Page:In defense of Harriet Shelley, and other essays.djvu/58

 MARK TWAIN

But without doubt she had been reserving her looks of love a good part of the time for ten months, now ever since he began to lavish his own on Cor nelia Turner at the end of the previous July. He does really seem to have already forgotten Cornelia s merits in one brief month, for he eulogizes Harriet in a way which rules all competition out:

Thou only virtuous, gentle, kind, Amid a world of hate.

He complains of her hardness, and begs her to make the concession of a &quot;slight endurance&quot; of his waywardness, perhaps for the sake of &quot;a fellow-being s lasting weal.&quot; But the main force of his appeal is in his closing stanza, and is strongly

worded :

O trust for once no erring guide!

Bid the remorseless feeling flee; Tis malice, tis revenge, tis pride,

Tis anything but thee; O deign a nobler pride to prove, And pity if thou canst not love.

This is in May apparently toward the end of it. Harriet and Shelley were corresponding all the time. Harriet got the poem a copy exists in her own handwriting; she being the only gentle and kind person amid a world of hate, according to Shelley s own testimony in the poem, we are permitted to think that the daily letters would presently have melted that kind and gentle heart and brought about the reconciliation, if there had been time but there wasn t; for in a very few days in fact, before the 8th of June Shelley was in love with another woman,

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