“Dearest when most thy tender traits express
The image of thy mother's loveliness.”
Up to this point the fabulist counsel for Shelley and prosecutor of his
young wife has had easy sailing, but now his trouble begins, for Shelley
is getting ready to make some unpleasant history for himself, and it
will be necessary to put the blame of it on the wife.
Shelley had made the acquaintance of a charming gray-haired,
young-hearted Mrs. Boinville, whose face “retained a certain youthful
beauty”; she lived at Bracknell, and had a young daughter named Cornelia
Turner, who was equipped with many fascinations. Apparently these people
were sufficiently sentimental. Hogg says of Mrs. Boinville:
“The greater part of her associates were odious. I generally
found there two or three sentimental young butchers, an
eminently philosophical tinker, and several very
unsophisticated medical practitioners or medical students, all
of low origin and vulgar and offensive manners. They sighed,
turned up their eyes, retailed philosophy, such as it was,”
etc.
Shelley moved to Bracknell, July 27th (this is still 1813) purposely to
be near this unwholesome prairie-dogs' nest. The fabulist says: “It was
the entrance into a world more amiable and exquisite than he had yet
known.”
“In this acquaintance the attraction was mutual”--and presently it grew
to be very mutual indeed, between Shelley and Cornelia Turner, when they
got to studying the Italian poets together. Shelley, “responding like
a tremulous instrument to every breath of passion or of sentiment,” had
his chance here. It took only four days for Cornelia's attractions to
begin to dim Harriet's. Shelley arrived on the 27th of July; on the 31st
he wrote a sonnet to Harriet in which “one detects already the little
rift in the lover's lute which had seemed to be healed or never to
have gaped at all when the later and happier sonnet to Ianthe was
written”--in September, we remember: