“Thy look of love has power to calm
The stormiest passion of my soul.”
But without doubt she had been reserving her looks of love a good part
of the time for ten months, now--ever since he began to lavish his own
on Cornelia Turner at the end of the previous July. He does really seem
to have already forgotten Cornelia's merits in one brief month, for he
eulogizes Harriet in a way which rules all competition out:
“Thou only virtuous, gentle, kind,
Amid a world of hate.”
He complains of her hardness, and begs her to make the concession of
a “slight endurance”--of his waywardness, perhaps--for the sake of “a
fellow-being's lasting weal.” But the main force of his appeal is in his
closing stanza, and is strongly worded:
“O trust for once no erring guide!
Bid the remorseless feeling flee;
'Tis malice, 'tis revenge, 'tis pride,
'Tis anything but thee;
O deign a nobler pride to prove,
And pity if thou canst not love.”
This is in May--apparently towards the end of it. Harriet and Shelley
were corresponding all the time. Harriet got the poem--a copy exists in
her own handwriting; she being the only gentle and kind person amid a
world of hate, according to Shelley's own testimony in the poem, we are
permitted to think that the daily letters would presently have melted
that kind and gentle heart and brought about the reconciliation, if
there had been time but there wasn't; for in a very few days--in fact,
before the 8th of June--Shelley was in love with another woman.
And so--perhaps while Harriet was walking the floor nights, trying to
get her poem by heart--her husband was doing a fresh one--for the other
girl--Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin--with sentiments like these in it: