by this supreme poetic
effort, the solitude of the Villa Magni, and the elemental fervour of
Italian heat to which he recklessly exposed himself, contributed to make
Shelley more than usually nervous. His somnambulism returned, and he saw
visions. On one occasion he thought that the dead Allegra rose from the
sea, and clapped her hands, and laughed, and beckoned to him. On another
he roused the whole house at night by his screams, and remained
terror-frozen in the trance produced by an appalling vision. This mood
he communicated, in some measure, to his friends. One of them saw what
she afterwards believed to have been his phantom, and another dreamed
that he was dead. They talked much of death, and it is noticeable that
the last words written to him by Jane were these:--"Are you going to
join your friend Plato?"

The Leigh Hunts arrived at last in Genoa, whence they again sailed for
Leghorn. Shelley heard the news upon the 20th of June. He immediately
prepared to join them; and on the 1st of July set off with Williams in
the "Don Juan" for Leghorn, where he rushed into the arms of his old
friend. Leigh Hunt, in his autobiography, writes, "I will not dwell upon
the moment." From Leghorn he drove with the Hunts to Pisa, and
established them in the ground-floor of Byron's Palazzo Lanfranchi, as
comfortably as was consistent with his lordship's variable moods. The
negotiations which had preceded Hunt's visit to Italy, raised
forebodings in Shelley's mind as to the reception he would meet from
Byron; nor were these destined to be unfulfilled. Trelawny tells us how
irksome the poet found it to have "a man with a sick wife, and seven
disorderly children," established in his palace. To Mrs. Hunt he was
positively brutal; nor could he tolerate her self-complacent husband,
who, while he had voyaged far and wide in literature, had never wholly
cast the slough of Cockneyism. Hunt was himself hardly powerful enough
to understand the true magnitude of Shelley, though he loved him; and
the tender solicitude of the great, unselfish Shelley, for the smaller,
harmlessly conceited Hunt, is pathetic. They spent a pleasant day or two
together, Shelley showing the Campo Santo and other sights of Pisa to
his English friend. Hunt thought him somewhat less hopeful than he used
to be, but improved in health and strength and spirits. One little touch
relating to their last conversation, deserves to be recorded:--"He
assented warmly to an opinio