The story of the two years and nine months during which Shelley lived with Harriet must seem insane to a rational mind. Life was one comfortless picnic. When Shelley wanted food, he would dart into a shop and buy a loaf or a handful of raisins. Always accompanied by Eliza, they changed their dwelling-place more than twelve times. Edinburgh, York, Keswick, Dublin, Nantgwillt, Lynmouth, Tremadoc, Tanyrallt, Killarney, London (Half Moon Street and Pimlico), Bracknell, Edinburgh again, and Windsor, successively received this fantastic household. Each fresh house was the one where they were to abide for ever, and each formed the base of operations for some new scheme of comprehensive beneficence. Thus at Tremadoc, on the Welsh coast, Shelley embarked on the construction of an embankment to reclaim a drowned tract of land; 'Queen Mab' was written partly in Devonshire and partly in Wales; and from Ireland, where he had gone to regenerate the country, he opened correspondence with William Godwin, the philosopher and author of 'Political Justice'. His energy in entering upon ecstatic personal relations was as great as that which he threw into philanthropic schemes; but the relations, like the schemes, were formed with no notion of adapting means to ends, and were often dropped as hurriedly. Eliza Westbrook, at first a woman of estimable qualities, quickly became "a blind and loathsome worm that cannot see to sting", Miss Hitchener, who had been induced to give up her school and come to live with them "for ever," was discovered to be a "brown demon," and had to be pensioned off. He loved his wife for a time, but they drifted apart, and he found consolation in a sentimental attachment to a Mrs. Boinville and her daughter, Cornelia Turner, ladies who read Italian poetry with him and sang to guitars. Harriet had borne him a daughter, Ianthe, but she herself was a child, who soon wearied of philosophy and of being taught Latin; naturally she wanted fine clothes, fashion, a settlement. Egged on by her sister, she spent on plate and a carriage the money that Shelley would have squandered on humanity at large. Money difficulties and negotiations with his father were the background of all this period. On March 24, 1814, he married Harriet in church, to settle any possible question as to the legitimacy of his children; but they parted soon after. Attempts were made at reconciliation, which might have succeeded had not Shelley during this summer drifted into a serious and relatively permanent passion. He made financial provision for his wife, who gave birth to a second child, a boy, on November 30, 1814; but, as the months passed, and Shelley was irrevocably bound to another, she lost heart for life in the dreariness of her father's house. An Irish officer took her for his mistress, and on December 10, 1816, she was found drowned in the Serpentine. Twenty days later Shelley married his second wife.