most wives:  not being exactly what he wished her to be, and lacking the faculties to become so, she tried to seem it.  The desire was partly sincere, partly an affectation, as we discern in such little trifles as her suddenly using the word “thou” in a letter to Hookham where she had previously been using the ordinary colloquial “you.”  That she was not quite ingenuous we also detect in the fast-and-loose conduct which enabled her, while affecting to become what Shelley deemed her to be, also to play into the hands of very inferior people, who must sometimes have counselled her against him behind his back; and this, I am sure, is what he means by “Oh! why not true to me?” though he may include in the question a fervent regret for the fate which attended her wandering from him.  “Then like a hunted deer he turned upon his thoughts and stood at bay,” until

                            “The cold day
  Trembled, for pity of my strife and pain,
  When, like a noonday dawn, there shone again
  Deliverance.  One stood on my path who seemed
  As like the glorious shape that I had dreamed
  As is the Moon, whose changes ever run
  Into themselves, to the eternal Sun.”

“The cold chaste moon” fails to satisfy the longing of his soul.  “At her silver voice came death and life”; hope and despondency, expectation from her noble qualities, disappointment at the failure of response, were feelings that sprang from the exaggerations of his ideal longings.

  “What storms then shook the ocean of my sleep,
  Blotting that Moon whose pale and waning lips
  Then shrank as in the sickness of eclipse!”

The whole passage is worth perusing; and again wrong interpretation has been given to this portion of his writing.  I am still more firmly convinced that in the other case, when he says, “The planet of that hour was quenched,” he alludes to nothing more than the partial failure of his own ideal requirements.  At length into the obscure forest came

“The vision I had sought through grief and shame.

* * * * *

I stood and felt the dawn of my long night
Was penetrating me with living light: 
I knew it was the vision veiled from me
So many years,—­that it was Emily.”

To grasp the entire meaning of this autobiographical episode, we must remember the extent to which Shelley idealizes.  “More popular poets clothe the ideal with familiar and sensible imagery; Shelley loved to idealize the real,—­to gift the mechanism of the material universe with a soul and a voice, and to bestow such also on the most delicate and abstract emotions and thoughts of the mind.  Sophocles was his great master in this species of imagery.”  The heroine of the “Epipsychidion” is an imagination; a creature, like Raphael’s Galatea, copied from no living model, but from “una certa idea”; a thing originally created by himself, and suggested only by the living portrait, as each one of the admired had previously suggested its ideal counterpart.  Emilia, then, was the bride of a dream, and, in the indulgence of disappointed longing for a fuller satisfaction of his soul, Shelley mournfully contrasts this vision, who had so eloquently responded to his idealizing through her convent-bars, with Mary, whose stubborn, independent realism had checked and daunted him.