de off to find a suitable lodging
for themselves and the Shelleys on the Gulf of Spezia. They pitched upon
a house called the Villa Magni, between Lerici and San Terenzio, which
"looked more like a boat or a bathing-house than a place to live in. It
consisted of a terrace or ground-floor unpaved, and used for storing
boat-gear and fishing-tackle, and of a single storey over it, divided
into a hall or saloon and four small rooms, which had once been
white-washed; there was one chimney for cooking. This place we thought
the Shelleys might put up with for the summer. The only good thing about
it was a verandah facing the sea, and almost over it." When it came to
be inhabited, the central hall was used for the living and eating room
of the whole party. The Shelleys occupied two rooms facing each other;
the Williamses had one of the remaining chambers, and Trelawny another.
Access to these smaller apartments could only be got through the saloon;
and this circumstance once gave rise to a ludicrous incident, when
Shelley, having lost his clothes out bathing, had to cross, in puris
naturalibus, not undetected, though covered in his retreat by the clever
Italian handmaiden, through a luncheon party assembled in the
dining-room. The horror of the ladies at the poet's unexpected
apparition and his innocent self-defence are well described by Trelawny.
Life in the villa was of the simplest description. To get food was no
easy matter; and the style of the furniture may be guessed by Trelawny's
laconic remark that the sea was his only washing-basin.

They arrived at Villa Magni on the 26th of April, and began a course of
life which was not interrupted till the final catastrophe of July 8.
These few weeks were in many respects the happiest of Shelley's life. We
seem to discern in his last letter of importance, recently edited by Mr.
Garnett, that he was now conscious of having reached a platform from
which he could survey his past achievement, and whence he would probably
have risen to a loftier altitude, by a calmer and more equable exercise
of powers which had been ripening during the last three years of life in
Italy. Meanwhile, "I am content," he writes, "if the heaven above me is
calm for the passing moment." And this tranquillity was perfect, with
none of the oppressive sense of coming danger, which distinguishes the
calm before a storm. He was far away from the distractions of the world
he hated, in a scene of indescribable beaut