looks, in his gestures, in his speech, the state of a mind
suffering, like a little kingdom, the nature of an insurrection.
His eyes were bloodshot, his hair and dress disordered. He
frequently repeated the lines from Sophocles,--

'Man's happiest lot is not to be;
And when we tread life's thorny steep,
Most blest are they who, earliest free,
Descend to death's eternal sleep.'"

Godwin, it appears, tried hard to re-unite Shelley and Harriet, and
disapproved entirely of the new connection. Mary was but seventeen years
old, very beautiful, and possessed of genius; and her father, moral
considerations entirely aside, did not look upon Shelley as a suitable
husband for her. But Shelley had conceived for her the one violent,
uncontrollable passion of his life, and she was very easily brought
under his influence, in spite of the disapproval of her father. Mary had
not been brought up with conventional ideas upon the subject of marriage
(her own mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, having had very unusual opinions
upon that subject), and she fell an easy victim to Shelley's impassioned
eloquence, when he urged her to flee with him from an uncongenial home.
Shelley appeared to Mary as almost a divine being, and her worshipful
love never waned, even during her long widowhood of thirty years'
duration. For Shelley, in the whole matter, there seems to be no valid
excuse. He deliberately defied the world and the world's ways, and even
his memory must bear the fatal consequences. If we allow his genius to
excuse his acts, we are setting up a precedent which we have only to
imagine universally carried out to produce not only moral revolution but
chaos throughout the social world. He sinned like an ordinary mortal, he
suffered also in the same wise, and in the memory of man he must be held
to the same responsibility as his fellows. But his unworldliness may
well be taken into the account. He lived in a sort of dreamworld of his
own, and the thoughts and opinions and feelings of ordinary men upon
matters of life and conduct were so different from his that he could
hardly comprehend the value they had in the eyes of their possessors.
Born to rank and wealth, he desired to induce every rich man to despoil
himself of superfluity, and to create a brotherhood of property and
service, and was ready to be the first one to lay down the advantages of
his birth. Born with the most fanatical love of liberty, he looke