The most agreeable aspect of Shelley’s life at Tanyrallt affords a view of his intercourse with his wife. As she gave birth to Shelley’s eldest child, Ianthe Eliza, in London, on 28th June, 1813, Harriett, at the turn of the year 1812-13, had for some time been in a state of health, to animate Shelley with a renewal of tenderness for her, and to quicken their mutual affection. Stirred with the hope of becoming a father in the ensuing summer, the poet who had longed at Dublin and Nantgwillt for the delights of conversation with his philosophical school-mistress, now found in his wife the sufficient mate she had not been to him either in Ireland or at Keswick. Possibly his discovery of a Brown Demon in the whilom angelical Miss Hitchener was, in some degree, accountable for his contentment with the wife who promised soon to give him an heir. Anyhow there can be no question that the moderate satisfaction with which he may be said to have regarded his bride for several months after the subsidence of the first excitements of the honeymoon, was now replaced by a state of feeling that caused him to write of her with mingled pride and gladness. The letter in which, whilst defending her from the imputation of being ‘a fine lady,’ he spoke admiringly of ‘the uncalculating connexion of her thoughts and speech,’ was dated to Fanny Imlay on 10th December, 1812. In a letter of later date, referring to his unconcern whether he came to terms with his father, he associates Harriett’s happiness with his own contentment;--‘Harriett is very happy as we are, and I am very happy.’ Though he writes complainingly in a yet later letter (7th February, 1813) of vexation coming to him from ‘the embankment affair,’ he speaks of his home as a place where he forgets the annoyance, and knows nought but joy in Harriett’s society;--‘for when I come home to Harriett I am the happiest of the happy.’ Whilst reading Greek classics with the help of ‘cribs,’ he is teaching Harriett Latin so as to give her a general notion of Horace’s _Odes_ and Ovid’s _Metamorphoses_. ‘Harriett,’ he writes to Hogg on the 7th February, 1813, ‘has a bold scheme of writing you a Latin letter. If you have an Ovid’s _Metamorphoses_, she will thank you to bring it.’