Thought lost forever, And woe, and woe, for me: They were the saddest days, the saddest, That he has yet known O thou who never knewest All these things were to be. The man, my love, whose love was more Than mine for him or you, He said there was an end to all The stories ever told, And he, who knew no sorrow, Was of our sorrow fain, And woe, and woe, for me: They were the saddest days, the saddest, That he has yet known. And then his memory awoke In a still sadder tale, And all that I had seen with him When first I saw him smile, When first we rode together The summer through, For me and him and you, For me and him and you. O I know not what will happen, I can only dream, That you are in the hands of them Who know him, or who knew, That you are loved, and only The shadows come and go And he, and he, for me: They were the saddest days, the saddest, That he has yet known. A good poem, and an extremely touching. I wish we had never made his acquaintance at all, although I shall never forget his kindness to us when we first met. I am still sore for him because I shall never meet him again." Shelley's letter (1851): St. Leonards, May 8th. 1851. My dear Harriet, - The day of my release being here at last, and the dear ladies to whom I have so long owed the greatest debt of all men, wishing it to be acknowledged at once, permit me at last to present this trifling document as a sort of receipt in full, and as a solemn security that no other obligation of a pecuniary nature shall ever be acknowledged or considered binding upon me; although my debt may seem immense, all I can say is, that it was unavoidable. I am ashamed to think of the amount you at first lent me in a few weeks - £500. I know my eyes, at that time, were more in danger of their eyes than of my feet. But my father is dead and has made some little provision for me, so all difficulties are removed for the future, and at this time of rest and liberty I feel myself truly grateful, and most grateful for all your dear sympathy and kind wishes at a moment when I despaired even of a single kind word. Believe me ever, my dearest Harriet, most truly yours, E. B. B. The story told by Mr. Ollier, the gentleman of St. Petersburg who gave Shelley the information. A young man and his friend were talking about life, and the last-mentioned began to tell a tale in illustration of his views, describing a young man who was riding along on horseback in a sultry day, and who encountered a large frog just as he was about to drown himself; he seized it, threw it on his horse, and placed himself behind it; when his companion asked, 'And what happened?' 'Why, my boy, the frog ran away.' 'I thought so,' returned the companion, 'your life was bound up in that frog.' Shelley in his letters to Godwin refers to Godwin's work on Jurisprudence as a treatise on suicide. But, says John B. Adderley in a review of Shelley's letters: "In his own account of the work, however, Shelley said Godwin "wisely rejected all those arguments which bear upon human nature in its unregulated state, and treats chiefly of man under the restraints and providences of civil law." "If," he says, "no part of human conduct is affected by these restraints, that is a fact of much deeper importance than the law of self-defence." And then he continues, "What he says of life in general is very true, that 'our life, such as it is, and all its enjoyments, are soiled, like every thing else; and our death cannot be more exempt from blame than those enjoyments themselves' (p. 54)." So, Shelley's opinion of Godwin's Jurisprudence is a "fact of much deeper importance" than the works themselves - to be read not as literature, but as a philosophical analysis. And Godwin's works were thus never to be read by the "young man and his friend" to whom Godwin dedicated the Posthumous Works. Godwin wrote Shelley a letter, on his deathbed, that he had "displeased" him, and that he had "lost" him. Godwin continued, in his letter, to speak of Shelley as being one who had "lost his soul" - that is to say, he had destroyed his soul. I am not aware that these two comments of Godwin's can be explained away. The man whom Shelley met with such cordiality in 1851 was Mr. William Rossetti, then the agent for Lady Shelley, who took the letters to him. "I do not know that I should ever be able to write about him in any way. If he could have been living he would have understood my sympathy with him and the love for him which was ever present in my heart. He had qualities which were beyond analysis, and which I could not explain. He would have loved me had he lived. His mind was of the highest order, although by nature it was not so refined. You will recollect he never read, and therefore he could not know Shelley. "One instance of his eccentricities is very remarkable. He had just given up the management of his affairs, on account of his having written a book against suicide, called An Essay on the Permanence of Life. He said that a certain individual had persuaded him that he had not done his duty in allowing Shelley to destroy himself; that he was now going to give up the management of his affairs, which he had recently left, and that he would go to a place from which he could be better hidden from the world than by living, and that he was going to do this on the anniversary of Shelley's suicide, and that he was going to commit suicide at the same time. "The poor man had been drinking, and was much excited. I tried to argue him out of his idea. "He said, 'The man who wrote An Essay on the Permanence of Life is trying to keep me from writing that book. I am now going to write it in his memory, and also in honour of my friend Shelley, as he died a victim of his enemies, in consequence of the ill-naturedness and the falsehoods which were published of him; but he had qualities which would have placed him on a pedestal if he had lived.'" * * * "If it was not so sad, the story of the death of Shelley would be worthy to be written as an epic. You will remember that a man whom he had treated with great kindness and consideration from his youth up took advantage of his good nature, and persuaded him to live with his wife at Pisa, and she kept him a prisoner all through his last days. The man, I am told, was the most disagreeable and vulgar of mortals. So much for the opinions of Shelley and his 'friend.' "What will be the truth of his works when they are published, after those who survive him have lost the power of enjoying them?" By now it was the beginning of 1855, and Shelley had been dead for five months. But he had never ceased to haunt John Adderley, who had remained so much under Shelley's influence that he had fallen out with his first wife. He had been writing a series of articles about Shelley for the London Quarterly, the periodical that Mr. Quillinan had sold, but which was now in Mr. Quillinan's hands again. He had left England with the idea of being able to bring out a new edition of Shelley's works that would allow him to make it clear that Shelley was not one of those "irrational" writers who had perished in the Napoleonic wars - men who had "lost their souls". Quillinan wrote to Shelley's publishers at that time to request permission to have the copyright of Shelley's writings returned to him. When this was refused, Quillinan wrote: The publication of the Shelley papers has afforded me an opportunity of giving some account of the life of the author of "Queen Mab" and "Prometheus" and of his relations with Percy Bysshe Shelley, which I trust may be of service to some who are deeply interested in the history of his last years, and may throw some light upon his relations with his second wife and his child. He would have been gratified by the circumstance that the work was published by the same publishing firm who hold his copyright. In the summer of 1855, Quillinan received an offer from Shelley's publishers that they would be prepared to make an arrangement with him by which he could receive half the profits arising from the works of Shelley, to be made available for a life annuity of £500, and half for his heirs. However