"In many mortal forms I rashly sought The shadow of that idol of my thought: And some were fair,--but beauty dies away; Others were wise,--but honeyed words betray; And one was true,--oh! why not true to me? Then, as a hunted deer that could not flee, I turned upon my thoughts and stood at bay." "Oh! why not true to me?" has been taken by some very few who were cognizant of the facts as constituting an imputation on the one whom he first married; but I am convinced that the interpretation is wrong, although the surmise on which that interpretation is based was partly correct. Nothing is more evident than the fact that Harriet possessed rather an unusual degree of ability, but enormously less than Shelley desired in the being whom he sought, and equally less than his idealizing estimate originally ascribed to her. It is also plain, from her own letters, that she courted his approval in a way far too common with the wives of the artist-tribe, and perhaps with most wives: not being exactly what he wished her to be, and lacking the faculties to become so, she tried to seem it. The desire was partly sincere, partly an affectation, as we discern in such little trifles as her suddenly using the word "thou" in a letter to Hookham where she had previously been using the ordinary colloquial "you." That she was not quite ingenuous we also detect in the fast-and-loose conduct which enabled her, while affecting to become what Shelley deemed her to be, also to play into the hands of very inferior people, who must sometimes have counselled her against him behind his back; and this, I am sure, is what he means by "Oh! why not true to me?" though he may include in the question a fervent regret for the fate which attended her wandering from him. "Then like a hunted deer he turned upon his thoughts and stood at bay," until "The cold day Trembled, for pity of my strife and pain, When, like a noonday dawn, there shone again Deliverance. One stood on my path who seemed As like the glorious shape that I had dreamed As is the Moon, whose changes ever run Into themselves, to the eternal Sun." "The cold chaste moon" fails to satisfy the longing of his soul. "At her silver voice came death and life"; hope and despondency, expectation from her noble qualities, disappointment at the failure of response, were feelings that sprang from the exaggerations of his ideal longings. "What storms then shook the ocean of my sleep, Blotting that Moon whose pale and waning lips Then shrank as in the sickness of eclipse!" The whole passage is worth perusing; and again wrong interpretation has been given to this portion of his writing. I am still more firmly convinced that in the other case, when he says, "The planet of that hour was quenched," he alludes to nothing more than the partial failure of his own ideal requirements. At length into the obscure forest came "The vision I had sought through grief and shame.