The Leigh Hunts arrived at last in Genoa, whence they again sailed for Leghorn.  Shelley heard the news upon the 20th of June.  He immediately prepared to join them; and on the 1st of July set off with Williams in the “Don Juan” for Leghorn, where he rushed into the arms of his old friend.  Leigh Hunt, in his autobiography, writes, “I will not dwell upon the moment.”  From Leghorn he drove with the Hunts to Pisa, and established them in the ground-floor of Byron’s Palazzo Lanfranchi, as comfortably as was consistent with his lordship’s variable moods.  The negotiations which had preceded Hunt’s visit to Italy, raised forebodings in Shelley’s mind as to the reception he would meet from Byron; nor were these destined to be unfulfilled.  Trelawny tells us how irksome the poet found it to have “a man with a sick wife, and seven disorderly children,” established in his palace.  To Mrs. Hunt he was positively brutal; nor could he tolerate her self-complacent husband, who, while he had voyaged far and wide in literature, had never wholly cast the slough of Cockneyism.  Hunt was himself hardly powerful enough to understand the true magnitude of Shelley, though he loved him; and the tender solicitude of the great, unselfish Shelley, for the smaller, harmlessly conceited Hunt, is pathetic.  They spent a pleasant day or two together, Shelley showing the Campo Santo and other sights of Pisa to his English friend.  Hunt thought him somewhat less hopeful than he used to be, but improved in health and strength and spirits.  One little touch relating to their last conversation, deserves to be recorded:—­“He assented warmly to an opinion I expressed in the cathedral at Pisa, while the organ was playing, that a truly divine religion might yet be established, if charity were really made the principle of it, instead of faith.”

On the night following that day of rest, Shelley took a postchaise for Leghorn; and early in the afternoon of the next day he set sail, with Williams, on his return voyage to Lerici.  The sailor-boy, Charles Vivian, was their only companion.  Trelawny, who was detained on board the “Bolivar”, in the Leghorn harbour, watched them start.  The weather for some time had been unusually hot and dry.  “Processions of priests and religiosi have been for several days past praying for rain;” so runs the last entry in Williams’s diary; “but the gods are either angry or nature too powerful.”  Trelawny’s Genoese mate observed, as the “Don Juan” stood out to sea, that they ought to have started at three a.m. instead of twelve hours later; adding “the devil is brewing mischief.”  Then a sea-fog withdrew the “Don Juan” from their sight.  It was an oppressively sultry afternoon.  Trelawny went down into his cabin, and slept; but was soon roused by the noise of the ships’ crews in the harbour making all ready for a gale.  In a short time the tempest was upon them, with wind, rain, and thunder.  It did not last more than twenty minutes; and at its end Trelawny looked out anxiously for Shelley’s boat.  She was nowhere to be seen, and nothing could be heard of her.  In fact, though Trelawny could not then be absolutely sure of the catastrophe, she had sunk, struck in all probability by the prow of a felucca, but whether by accident or with the intention of running her down is still uncertain.