e consideration; he wrote to her
frequently, and kept her informed of his whereabouts."

We must not get impatient over these curious inharmoniousnesses and
irreconcilabilities in Shelley's character. You can see by the
biographer's attitude towards them that there is nothing objectionable
about them. Shelley was doing his best to make two adoring young
creatures happy: he was regarding the one with affectionate consideration
by mail, and he was assuaging the other one at home.

"Unhappy Harriet, residing at Bath, had perhaps never desired
that the breach between herself and her husband should be
irreparable and complete."

I find no fault with that sentence except that the "perhaps" is not
strictly warranted. It should have been left out. In support--or shall
we say extenuation?--of this opinion I submit that there is not
sufficient evidence to warrant the uncertainty which it implies. The
only "evidence" offered that Harriet was hard and proud and standing out
against a reconciliation is a poem--the poem in which Shelley beseeches
her to "bid the remorseless feeling flee" and "pity" if she "cannot
love." We have just that as "evidence," and out of its meagre materials
the biographer builds a cobhouse of conjectures as big as the Coliseum;
conjectures which convince him, the prosecuting attorney, but ought to
fall far short of convincing any fair-minded jury.

Shelley's love-poems may be very good evidence, but we know well that
they are "good for this day and train only." We are able to believe that
they spoke the truth for that one day, but we know by experience that
they could not be depended on to speak it the next. The very
supplication for a rewarming of Harriet's chilled love was followed so
suddenly by the poet's plunge into an adoring passion for Mary Godwin
that if it had been a check it would have lost its value before a lazy
person could have gotten to the bank with it.

Hardness, stubbornness, pride, vindictiveness--these may sometimes reside
in a young wife and mother of nineteen, but they are not charged against
Harriet Shelley outside of that poem, and one has no right to insert them
into her character on such shadowy "evidence" as that. Peacock knew
Harriet well, and she has a flexible and persuadable look, as painted by
him:

"Her manners were good, and her whole aspect and demeanor such
manifest emanations of pure and truthful