Shelley and Mary seem to have been very happy with each other from the first, although they felt the keenest sorrow at his being deprived by the Court of Chancery of the guardianship of his children, on the alleged grounds of his atheism, and although they were inexpressibly pained and shocked at the suicide of Harriet, which occurred about two years after the separation. Her death seems to have had no immediate connection with any act of Shelley's, but he mourned over it with great bitterness to the end of his life. He married Mary in a legal manner soon after Harriet's death, and of course a most violent storm of detraction and denunciation burst upon his head. He soon retired to Italy, where he first met Byron, and he passed nearly all the rest of his life there. Poor Harriet was only twenty-two at the time of her tragic death. Whatever may have been the errors of her life, she had suffered much in their expiation. After her return to her father's house it appears that she was treated with unkindness, and fell into some irregularities of life,--how great, remains still a disputed point. But no one charges anything against her up to the time of her separation from Shelley, except that she was almost as foolish and impracticable as himself. Shelley's fancy for her was that of a mere boy, and his friend Mr. Peacock thus describes the conflict of his feelings after meeting Mary Godwin:-- "Between his old feelings towards Harriet, from whom he was not then separated, and his new passion for Mary, he showed in his looks, in his gestures, in his speech, the state of a mind suffering, like a little kingdom, the nature of an insurrection. His eyes were bloodshot, his hair and dress disordered. He frequently repeated the lines from Sophocles,-- 'Man's happiest lot is not to be; And when we tread life's thorny steep, Most blest are they who, earliest free, Descend to death's eternal sleep.'"