Shelley often called me for a long ramble on the heath, or into regions which I then thought far distant; and I went with him rather than with my father, because he walked faster, and talked with me while he walked, instead of being lost in his own thoughts and conversing only at intervals.  A love of wandering seemed to possess him in the most literal sense; his rambles appeared to be without design, or any limit but my fatigue; and when I was “done up,” he carried me home in his arms, on his shoulder, or pickback.  Our communion was not always concord; as I have intimated, he took a pleasure in frightening me, though I never really lost my confidence in his protection, if he would only drop the fantastic aspects that he delighted to assume.  Sometimes, but much more rarely, he teased me with exasperating banter; and, inheriting from some of my progenitors a vindictive temper, I once retaliated severely.  We were in the sitting-room with my father and some others, while I was tortured.  The chancery-suit was just then approaching its most critical point, and, to inflict the cruellest stroke I could think of, I looked him in the face, and expressed a hope that he would be beaten in the trial and have his children taken from him.  I was sitting on his knee, and as I spoke, he let himself fall listlessly back in his chair, without attempting to conceal the shock I had given him.  But presently he folded his arms round me and kissed me; and I perfectly understood that he saw how sorry I was, and was as anxious as I was to be friends again.  It was not very long after that we were playing with paper boats on the pond in the Vale of Health, watching the way in which the wind carried some of them over, or swamped most of them before they had surmounted many billows; and Shelley then playfully said how much he should like it, if we could get into one of the boats and be shipwrecked,—­it was a death he should like better than any other.

After the death of Harriet, Shelley’s life entirely changed; and I think I shall be able to show in the sequel that the change was far greater than any of his biographers, except perhaps one who was most likely to know, have acknowledged.  Conventional form and Shelley are almost incompatible ideas; as his admirable wife has said of him, “He lived to idealize reality,—­to ally the love of abstract truth, and adoration of abstract good, with the living sympathies.  And long as he did this without injury to others, he had the reverse of any respect for the dictates of orthodoxy or convention.”  As soon, therefore, as the obstacle to a second marriage was removed, he and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin were regularly joined in matrimony, and retired to Great Marlow, in Buckinghamshire.  A brief year Shelley passed in the position of a country-gentleman on a small scale.  His abode was a rough house in the village, with a garden at the back and nothing beyond but the country.  Close to the house there was a small pleasure-ground, with a mound at the farther