Famous Affinities of History — Volume 4 eBook


In little more than a month from the time of their first meeting, Shelley and Mary Godwin and Miss Clairmont left Godwin’s house at four o ’clock in the morning, and hurried across the Channel to Calais.  They wandered almost like vagabonds across France, eating black bread and the coarsest fare, walking on the highways when they could not afford to ride, and putting up with every possible inconvenience.  Yet it is worth noting that neither then nor at any other time did either Shelley or Mary regret what they had done.  To the very end of the poet’s brief career they were inseparable.

Later he was able to pension Harriet, who, being of a morbid disposition, ended her life by drowning—­not, it may be said, because of grief for Shelley.  It has been told that Fanny Imlay, Mary’s sister, likewise committed suicide because Shelley did not care for her, but this has also been disproved.  There was really nothing to mar the inner happiness of the poet and the woman who, at the very end, became his wife.  Living, as they did, in Italy and Switzerland, they saw much of their own countrymen, such as Landor and Leigh Hunt and Byron, to whose fascinations poor Miss Clairmont yielded, and became the mother of the little girl Allegra.

But there could have been no truer union than this of Shelley’s with the woman whom nature had intended for him.  It was in his love-life, far more than in his poetry, that he attained completeness.  When he died by drowning, in 1822, and his body was burned in the presence of Lord Byron, he was truly mourned by the one whom he had only lately made his wife.  As a poet he never reached the same perfection; for his genius was fitful and uncertain, rare in its flights, and mingled always with that which disappoints.

As the lover and husband of Mary Godwin, there was nothing left to wish.  In his verse, however, the truest word concerning him will always be that exquisite sentence of Matthew Arnold: 

“A beautiful and ineffectual angel beating his luminous wings against the void in vain.”


To most persons, Tennyson was a remote and romantic figure.  His homes in the Isle of Wight and at Aldworth had a dignified seclusion about them which was very appropriate to so great a poet, and invested him with a certain awe through which the multitude rarely penetrated.  As a matter of fact, however, he was an excellent companion, a ready talker, and gifted with so much wit that it is a pity that more of his sayings have not been preserved to us.

One of the best known is that which was drawn from him after he and a number of friends had been spending an hour in company with Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle.  The two Carlyles were unfortunately at their worst, and gave a superb specimen of domestic “nagging.”  Each caught up whatever the other said, and either turned it into ridicule, or tried to make the author of it an object of contempt.

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