Thus began that happy last summer of Shelley’s life.  Day by day, he, with Trelawney and Williams, watched for that fatal plaything, the little boat Ariel, which Trelawney had drawn in her actual dimensions for him on the sands of Arno, while he, with a map of the Mediterranean spread before him, sitting in this imaginary ship, had already made wonderful voyages.  And one day as he paced the terrace with Williams, they saw her round the headland of Porto Venere.  Twenty-eight feet long by eight she was:  built in Genoa from an English model that Williams, who had been a sailor, had brought with him.  Without a deck, schooner-rigged, it took, says Trelawney, “two tons of iron ballast to bring her down to her bearings, and then she was very crank in a breeze, though not deficient in beam.”  Truly Shelley was no seaman.  “You will do no good with Shelley,” Trelawney told Williams, “until you heave his books and papers overboard, shear the wisps of hair that hang over his eyes, and plunge his arms up to the elbows in a tar bucket.”  But he said, “I can read and steer at the same time.”  Read and steer!  But indeed it was on this very bay, and almost certainly in the Ariel, that he wrote those perfect lines:  “She left me at the silent time.”

It was here too, in Lerici, that Shelley wrote “The Triumph of Life,” that splendid fragment in terza rima, which is like a pageant suddenly broken by the advent of Death:  that ends with the immortal question—­

    “Then, what is life?  I cried,”

which was for ever to remain unanswered, for he had gone, as he said, “to solve the great mystery.”  Well, the story is an old one, I shall not tell it again; only here in the bay of Lerici, with his words in my ears, his house before me, and the very terrace where he worked, the ghost of that sorrowful and splendid spirit seems to wander even yet.  What was it that haunted this shore, full of foreboding, prophesying death?

It was to meet Leigh Hunt that Shelley set out on 1st July with Williams in the Ariel for Leghorn.  For weeks the sky had been cloudless, full of the mysterious light, which is, as it seems to me, the most beautiful and the most splendid thing in the world.  In all the churches and by the roadsides they were praying for rain.  Shelley had been in Pisa with Hunt showing him that most lovely of all cathedrals, and, listening to the organ there, he had been led to agree that a truly divine religion might even yet be established if Love were really made the principle of it instead of Faith.  On the afternoon following that serene day at Pisa, he set sail for Lerici from Leghorn with Williams and the boy Charles Vivian.  Trelawney was on the Bolivar, Byron’s yacht, at the time, and saw them start.  His Genoese mate, watching too, turned to him and said, “They should have sailed this morning at three or four instead of now; they are standing too much inshore; the current will set