Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 52.djvu/43

 Elan in Radnorshire, letter after letter came from Harriet complaining of the oppressions she underwent, and threatening to commit suicide. Shelley hastened back to town, saw her, commiserated her appearance, and under the influence of compassion and embittered feeling at his own renunciation by Harriet Grove, who had rejected him before his expulsion from Oxford, committed the weakest action of his life in engaging to marry her. They fled northward, and were wedded in Edinburgh on 28 Aug. 1811. It seems unlikely that Harriet's father should have had any violent objection to his daughter marrying the eventual heir to a baronetcy; and it is no unreasonable conjecture that the transaction was, in fact, arranged by Harriet's family. If so, however, Harriet was certainly an innocent tool. Pleasing in appearance, fairly well educated, good-mannered and good-humoured as she was, an ordinary man might have promised himself much happiness with her; and indeed, until the affection which she originally felt for Shelley had become indifference, the marriage might have passed for fortunate. His own feelings when it was contracted, and for some time afterwards, are portrayed in his letters to Miss Hitchener, a Sussex schoolmistress, then the object of his ardent intellectual admiration.

Shelley's varied adventures for the next three years are unimportant in comparison with the phenomenon in the background, the silent growth of his mind. In the winter of 1811–12 he lived chiefly at Keswick, where he met with the kindest reception from Southey, where he opened his momentous correspondence with Godwin, whose ‘Political Justice’ had deeply impressed him, and whence, in February, he departed on the most quixotic of his undertakings, an expedition to redress the wrongs of Ireland. He spoke at meetings, wrote ‘An Address to the Irish People’ (1812) and ‘Proposals for an Association for the Regeneration of Ireland,’ and in April departed for Wales, leaving things as he had found them. About this time he adopted the vegetarian system of diet, to which he adhered with more or less constancy when in England, but seems to have generally discarded when abroad. He spent the early summer at his old haunt of Cwm Elan, and by the end of June was settled at Lynmouth in North Devon, where he wrote his powerful remonstrance with Lord Ellenborough on the condemnation of Daniel Isaac Eaton for publishing the third part of Paine's ‘Age of Reason’ (Barnstaple, 1812, 8vo). He excited the attention of government by sending a revolutionary ‘Declaration of Rights’ [Dublin, 1812], and his poem ‘The Devil's Walk’ (a broadsheet, of which the only known copy is in the Public Record Office) to sea in boxes and bottles. Finding it advisable to disappear, he took refuge at Tanyrallt, a house near Tremadoc in North Wales, where his landlord, Mr. Madocks, M.P. for Boston, was constructing the embankment which, at a great sacrifice of natural picturesqueness, has redeemed from the sea the estuary of the Glaslyn. The work was battered by storms, and its financial situation was precarious. Shelley hurried up to London to raise money on its behalf, and there made the personal acquaintance of Godwin, who had previously come down to visit him at Lynmouth, and ‘found only that he was not to be found.’ His residence at Tanyrallt was terminated by a mysterious occurrence in the following February, which he represented as the attack of an assassin, but which was in all probability an hallucination. He sought refuge in Ireland with his family, which had for some time included Harriet's elder sister Eliza, an addition pernicious to his domestic peace. Leaving her at Killarney ‘with plenty of books but no money,’ Shelley and Harriet travelled up to London, where on 28 June 1813, their daughter Ianthe (afterwards Mrs. Esdaile, d. 1876) was born. By the end of July they had taken a house at Bracknell in Berkshire, near Windsor Forest. ‘Queen Mab,’ principally written, as would seem, in 1812, was privately printed about this time (‘Queen Mab: A Philosophical Poem,’ London, 1813, 8vo), with notes that might very well have been spared, including ‘a vindication of natural diet’ (the ‘Vindication’ was separately printed London, 1813, 8vo, but is excessively rare). It remained unknown until a piratical reproduction of it in 1821 (which Shelley vainly endeavoured to suppress by an injunction) excited attention, and it obtained a celebrity long denied to his maturer and more truly poetical writings. It is indeed admirably adapted to serve as a freethinking and socialistic gospel, being couched in a strain of rhetoric so exalted as to pass easily for poetry. Early in 1814 he published anonymously an ironical ‘Refutation of Deism’ in a dialogue (London, 8vo), perhaps the rarest of his writings; it was, however, reprinted in 1815 in the ‘Theological Inquirer.’

Shelley was now on the eve of the great crisis of his life, his separation from Harriet. So late as September 1813 he speaks of their ‘close-woven happiness.’ But radical incompatibility of temperament had already laid the foundation of an estrangement. Hogg, writing of January 1814, says: ‘The good