as a complete collection of my husband’s poetical works, and I do not foresee that I can hereafter add to or take away a word or line.”  So writes the wife-editor; and then “The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley” begin with a dedication to Harriet, restored to its place by Mary.  While the biographers of Shelley are chargeable with suppression, the most straightforward and frank of all of them is Mary, who, although not insensible to the passion of jealousy, and carrying with her the painful sense of a life-opportunity not fully used, thus writes the name of Harriet the first on her husband’s monument, while she has nobly abstained from telling those things that other persons should have supplied to the narrative.  I have heard her accused of an over-anxiety to be admired; and something of the sort was discernible in society:  it was a weakness as venial as it was purely superficial.  Away from society, she was as truthful and simple a woman as I have ever met,—­was as faithful a friend as the world has produced,—­using that unreserved directness towards those whom she regarded with affection which is the very crowning glory of friendly intercourse.  I suspect that these qualities came out in their greatest force after her calamity; for many things which she said in her regret, and passages in Shelley’s own poetry, make me doubt whether little habits of temper, and possibly of a refined and exacting coquettishness, had not prevented him from acquiring so full a knowledge of her as she had of him.  This was natural for many reasons, and especially two.  Shelley had not the opportunity of retrospectively studying her character, and his mind was by nature more constructed than hers was to be preoccupied.  If the reader desires a portrait of Mary, he has one in the well-known antique bust sometimes called “Isis” and sometimes “Clytie”:  a woman’s head and shoulders rising from a lotus-flower.  It is most probably the portrait of a Roman lady, is in some degree more elongated and “classic” than Mary; but, on the other hand, it falls short of her, for it gives no idea of her tall and intellectual forehead, nor has it any trace of the bright, animated, and sweet expression that so often lighted up her face.

Attention has often been concentrated on the passage in “Epipsychidion” which appears to relate Shelley’s experiences from earliest youth until he met with the noble and unfortunate “Lady Emilia V., now imprisoned in the convent of—­,” whose own words form the motto to the poem, and a key to the sympathy which the writer felt for her:—­“The loving soul launches itself out of the created, and creates in the infinite a world all its own, far different from this dark and fearful abysm.”  The passage begins,—­

  “There was a being whom my spirit oft
  Met on its visioned wanderings, far aloft,
  In the clear golden prime of my youth’s
          dawn.”

And this being was the worshipped object of Shelley’s adoring aspirations in extreme youth; but it passed by him as a vision, though—­