Page:In defense of Harriet Shelley, and other essays.djvu/50

 MARK TWAIN

going bag and baggage over to Cornelia Turner and supplying the rest of his need in the way of surplus sympathy and intellectual pie unlawfully. By the same reasoning a man in merely comfortable circum stances may rob a bank without sin.

Ill

IT is 1814, it is the i6th of March, Shelley had written his letter, he has been in the Boinville paradise a month, his deserted wife is in her hus- bandless home. Mischief has been wrought. It is the biographer who concedes this. We greatly need some light on Harriet s side of the case now; we need to know how she enjoyed the month, but there is no way to inform ourselves; there seems to be a strange absence of documents and letters and diaries on that side. Shelley kept a diary, the approaching Mary Godwin kept a diary, her father kept one, her half-sister by marriage, adoption, and the dispensa tion of God kept one, and the entire tribe and all its friends wrote and received letters, and the letters were kept and are producible when this biography needs them; but there are only three or four scraps of Harriet s writing, and no diary. Harriet wrote plenty of letters to her husband nobody knows where they are, I suppose; she wrote plenty of letters to other people apparently they have dis appeared, too. Peacock says she wrote good letters, but apparently interested people had sagacity enough to mislay them in time. After all her industry she went down into her grave and lies silent there

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