Page:In defense of Harriet Shelley, and other essays.djvu/61

 DEFENSE OF HARRIET SHELLEY

end of 1813 and the beginning of 1814, yet he sup plied both of them with love poems of an equal temperature meantime; he loved Mary and Harriet in June, and while getting ready to run off with the one, it is conjectured that he put in his odd time trying to get reconciled to the other; by and by, while still in love with Mary, he will make love to her half-sister by marriage, adoption, and the visita tion of God, through the medium of clandestine letters, and she will answer with letters that are for no eye but his own.

When Shelley encountered Mary Godwin he was looking around for another paradise. He had tastes of his own, and there were features about the God-- win establishment that strongly recommended it. Godwin was an advanced thinker and an able writer. One of his romances is still read, but his philo sophical works, once so esteemed, are out of vogue now; their authority was already declining when Shelley made his acquaintance that is, it was de clining with the public, but not with Shelley. They had been his moral and political Bible, and they were that yet. Shelley the infidel would himself have claimed to be less a work of God than a work of Godwin. Godwin s philosophies had formed his mind and interwoven themselves into it and become a part of its texture; he regarded himself as God win s spiritual son. Godwin was not without self- appreciation; indeed, it may be conjectured that from his point of view the last syllable of his name was surplusage. He lived serene in his lofty world of philosophy, far above the mean interests that

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