Page:Compromises (Repplier).djvu/260

 244 "Sanity and balance," says Mr. Morley, "mark the foundations of his character. An angel of reasonableness seems to watch over him, even when he comes most dangerously near to an extravagance."

Miss Clairmont did not confide to her guardians the secret of her intimacy with Lord Byron until after the meeting at Geneva. When her relations with him were understood, neither Shelley nor Mary Godwin saw at first any occasion for distress. They cared nothing for the broken marriage bond, and they believed, or hoped, that some true affection had been—as in their own case—the impelling and upholding power. It was the swift withering of this hope which filled their hearts with apprehension. They carried Miss Clairmont back to England in the autumn ("I have had all the plague possible to persuade her to go back," wrote Byron to his sister); and in Bath, the following January, her little daughter was born.

It was a blue-eyed baby of exceptional loveliness. Mrs. Shelley (Mary Godwin had been married to the poet on the death of his wife, two months earlier) fills her letters with praises