Much romantic and sensational stuff has been written of the anguish that came to Shelley from Lord Eldon’s barbarity. It has been told again and again how these interesting babes were torn from his breast. As he had left the elder of them of his own accord, when he left her mother, and was content to let them remain in Chapel Street after losing sight of their mother, they can scarcely be said to have been _torn from_ his breast. Such writing (like the story of his going clean mad from grief for Harriett) may go for what it is worth, whilst judicious readers are content to allow, that Shelley must have been acutely mortified and incensed by a judgment affecting his honour so darkly and deeply, and that he probably mistook for torture of wounded affection, what was only sharp chagrin at an humiliating misadventure. Some of the sensational writers give curious reasons for thinking Shelley suffered unimaginable anguish from the violence done to his parental feelings. For instance, Hunt is sure that Shelley suffered inordinately from the loss of the children because, after the subsidence of his first violent agitation at the Chancellor’s cruelty, he _never spoke about them_. That Byron was no more insincere in gushing to the whole world about the Ada be might not look upon, than Shelley was in writing _The Billows on the Beach_, is a matter admitting of proof. This poem ‘To William Shelley’ has been used by successive writers as sure evidence that, in leaving England in 1818 with his family, Shelley was mainly moved by a desire to carry his children beyond the reach of Lord Eldon, whom he suspected of a design to tear them from him. Dealing with this poem, as Lady Shelley deals with the poet’s imaginary reminiscences of his boyhood in _Laon and Cythna_, what do we learn from it? That the poet carried his son William across the sea, when the sky was black and the wind boisterous; that he carried the boy over the stormy water, in order that the servants of the Court of Chancery should not tear them asunder; that the Court of Chancery had already taken from the boy a brother and sister who were known and dear to him; that Mrs. Shelley and her little girl were companions of this voyage over a wind-swept sea; that little William was alarmed at the rocking of the boat, and the cold spray, and the wild clamour; that the poet and his wife had reason to think the storm, with all its dark and hungry billows, less cruel than the Court of Chancery, and to regard themselves as flying from merciless agents of that Court; that little William was old enough to be likely to hold in remembrance the flight over the stormy sea; that, though perhaps not old enough to apprehend the meaning of the written verses, he was at least old enough to comprehend their sentiment when put in language, adapted to the understanding of a young child. It is, no doubt, very absurd to read a poem in this way, and reduce its figurative expressions into bald statement.