and most touching lyrics of this year are addressed to Jane—­for so Mrs. Williams was called; and attentive students may perceive that the thought of Emilia was already blending by subtle transitions with the new thought of Jane.  One poem, almost terrible in its intensity of melancholy, is hardly explicable on the supposition that Shelley was quite happy in his home. ("The Serpent is shut out from Paradise.”) These words must be taken as implying no reflection either upon Mary’s love for him, or upon his own power to bear the slighter troubles of domestic life.  He was not a spoiled child of fortune, a weak egotist, or a querulous complainer.  But he was always seeking and never finding the satisfaction of some deeper craving.  In his own words, he had loved Antigone before he visited this earth:  and no one woman could probably have made him happy, because he was for ever demanding more from love than it can give in the mixed circumstances of mortal life.  Moreover, it must be remembered that his power of self-expression has bestowed permanent form on feelings which may have been but transitory; nor can we avoid the conclusion that, sincere as Shelley was, he, like all poets, made use of the emotion of the moment for purposes of art, converting an ephemeral mood into something typical and universal.  This was almost certainly the case with “Epipsychidion.”

So much at any rate had to be said upon this subject; for careful readers of Shelley’s minor poems are forced to the conviction that during the last year of his life he often found relief from a wretchedness, which, however real, can hardly be defined, in the sympathy of this true-hearted woman.  The affection he felt for Jane was beyond question pure and honourable.  All the verses he addressed to her passed through her husband’s hands without the slightest interruption to their intercourse; and Mrs. Shelley, who was not unpardonably jealous of her Ariel, continued to be Mrs. Williams’s warm friend.  A passage from Shelley’s letter of June 18, 1822, expresses the plain prose of his relation to the Williamses:—­“They are people who are very pleasing to me.  But words are not the instruments of our intercourse.  I like Jane more and more, and I find Williams the most amiable of companions.  She has a taste for music, and an eloquence of form and motions that compensate in some degree for the lack of literary refinement.”

Two lyrics of this period may here be introduced, partly for the sake of their intrinsic beauty, and partly because they illustrate the fecundity of Shelley’s genius during the months of tranquil industry which he passed at Pisa.  The first is an Invocation to Night:—­

    Swiftly walk over the western wave,
    Spirit of Night! 
    Out of the misty eastern cave,
    Where all the long and lone daylight,
    Thou wovest dreams of joy and fear,
    Which make thee terrible and dear,—­
    Swift be thy flight!