was the consciousness, which would be ever prevalent with him, of
his being, in its utter extent, not a free agent, even within such a
circle as Shelley's--he himself nevertheless being the most unrestricted
of beings.' Mr. Clarke seems to mean in this passage that Shelley,
_before_ starting for Italy, invited Keats to accompany him thither--a
fact, if such it is, of which I find no trace elsewhere. It is however
just possible that Clarke was only referring to the earlier invitation,
previously mentioned, for Keats to visit at Great Marlow; or he may most
probably, with some confusion as to dates and details, be thinking of
the message which Shelley, when already settled in Italy for a couple of
years, addressed to his brother-poet--of which more anon.

Shelley and his family--including for the most part Miss
Clairmont--wandered about a good deal in Italy. They were in Milan,
Leghorn, the Bagni di Lucca, Venice and its neighbourhood, Rome, Naples,
Florence, Pisa, the Bagni di Pisa, and finally (after Shelley had gone
to Ravenna by himself) in a lonely house named Casa Magni, between
Lerici and San Terenzio, on the Bay of Spezzia. Their two children died;
but in 1819 another was born, the Sir Percy Florence Shelley who lived
on till November 1889. They were often isolated or even solitary. Among
their interesting acquaintances at one place or another were, besides
Byron, Mr. and Mrs. Gisborne (the latter had previously been Mrs.
Reveley, and had been sought in marriage by Godwin after the death of
Mary Wollstonecraft in 1797); the Contessina Emilia Viviani, celebrated
in Shelley's poem of _Epipsychidion_; Captain Medwin, Shelley's cousin
and schoolfellow; the Greek Prince, Alexander Mavrocordato; Lieutenant
and Mrs. Williams, who joined them at Casa Magni; and Edward John
Trelawny, an adventurous and daring sea-rover, who afterwards
accompanied Byron to Greece.

It was only towards the summer of 1819 that Shelley read the _Endymion_.
He wrote of it thus in a letter to his publisher, Mr. Ollier, September
6, 1819. 'I have read ... Keats's poem.... Much praise is due to me for
having read it, the author's intention appearing to be that no person
should possibly get to the end of it. Yet it is full of some of the
highest and the finest gleams of poetry: indeed, everything seems to be
viewed by the mind of a poet which is described in it. I think, if he
had printed about fifty pages of fragments from it, I should have been