Admiring her from the first hour of their brief association for an appearance, that combined in so peculiar and piquant a manner the loveliness of youth and age, he delighted in the winning sweetness of her voice, and discovered in her conversation and mien the charms of intellectual subtlety and moral elevation. Concurring with him on the several religious and social questions, that were holding his attention, she exulted in his song no less frankly than he exulted in her beauty. It is no exaggeration to say that the stripling, who still wanted several months of his majority, was platonically enamoured of the woman with snow-white hair and girlish face, whose years cannot have been much under fifty. Pouring into her sympathetic ear the long and stirring tale of his multifarious domestic distresses, he consulted her on nice questions of poetry and metaphysical science, and never conferred with her on such matters without discovering new reasons for admiring the subtlety and self-dependence of her intellect; though it is conceivable that, when he was most deeply impressed by her mental acuteness and originality, she was only returning to him the thoughts that had come to her from his lips on the previous evening. Nor was Maimuna the only influence that rendered her house far more agreeable to the youthful poet than his comfortless lodgings in Half-Moon Street, where Eliza became more and more distasteful to her brother-in-law, and Harriett less shapely and beautiful. For the charming and highly sentimental Mrs. Boinville had a scarcely less charming and sentimental sister, as well as a daughter who, without possessing all her mother’s excellencies, was not unworthy of so fascinating a parent. In adorative tenderness for Percy, the youngest of these three ladies seems to have surpassed her aunt and equalled Mrs. Boinville. It was she who discovered that, seen from the pavement below, whilst sitting book-in-hand at the little projecting window of the Half-Moon Street drawing-room, Percy would have looked ‘like some young lady’s lark, hanging outside for air and song,’ had he only been provided with ‘a pan of clear water and a fresh turf.’ Surely the lady who discovered this resemblance must have been the author of the happy thought, that Shelley had the appearance of a moss-rose still drenched by the tears of heaven.