ney told Williams, "until you heave his
books and papers overboard, shear the wisps of hair that hang over his
eyes, and plunge his arms up to the elbows in a tar bucket." But he
said, "I can read and steer at the same time." Read and steer! But
indeed it was on this very bay, and almost certainly in the _Ariel_,
that he wrote those perfect lines: "She left me at the silent time."

It was here too, in Lerici, that Shelley wrote "The Triumph of Life,"
that splendid fragment in _terza rima_, which is like a pageant suddenly
broken by the advent of Death: that ends with the immortal question--

"Then, what is life? I cried,"

which was for ever to remain unanswered, for he had gone, as he said,
"to solve the great mystery." Well, the story is an old one, I shall not
tell it again; only here in the bay of Lerici, with his words in my
ears, his house before me, and the very terrace where he worked, the
ghost of that sorrowful and splendid spirit seems to wander even yet.
What was it that haunted this shore, full of foreboding, prophesying
death?

It was to meet Leigh Hunt that Shelley set out on 1st July with Williams
in the _Ariel_ for Leghorn. For weeks the sky had been cloudless, full
of the mysterious light, which is, as it seems to me, the most beautiful
and the most splendid thing in the world. In all the churches and by the
roadsides they were praying for rain. Shelley had been in Pisa with Hunt
showing him that most lovely of all cathedrals, and, listening to the
organ there, he had been led to agree that a truly divine religion might
even yet be established if Love were really made the principle of it
instead of Faith. On the afternoon following that serene day at Pisa, he
set sail for Lerici from Leghorn with Williams and the boy Charles
Vivian. Trelawney was on the _Bolivar_, Byron's yacht, at the time, and
saw them start. His Genoese mate, watching too, turned to him and said,
"They should have sailed this morning at three or four instead of now;
they are standing too much inshore; the current will set them there."
Trelawney answered, "They will soon have the land-breeze." "Maybe,"
continued the mate, "she will soon have too much breeze; that gaff
topsail is foolish in a boat with no deck and no sailor on board." Then,
pointing to the south-west,--"Look at those black lines and the dirty
rags hanging on them out of the sky--they are a warning; look at the
smoke on the water; the devil is brewing mischief."