shall certainly come, as I cannot endure this dreadful
state of suspense. You are his friend and you can feel for me.
"I remain yours truly,
"H. S."

Even without Peacock's testimony that "her whole aspect and demeanor were
manifest emanations of a pure and truthful nature," we should hold this
to be a truthful letter, a sincere letter, a loving letter; it bears
those marks; I think it is also the letter of a person accustomed to
receiving letters from her husband frequently, and that they have been of
a welcome and satisfactory sort, too, this long time back--ever since the
solemn remarriage and reconciliation at the altar most likely.

The biographer follows Harriet's letter with a conjecture.
He conjectures that she "would now gladly have retraced her steps."
Which means that it is proven that she had steps to retrace--proven by
the poem. Well, if the poem is better evidence than the letter, we must
let it stand at that.

Then the biographer attacks Harriet Shelley's honor--by authority of
random and unverified gossip scavengered from a group of people whose
very names make a person shudder: Mary Godwin, mistress to Shelley; her
part-sister, discarded mistress of Lord Byron; Godwin, the philosophical
tramp, who gathers his share of it from a shadow--that is to say, from a
person whom he shirks out of naming. Yet the biographer dignifies this
sorry rubbish with the name of "evidence."

Nothing remotely resembling a distinct charge from a named person
professing to know is offered among this precious "evidence."

1. "Shelley believed" so and so.

2. Byron's discarded mistress says that Shelley told Mary Godwin so and
so, and Mary told her.

3. "Shelley said" so and so--and later "admitted over and over again
that he had been in error."

4. The unspeakable Godwin "wrote to Mr. Baxter" that he knew so and so
"from unquestionable authority"--name not furnished.

How-any man in his right mind could bring himself to defile the grave of
a shamefully abused and defenceless girl with these baseless
fabrications, this manufactured filth, is inconceivable. How any man, in
his right mind or out of it, could sit down and coldly try to persuade
anybody to believe it, or listen patiently to it, or, indeed, do anything
but scoff at it and deride it, is astonishing.

The charge insinuated by these odious slanders is one of th