“Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley, with her well-shaped, golden-haired head, almost always a little bent and drooping; her marble-white shoulders and arms statuesquely visible in the perfectly plain black velvet dress, which the customs of that time allowed to be cut low, and which her own taste adopted; ... her thoughtful, earnest eyes; her short upper lip and intellectually curved mouth, with a certain close compressed and decisive expression while she listened, and a relaxation into fuller redness and mobility when speaking; her exquisitely formed, white, dimpled, small hands, with rosy palms, and plumply commencing fingers, that tapered into tips as slender and delicate as those in a Vandyck portrait,--all remain palpably present to memory.”--About 1824. [Sidenote: _The Cornhill_, 1875.] “Shelley’s second love, who was five years his junior, is described as ‘rather short, remarkably fair, and light-haired with brownish gray eyes, a great forehead, striking features, and a noticeable air of sedateness.’ One writer has compared her with the classic bust of Clytie.” PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 1792-1822 [Sidenote: Stoddard’s _Anecdote Biography of Percy Bysshe Shelley_.] “As I felt in truth but a slight interest in the subject of his conversation, I had leisure to examine, and, I may add, admire the appearance of my very extraordinary guest. It was a sum of many contradictions. His figure was slight and fragile, and yet his bones and joints were large and strong. He was tall, but he stooped so much that he seemed of a low stature. His clothes were expensive, and made according to the most approved mode of the day; but they were tumbled, rumpled, unbrushed. His gestures were abrupt and sometimes violent, occasionally even awkward. His complexion was delicate and almost feminine, of the purest red and white; yet he was tanned and freckled by exposure to the sun, having passed the autumn, as he said, in shooting. His features, his whole face, and particularly his head, were, in fact, unusually small; yet the last _appeared_ of a remarkable bulk, for his hair was long and bushy, and in fits of absence, and in the agonies (if I may use the word) of anxious thought, he often rubbed it fiercely with his hands, or passed his fingers quickly through his locks unconsciously, so that it was singularly wild and rough. In times when it was the mode to imitate stage-coachmen as closely as possible in costume, and when the hair was invariably cropped, like that of our soldiers, this eccentricity was very striking. His features were not symmetrical (the mouth, perhaps, excepted), yet was the effect of the whole extremely powerful. They breathed an animation, a fire, an enthusiasm, a vivid and preternatural intelligence, that I never met with in any other countenance.”--1810. [Sidenote: The Cowden Clarke’s _Recollections of Writers_.]