at I have any talent at all, or you in the
selection of the specimens of it. Yet, after all, I cannot but be
conscious, in much of what I write, of an absence of that tranquillity
which is the attribute and accompaniment of power. This feeling alone
would make your most kind and wise admonitions, on the subject of the
economy of intellectual force, valuable to me. And, if I live, or if I
see any trust in coming years, doubt not but that I shall do something,
whatever it may be, which a serious and earnest estimate of my powers
will suggest to me, and which will be in every respect accommodated to
their utmost limits.

[Shelley to Godwin.]

NOTE ON ROSALIND AND HELEN BY MRS. SHELLEY.

"Rosalind and Helen" was begun at Marlow, and thrown aside--till I found
it; and, at my request, it was completed. Shelley had no care for any of
his poems that did not emanate from the depths of his mind, and develop
some high or abstruse truth. When he does touch on human life and the
human heart, no pictures can be more faithful, more delicate, more
subtle, or more pathetic. He never mentioned Love but he shed a grace
borrowed from his own nature, that scarcely any other poet has bestowed
on that passion. When he spoke of it as the law of life, which inasmuch
as we rebel against we err and injure ourselves and others, he
promulgated that which he considered an irrefragable truth. In his eyes
it was the essence of our being, and all woe and pain arose from the war
made against it by selfishness, or insensibility, or mistake. By
reverting in his mind to this first principle, he discovered the source
of many emotions, and could disclose the secrets of all hearts, and his
delineations of passion and emotion touch the finest chords of our
nature.

"Rosalind and Helen" was finished during the summer of 1818, while we
were at the Baths of Lucca.

NOTE BY MRS. SHELLEY.

From the Baths of Lucca, in 1818, Shelley visited Venice; and,
circumstances rendering it eligible that we should remain a few weeks in
the neighbourhood of that city, he accepted the offer of Lord Byron, who
lent him the use of a villa he rented near Este; and he sent for his
family from Lucca to join him.

I Capuccini was a villa built on the site of a Capuchin convent,
demolished when the French suppressed religious houses; it was situated
on the very overhanging brow of a low hill at the foot of a range of
higher ones. The house was cheerful and pleasant;