The subject he had suggested for a tragedy was Charles I:  and he had written to me:  ’Remember, remember Charles I. I have been already imagining how you would conduct some scenes.  The second volume of “St. Leon” begins with this proud and true sentiment:  “There is nothing which the human mind can conceive which it may not execute.”  Shakespeare was only a human being.’  These words were written in 1818, while we were in Lombardy, when he little thought how soon a work of his own would prove a proud comment on the passage he quoted.  When in Rome, in 1819, a friend put into our hands the old manuscript account of the story of the Cenci.  We visited the Colonna and Doria palaces, where the portraits of Beatrice were to be found; and her beauty cast the reflection of its own grace over her appalling story.  Shelley’s imagination became strongly excited, and he urged the subject to me as one fitted for a tragedy.  More than ever I felt my incompetence; but I entreated him to write it instead; and he began, and proceeded swiftly, urged on by intense sympathy with the sufferings of the human beings whose passions, so long cold in the tomb, he revived, and gifted with poetic language.  This tragedy is the only one of his works that he communicated to me during its progress.  We talked over the arrangement of the scenes together.  I speedily saw the great mistake we had made, and triumphed in the discovery of the new talent brought to light from that mine of wealth (never, alas, through his untimely death, worked to its depths)—­his richly gifted mind.

We suffered a severe affliction in Rome by the loss of our eldest child, who was of such beauty and promise as to cause him deservedly to be the idol of our hearts.  We left the capital of the world, anxious for a time to escape a spot associated too intimately with his presence and loss.  (Such feelings haunted him when, in “The Cenci”, he makes Beatrice speak to Cardinal Camillo of

     ’that fair blue-eyed child
    Who was the lodestar of your life:’—­and say—­
    All see, since his most swift and piteous death,
    That day and night, and heaven and earth, and time,
    And all the things hoped for or done therein
    Are changed to you, through your exceeding grief.’)

Some friends of ours were residing in the neighbourhood of Leghorn, and we took a small house, Villa Valsovano, about half-way between the town and Monte Nero, where we remained during the summer.  Our villa was situated in the midst of a podere; the peasants sang as they worked beneath our windows, during the heats of a very hot season, and in the evening the water-wheel creaked as the process of irrigation went on, and the fireflies flashed from among the myrtle hedges:  Nature was bright, sunshiny, and cheerful, or diversified by storms of a majestic terror, such as we had never before witnessed.