On their return to the lake, the Shelleys found M.G.  Lewis established with Byron.  This addition to the circle introduced much conversation about apparitions, and each member of the party undertook to produce a ghost story.  Polidori’s “Vampyre” and Mrs. Shelley’s “Frankenstein” were the only durable results of their determination.  But an incident occurred which is of some importance in the history of Shelley’s psychological condition.  Toward midnight on the 18th of July, Byron recited the lines in “Christabel” about the lady’s breast; when Shelley suddenly started up, shrieked, and fled from the room.  He had seen a vision of a woman with eyes instead of nipples.  At this time he was writing notes upon the phenomena of sleep to be inserted in his “Speculations on Metaphysics”, and Mrs. Shelley informs us that the mere effort to remember dreams of thrilling or mysterious import so disturbed his nervous system that he had to relinquish the task.  At no period of his life was he wholly free from visions which had the reality of facts.  Sometimes they occurred in sleep, and were prolonged with painful vividness into his waking moments.  Sometimes they seemed to grow out of his intense meditation, or to present themselves before his eyes as the projection of a powerful inner impression.  All his sensations were abnormally acute, and his ever-active imagination confused the border-lands of the actual and the visionary.  Such a nature as Shelley’s, through its far greater susceptibility than is common even when with artistic temperaments, was debarred in moments of high-strung emotion from observing the ordinary distinctions of subject and object; and this peculiar quality must never be forgotten when we seek to estimate the proper proportions of Dichtung and Wahreit in certain episodes of his biography.  The strange story, for example, told by Peacock about a supposed warning he had received in the spring of this year from Mr. Williams of Tremadoc, may possibly be explained on the hypothesis that his brooding thoughts had taken form before him, both ear and eye having been unconsciously pressed into the service of a subjective energy. (Fraser’s Magazine, January, 1860, page 98.)

On their return to England in September, Shelley took a cottage at Great Marlow on the Thames, in order to be near his friend Peacock.  While it was being prepared for the reception of his family, he stayed at Bath, and there heard of Harriet’s suicide.  The life that once was dearest to him, had ended thus in misery, desertion, want.  The mother of his two children, abandoned by both her husband and her lover, and driven from her father’s home, had drowned herself after a brief struggle with circumstance.  However Shelley may have felt that his conscience was free from blame, however small an element of self-reproach may have mingled with his grief and horror, there is no doubt that he suffered most acutely.  His deepest ground for remorse seems to have been the