‘The chill rain is falling, the nipt worm is crawling, The rivers are swelling, the thunder is knelling; For the year; The blithe swallows are flown, and the lizards each gone To his dwelling. Come, months, come away; Put on white, black, and gray; Let your light sisters play— Ye, follow the bier Of the dead cold year, And make her grave green with tear on tear.’ In a frenzied mood he breaks forth into wildness: ‘She is still, she is cold On the bridal couch; One step to the white deathbed, And one to the bier, And one to the charnel—and one, O, where? The dark arrow fled In the noon. Ere the sun through heaven once more has roll’d, The rats in her heart Will have made their nest, And the worms be alive in her golden hair; While the spirit that guides the sun Sits throned in his flaming chair, She shall sleep.’ There is no doubt that these and a hundred other similar passages allude to the death of his first wife; as melancholy a story as ever shivered the nerves of an excitable being. The facts are hardly known to us, but they are something like these: In very early youth Shelley had formed a half-fanciful attachment to a cousin, a Miss Harriet Grove, who is said to have been attractive, and to whom, certainly, his fancy often went back in later and distant years. How deep the feeling was on either side we do not know; she seems to have taken an interest in the hot singular dreams which occupied his mind—except only where her image might intrude—from which one might conjecture that she took unusual interest in him; she even wrote some chapters, or parts of some, in one of his boyish novels, and her parents doubtless thought the ‘Rosicrucian’ could be endured, as Shelley was the heir to land and a baronetcy. His expulsion from Oxford altered all this. Probably he had always among his friends been thought ‘a singular young man,’ and they had waited in perplexity to see if the oddness would turn to unusual good or unusual evil. His atheistic treatise and its results seemed to show clearly the latter, and all communication with Miss Grove was instantly forbidden him. What she felt on the subject is not told us; probably some theistic and undreaming lover intervened, for she married in a short time. The despair of an excitable poet at being deprived of his mistress at the same moment that he was abandoned by his family, and in a measure by society, may be fancied, though it cannot be known. Captain Medwin observes: ‘Shelley, on this trying occasion, had the courage to live, in order that he might labour for one great object—the advancement of the human race, and the amelioration of society; and strengthened himself in a resolution to devote his energies to this ultimate end, being prepared to endure every