Covering passages of wretchedness, that came to him from grief for his first wife’s fate, and from his rage against the Lord Chancellor, Shelley’s time at Marlow covered, also, some of the happiest weeks and months of his existence,--weeks and months of exciting literary labour; days spent agreeably with his wife’s father; and days passed, with livelier contentment, in the society of Peacock, Hogg, and the Hunts. Now on the water, and now on foot, he took much exercise in the open air. Sometimes by himself and sometimes with his younger friends, he walked to and fro between Marlow and London. In their pedestrian excursions to London (thirty-two miles distant from the Buckinghamshire village), it was usual for Peacock and Shelley to march to town in the day, stay two nights in the capital, and march back on the third day. Holding little intercourse with his immediate neighbours of his own degree (who, no doubt, gossiped much, and pumped Mr. Furnivall, the surgeon, with small result, about the ladies and babies of the poetical household), he received visitors from a distance, together with two or three of the Marlow residents, and altogether led a more sociable life than at Bishopgate. His time at Marlow was also a time of great literary productiveness. In it he threw off the Marlow Pamphlets, (_a_) _A Proposal for putting Reform to the Vote throughout the Kingdom_, and (_b_) _An Address to the People on the Death of the Princess Charlotte_, and published the _History of a Six Weeks’ Tour_--the book that gave Claire her place in the record of English literature as Shelley’s and Mrs. Shelley’s sister. It was also the period in which he wrote _Laon and Cythna, or the Revolution of the Golden City: A Vision of the Nineteenth Century_. _In the Stanza of Spenser_; wrote the fragmentary _Prince Athanase_, and began _Rosalind and Helen_, the modern eclogue, which he finished in the summer of the following year (1818) at the baths of Lucca,--the three poems which, telling us so much of the poet’s romantic view of his own character and career, are so rich in the poetical egotisms, which have been so often handled as though they were reliable passages of unimaginative biography. In studying the last-named of these poems, the reader will not fail to detect Shelley in Lionel (the name under which the poet figures in _The Boat on the Serchio_), Claire in Rosalind, and Mrs. Shelley in Helen, who says of her lost Lionel,-- ‘To Lionel, Though of great wealth and lineage high, Yet through those dungeon walls there came Thy thrilling light, O liberty! And as the meteor’s midnight flame Startles the dreamer, sun-like truth Flashed on his visionary youth, And filled him, not with love, but faith, And hope, and courage mute in death; For love and life in him were twins, Born at one birth.’