could never trust himself to speak of it even to the nearest and dearest friend he had.

"Such was his fear," says Mrs. Shelley, "to wound the feelings of others, that he never expressed the anguish he felt, and seldom gave vent to the indignation roused by the persecutions he underwent; while the course of deep, unexpressed passion, and the sense of injury, engendered the desire to embody themselves in forms deprecative of all the weakness and evil which cling to real life."

Some of the bitter and stormy feelings that threatened to overwhelm him, found expression in a curse, which, in a moment of agony, he addressed to the Lord Chancellor, in which there breathes, besides haughty indignation, all the tenderness of a father's love.* He exclaims:

"O let a father's curse be on thy soul,

And let a daughter's hope be on thy tomb,
And both on thy grey head a leaden cowl,
To weigh thee down to thy approaching doom!

"I curse thee by a parent's outraged love,
By hopes long cherish'd and too lately lost,
By gentle feelings thou couldst never prove,
By griefs which thy stern nature never cross'd.

Mrs. Shelley's Notes,

"By those infantile smiles of happy light,

Which were a fire within a stranger's hearth, Quench'd even when kindled, in untimely night, Hiding the promise of a lovely birth.

"By those unpractised accents of young speech, Which he who is a father thought to frame To gentle love, such as the wisest teach;

Thou strike the lyre of mind! O grief and shame.

By all the happy see in children's growth,

That undeveloped flow'r of budding years, Sweetness and sadness interwoven both,

Source of the sweetest hopes and saddest fears.

"I curse thee, though I hate thee not: O slave!
If thou couldst quench the earth-consuming hell
Of which thou art a demon, on thy grave

This curse should be thy blessing. Fare thee well."

When these proceedings and their results were related to Lord Byron, he did not hesitate to express his deep sense of the injury Shelley had sustained, and declared that had he been in England at the time, "he would have moved heaven and earth to have reversed such a decision," and that it was a most unwarrrantable act of oppression, a cruel outrage, before which

the bright, pure image of liberty or justice must stand appalled, every Englishman, be he of whatever creed or belief he may, will now acknowledge.

CHAPTER VIII.

Shelley marries Mary Godwin-His residence at Great Marlow-Nature of his studies-His philanthropyMode of Life at Marlow.

SOON after the events just narrated, Shelley married Mary Wolstonecraft Godwin, a circumstance which led an admirer of "Queen Mab," to refer him to the note in that work, hostile to matrimony, taxing him with apostacy, in having twice entered that state, to which the poet replied

"I abhor seduction as much as I adore love, and if I have conformed to the uses of the world on the score of matrimony, it is that disgrace always attaches to the weaker side."

Thereby proving that however in the abstract he might differ from received opinions, he was ever ready to conform to the uses of society. His second marriage was in every respect a happy one. Fitted by nature for each other's society, they contradicted the too oft-repeated assertion that the pursuits of literature, more especially those of the poet, are opposed to domestic happiness, and the growth of all those amiable virtues which throw such a charm about it in other circles of society.

They lived together in the most perfect harmony; a fact which was conspicuous to all who knew them, and which the letters addressed by the poet to his wife, and the idolatrous worship paid by Mrs. Shelley to the memory of her husband fully bear witness to.

In the spring of the year 1817, Shelley again rented a house, and packing up his books, and collecting his furniture from Bishopgate, he removed to Great Marlow, in Buckinghamshire, in search of that retirement of a quiet English country home, which seems to have been so much the desire of his nature.

He had chosen this spot by the advice of his