“And as a man with mighty loss dismayed,
  I would have followed, though the grave between
  Yawned like a gulf whose spectres are unseen: 
  When a voice said,—­’O thou of hearts the weakest,
  The phantom is beside thee whom thou seekest.’ 
  Then I,—­’Where?’ The world’s echo answered, ’Where’!”

She ever remained the veiled divinity of thoughts that worshipped her, while he went forth into the world with hope and fear,—­

  “Into the wintry forest of our life;
  And struggling through its error with vain strife,
  And stumbling in my weakness and my haste,
  And half bewildered by new forms, I passed
  Seeking among those untaught foresters
  If I could find one form resembling hers
  In which she might have masked herself from me.”

The passage grows more and more intelligible.  Hitherto he has been simply a dreamy seeker; but now, at last, he thinks that Fate has answered his questioning exclamation, “Where?”

  “There, one whose voice was venomed melody
  Sat by a well, under the nightshade bowers;
  The breath of her false mouth was like faint flowers;
  Her touch was as electric poison; flame
  Out of her looks into my vitals came;
  And from her living cheeks and bosom flew
  A killing air which pierced like honey-dew
  Into the core of my green heart, and lay
  Upon its leaves,—­until, as hair grown gray
  O’er a young brow, they hid its unblown prime
  With ruins of unseasonable time.”

This is a plain and only too intelligible reference to the college experiences to which I have alluded.  The youth for the moment thought that he had encountered her whom he was seeking, but, instead of the Florimel, he found her venal, hideous, and fatal simulacrum; and he indicates even the material consequences to himself in his injured aspect and hair touched with gray.  He continues his search.

  “In many mortal forms I rashly sought
  The shadow of that idol of my thought: 
  And some were fair,—­but beauty dies away;
  Others were wise,—­but honeyed words betray;
  And one was true,—­oh! why not true to me? 
  Then, as a hunted deer that could not flee,
  I turned upon my thoughts and stood at bay.”

“Oh! why not true to me?” has been taken by some very few who were cognizant of the facts as constituting an imputation on the one whom he first married; but I am convinced that the interpretation is wrong, although the surmise on which that interpretation is based was partly correct.  Nothing is more evident than the fact that Harriet possessed rather an unusual degree of ability, but enormously less than Shelley desired in the being whom he sought, and equally less than his idealizing estimate originally ascribed to her.  It is also plain, from her own letters, that she courted his approval in a way far too common with the wives of the artist-tribe, and perhaps with