With a more sympathetic
and acuter intelligence of her case, Leigh Hunt insisted (July 1819)
that she should try and give her paralysing sorrow some literary
expression, 'strike her pen into some... genial subject... and bring
up a fountain of gentle tears for us'. But the poor childless mother
could only rehearse her complaint--'to have won, and thus cruelly to
have lost' (4 August 1819). In fact she had, on William's death,
discontinued her diary.
Yet on the date just mentioned, as Shelley reached his twenty-seven
years, she plucked up courage and resumed the task. Shelley, however
absorbed by the creative ardour of his _Annus mirabilis_, could not
but observe that his wife's 'spirits continued wretchedly depressed'
(5 August 1819); and though masculine enough to resent the fact at
times more than pity it, he was human enough to persevere in that
habit of co-operative reading and writing which is one of the finest
traits of his married life. 'I write in the morning,' his wife
testifies, 'read Latin till 2, when we dine; then I read some English
book, and two cantos of Dante with Shelley [Footnote: Letter to Mrs.
Hunt, 28 August 1819.]--a fair average, no doubt, of the homely aspect
of the great days which produced _The Cenci_ and _Prometheus_.
On the 12th November, in Florence, the birth of a second son, Percy
Florence Shelley, helped Mary out of her sense of bereavement.
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