought the peasantry uncouth and hat...

Great excitement such as travelling royalties always arouse reigned in the Pisan circle at the expected arrival of the Pilgrim. Mary, at Shelley’s request, had taken for him the...

At the end of six weeks it was necessary that Hogg should return to York. As Shelley and Harriet had nothing to retain them in Edinburgh, nor indeed anywhere else in the world,...

The exiles set off bag and baggage in the Oxford coach. Shelley had borrowed £20 from his booksellers, in order to pay his way in London while waiting news from his father.

The few months which followed the departure of Miss Hitchener were happy months. The Shelleys were still penniless wanderers, but an immense interior satisfaction replaced for t...

A few days before Christmas Mr. Shelley found in his letter-bag a communication from a London publisher, a certain Mr. Stockdale, who called his attention to the extraordinary p...

The lodging-house servant brought up a letter from a lady who was waiting on the opposite pavement. It was from Fanny, to warn Shelley that his creditors were plotting to have h...

Mary’s child was born before its time, and the doctor said it would not live. Shelley kept watch between the cradle and the bed in company with Livy and Seneca. Fanny came round...

Byron, after promising Shelley to bring Allegra to Pisa, arrived without her, and Claire, who had come expressly from Florence to wait about the city in the hopes of seeing the...

In the holidays the refractory slave became the hereditary prince. Mr. Timothy Shelley, his father, owned the manor of Field Place in Sussex, a well-built, low, white house surr...

In the year 1809 George III appointed as Headmaster of Eton, Dr. Keate, a terrible little man who considered the flogging-block a necessary station on the road to perfection, an...

During the early days which followed her departure from Venice, Claire had received news of Allegra fairly often through the Hoppners. The child suffered from the cold. She had...

The sailor who had come to Pisa to admire two great men found that it was he, on the contrary, who was admired by them. It is true that when Trelawny was absent, Byron said of h...

Objecting to hotels, he put up at his old lodgings in the High—“the leaden horse”—appropriate house-sign of John Slatter, Plumber and Glazier. This Slatter was a son of Mr. Shel...

Mary wished to have Shelley buried near their little boy in the Roman cemetery which he had thought so beautiful, but the sanitary laws forbade that bodies once buried in quickl...

A pair of young lovers, persecuted and charming, exercises a fascination which is almost irresistible. The citizens of Edinburgh, difficult to get at where their purse is concer...

At the end of another month the villa must again be given up to Byron and Allegra restored to him. The cold and rainy weather gave Shelley the idea of pushing farther south. To...

The post-chaise was ordered for four o’clock in the morning. Shelley waited up all night opposite Godwins’ house. At length he saw the stars and the oil-lamps grow pale. Mary no...

Now for the first time Shelley was among mountain solitudes, and heard the voices of mountain torrents, but the power of hills was not upon him. “This is most divine scenery,” h...

One evening as he sat reading in a comfortable arm-chair wrapped in a warm dressing-gown, a pot of hot tea by his side, he heard a tremendous knocking at the outer door of the h...

The roses of Lynmouth were fading, and autumn winds swept the loose clouds like dead leaves across the sky. Miss Hitchener’s star was about to set. The constant presence of a st...

About a month after these unfortunate holidays, Messrs. Munday & Slatter, the Oxford booksellers to whom Timothy Shelley had recommended the literary freaks of his son, saw that...

Shelley returned next day, sooner than was expected. He had had no success. His father had refused to see him. From very different motives to Shelley’s he too considered his son...

“. . . You are surprised, and with reason, at the change of my opinion respecting Shiloh; it certainly is not that which I once entertained of him; but if I disclose to you my f...

XIX A SIX WEEKS’ TOUR 125 XX THE PARIAHS 130 XXI GODWIN 138 XXII DON JUAN CONQUERED 144 XXIII ARIEL AND DON JUAN 150 XXIV GRAVES IN THE GARDEN OF LOVE 159 XXV THE RULES OF THE G...

CHAPTER PAGE I KEATE’S WAY 11 II THE HOME 17 III THE CONFIDANT 23 IV THE NEIGHBOURING PINE 29 V QUOD ERAT DEMONSTRANDUM 35 VI TIMOTHY SHELLEY’S VIGOROUS DIALECTICS 40 VII AN ACA...