[67] The passage “It is true ...  I will” is on a slip of paper pasted across the page.

[68] In the revision from F of F—­B the style of this whole episode becomes more concise and specific.

[69] An improvement over the awkward phrasing in F of F—­B:  “a friend who will not repulse my request that he would accompany me.”

[70] These two paragraphs are not in F of F—­B; portions of them are in S-R fr.

[71] This speech is greatly improved in style over that in F of F—­B, more concise in expression (though somewhat expanded), more specific.  There are no corresponding S-R fr to show the process of revision.  With the ideas expressed here cf.  Shelley, Julian and Maddalo, ll. 182-187, 494-499, and his letter to Claire in November, 1820 (Julian Works, X, 226).  See also White, Shelley, II, 378.

[72] This solecism, copied from F of F—­B, is not characteristic of Mary Shelley.

[73] This paragraph prepares for the eventual softening of Mathilda’s feeling.  The idea is somewhat elaborated from F of F—­B.  Other changes are necessitated by the change in the mode of presenting the story.  In The Fields of Fancy Mathilda speaks as one who has already died.

[74] Cf.  Shelley’s emphasis on hope and its association with love in all his work.  When Mary wrote Mathilda she knew Queen Mab (see Part VIII, ll. 50-57, and Part IX, ll. 207-208), the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, and the first three acts of Prometheus Unbound.  The fourth act was written in the winter of 1819, but Demogorgon’s words may already have been at least adumbrated before the beginning of November: 

To love and bear, to hope till hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates.

[75] Shelley had written, “Desolation is a delicate thing” (Prometheus Unbound, Act I, l. 772) and called the Spirit of the Earth “a delicate spirit” (Ibid., Act III, Sc. iv, l. 6).

[76] Purgatorio, Canto 28, ll. 31-33.  Perhaps by this time Shelley had translated ll. 1-51 of this canto.  He had read the Purgatorio in April, 1818, and again with Mary in August, 1819, just as she was beginning to write Mathilda.  Shelley showed his translation to Medwin in 1820, but there seems to be no record of the date of composition.

[77] An air with this title was published about 1800 in London by Robert Birchall.  See Catalogue of Printed Music Published between 1487 and 1800 and now in the British Museum, by W. Barclay Squire, 1912.  Neither author nor composer is listed in the Catalogue.

[78] This paragraph is materially changed from F of F—­B.  Clouds and darkness are substituted for starlight, silence for the sound of the wind.  The weather here matches Mathilda’s mood.  Four and a half lines of verse (which I have not been able to identify, though they sound Shelleyan—­are they Mary’s own?) are omitted:  of the stars she says,