allowed herself to be influenced by her sister, under whose advice she probably acted when, some months earlier, she prevailed upon Shelley to provide her with a carriage, silver plate and expensive clothes.”  We cannot help sympathizing a little with Harriet.  At the same time, she was making a breach with Shelley inevitable.  She wished him to remain her husband and to pay for her bonnets, but she did not wish even to pretend to “live up to him” any longer.  As Mr. Ingpen says, “it was love, not matrimony,” for which Shelley yearned.  “Marriage,” Shelley had once written, echoing Godwin, “is hateful, detestable.  A kind of ineffable, sickening disgust seizes my mind when I think of this most despotic, most unrequired fetter which prejudice has forged to confine its energies.”  Having lived for years in a theory of “anti-matrimonialism,” he now saw himself doomed to one of those conventional marriages which had always seemed to him a denial of the holy spirit of love.  This, too, at a time when he had found in Mary Godwin a woman belonging to the same intellectual and spiritual race as himself—­a woman whom he loved as the great lovers in all the centuries have loved.  Shelley himself expressed the situation in a few characteristic words to Thomas Love Peacock:  “Everyone who knows me,” he said, “must know that the partner of my life should be one who can feel poetry and understand philosophy.  Harriet is a noble animal, but she can do neither.”  “It always appeared to me,” said Peacock, “that you were very fond of Harriet.”  Shelley replied:  “But you did not know how I hated her sister.”  And so Harriet’s marriage-lines were, torn up, as people say nowadays, like a scrap of paper.  That Shelley did not feel he had done anything inconsiderate is shown by the fact that, within three weeks of his elopement with Mary Godwin, he was writing to Harriet, describing the scenery through which Mary and he had travelled, and urging her to come and live near them in Switzerland.  “I write,” his letter runs—­

to urge you to come to Switzerland, where you will at least find one firm and constant friend, to whom your interests will be always dear—­by whom your feelings will never wilfully be injured.  From none can you expect this but me—­all else are unfeeling, or selfish, or have beloved friends of their own, as Mrs. B[oinville], to whom their attention and affection is confined.

He signed this letter (the Ianthe of whom he speaks was his daughter): 

    With love to my sweet little Ianthe, ever most affectionately
    yours, S.

This letter, if it had been written by an amorist, would seem either base or priggish.  Coming from Shelley, it is a miracle of what can only be called innocence.