as
only a human being.' These words were written in 1818, while we were in
Lombardy, when he little thought how soon a work of his own would prove
a proud comment on the passage he quoted. When in Rome, in 1819, a
friend put into our hands the old manuscript account of the story of the
Cenci. We visited the Colonna and Doria palaces, where the portraits of
Beatrice were to be found; and her beauty cast the reflection of its own
grace over her appalling story. Shelley's imagination became strongly
excited, and he urged the subject to me as one fitted for a tragedy.
More than ever I felt my incompetence; but I entreated him to write it
instead; and he began, and proceeded swiftly, urged on by intense
sympathy with the sufferings of the human beings whose passions, so long
cold in the tomb, he revived, and gifted with poetic language. This
tragedy is the only one of his works that he communicated to me during
its progress. We talked over the arrangement of the scenes together. I
speedily saw the great mistake we had made, and triumphed in the
discovery of the new talent brought to light from that mine of wealth
(never, alas, through his untimely death, worked to its depths)--his
richly gifted mind.

We suffered a severe affliction in Rome by the loss of our eldest child,
who was of such beauty and promise as to cause him deservedly to be the
idol of our hearts. We left the capital of the world, anxious for a time
to escape a spot associated too intimately with his presence and loss.
(Such feelings haunted him when, in "The Cenci", he makes Beatrice speak
to Cardinal Camillo of

'that fair blue-eyed child
Who was the lodestar of your life:'--and say--
All see, since his most swift and piteous death,
That day and night, and heaven and earth, and time,
And all the things hoped for or done therein
Are changed to you, through your exceeding grief.')

Some friends of ours were residing in the neighbourhood of Leghorn, and
we took a small house, Villa Valsovano, about half-way between the town
and Monte Nero, where we remained during the summer. Our villa was
situated in the midst of a podere; the peasants sang as they worked
beneath our windows, during the heats of a very hot season, and in the
evening the water-wheel creaked as the process of irrigation went on,
and the fireflies flashed from among the myrtle hedges: Nature was
bright, sunshiny, and cheerful, or diversified by storms of a majestic