The Last Days of Percy Bysshe Shelley: New Details from Unpublished Documents

T o those whose hearts have thrilled over the pages of Trelavney and the narratives of other witnesses to these facts, as well as those of Pro- fessor Dowdens masterly biography of the poet, related, as it is with the true insight of love it were idle once more to recount the bare details of that dark catastrophe which closed, tragically as an antique d-aina woven by inevitable Fate, the life of Percy Bvsshe Shelley. Who, in truth, can remember without profound sympathy, I had almost said, without tears, that sorrow- ful letter which Mary Shelley, the desolate widow, wrote on the 15th of August, 1822, to Mrs. Gisborne tel- ling the story of those days of agony The terrible drama of which those two women, Mrs. Shelley, and Mrs. Williams foresaw the end, is narrated with so true, so natural a crescendo of horror and of pathos as might move even the author of The Real Shelley , if certain critics conde- scended to possess hearts. If no more were known of Shelleys beloved com- panion, this letter would be enough to prove how worthy she was to be invoked as Mine own hearts home , as he calls her in the dedication of the Revolt of Islam , in which he says through thine eyes, even in thy soul I see, A Lamp of vestal fire, burning internally . The days pass , she writes after the terrible event, pass one after another, and we still live. Adonais is not Keats elegy, but his very own . Who knows how often she read, and re-read it in those twentynine long years during which she outlived him, widowed vestal of her one and only love The proof is found in a copy of the Pisan edition of this poem, that she possessed, where after her death a tiny silken sack was found among the pages, containing ashes, taken by her from his funeral urn. 4 The last days So is it in all which concerns the poet of the Liberated World , there breathes the true and simple crandeur of the patltos of the days b of old. w hoever thinks over this sorrowful story, to which...