I deign a nobler pride to prove,
And pity if thou canst not love."

This is in May--apparently towards the end of it. Harriet and Shelley
were corresponding all the time. Harriet got the poem--a copy exists in
her own handwriting; she being the only gentle and kind person amid a
world of hate, according to Shelley's own testimony in the poem, we are
permitted to think that the daily letters would presently have melted
that kind and gentle heart and brought about the reconciliation, if
there had been time but there wasn't; for in a very few days--in fact,
before the 8th of June--Shelley was in love with another woman.

And so--perhaps while Harriet was walking the floor nights, trying to
get her poem by heart--her husband was doing a fresh one--for the other
girl--Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin--with sentiments like these in it:

Exhibit G

To spend years thus and be rewarded,
As thou, sweet love, requited me
When none were near.
... thy lips did meet
Mine tremblingly;...

"Gentle and good and mild thou art,
Nor can I live if thou appear
Aught but thyself."...

And so on. "Before the close of June it was known and felt by Mary and
Shelley that each was inexpressibly dear to the other." Yes, Shelley had
found this child of sixteen to his liking, and had wooed and won her in
the graveyard. But that is nothing; it was better than wooing her in her
nursery, at any rate, where it might have disturbed the other children.

However, she was a child in years only. From the day that she set her
masculine grip on Shelley he was to frisk no more. If she had occupied
the only kind and gentle Harriet's place in March it would have been a
thrilling spectacle to see her invade the Boinville rookery and read the
riot act. That holiday of Shelley's would have been of short duration,
and Cornelia's hair would have been as gray as her mother's when the
services were over.

Hogg went to the Godwin residence in Skinner Street with Shelley on
that 8th of June. They passed through Godwin's little debt-factory of a
book-shop and went up-stairs hunting for the proprietor. Nobody there.
Shelley strode about the room impatiently, making its crazy floor quake
under him. Then a door "was partially and softly opened. A thrilling
voice called 'Shelley!' A thrilling voice answered, 'Mary!' And he
darted out of