nsult a physician, a trip
which was beset with delays and difficulties. She died almost as soon
as they arrived. According to Newman Ivey White,[xii] Mary, in the
unreasoning agony of her grief, blamed Shelley for the child's death
and for a time felt toward him an extreme physical antagonism which
subsided into apathy and spiritual alienation. Mary's black moods made
her difficult to live with, and Shelley himself fell into deep
dejection. He expressed his sense of their estrangement in some of the
lyrics of 1818--"all my saddest poems." In one fragment of verse, for
example, he lamented that Mary had left him "in this dreary world
alone."

Thy form is here indeed--a lovely one--
But thou art fled, gone down the dreary road,
That leads to Sorrow's most obscure abode.
Thou sittest on the hearth of pale despair,
Where
For thine own sake I cannot follow thee.

Professor White believed that Shelley recorded this estrangement only
"in veiled terms" in _Julian and Maddalo_ or in poems that he did not
show to Mary, and that Mary acknowledged it only after Shelley's
death, in her poem "The Choice" and in her editorial notes on his
poems of that year. But this unpublished story, written after the
death of their other child William, certainly contains, though also in
veiled terms, Mary's immediate recognition and remorse. Mary well
knew, I believe, what she was doing to Shelley. In an effort to purge
her own emotions and to acknowledge her fault, she poured out on the
pages of _Mathilda_ the suffering and the loneliness, the bitterness
and the self-recrimination of the past months.

The biographical elements are clear: Mathilda is certainly Mary
herself; Mathilda's father is Godwin; Woodville is an idealized
Shelley.

Like Mathilda Mary was a woman of strong passions and affections which
she often hid from the world under a placid appearance. Like
Mathilda's, Mary's mother had died a few days after giving her birth.
Like Mathilda she spent part of her girlhood in Scotland. Like
Mathilda she met and loved a poet of "exceeding beauty," and--also
like Mathilda--in that sad year she had treated him ill, having become
"captious and unreasonable" in her sorrow. Mathilda's loneliness,
grief, and remorse can be paralleled in Mary's later journal and in
"The Choice." This story was the outlet for her emotions in 1819.

Woodville, the poet, is virtually perfect, "gloriou