‘I am perfectly happy. After so much discontent, such violent scenes, such a turmoil of passion and hatred, you will hardly believe how enraptured I am with this dear, quiet little spot. I am as happy when I go to bed as when I rise. I am never disappointed, for I know the extent of my pleasures.’
Clearly the sisters-by-affinity had spoken smartly to one another before parting ‘for ever,’--a ‘for ever’ that fell considerably short of twelve months. At sweet seventeen the mutual resentments of two quick-tempered sisters blow over and leave no heart-burnings behind them. It would be ill for our homes were it otherwise. What would become of us were English girls so incapable, as Mr. Froude imagines them to be, of ‘making it up’ and ‘beginning again’ when they have had a smart tiff? It was all in the ordinary course of human nature that in the ensuing spring Claire and Mary were animated by ‘mutual affection, glowing with the impetuosity of girlish romance.’
Much as they delighted in their new home, Shelley and Miss Godwin needed the diversion of visiting scenes, even more alluring to lovers of nature than the glades of Windsor and the rich landscapes of the surrounding country. Besides making a tour along the coast of south Devon, and staying at Clifton during the summer, they went, at the end of August, with Peacock and Charles Clairmont, by the Thames to Lechlade in Gloucestershire, the river-trip mentioned in a previous chapter. Returning in September, 1815, to Bishopgate for the enjoyment of the autumnal colouring of the forest, Shelley may be supposed to have spent the happiest hours of his existence whilst meditating _Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude_, under the oaks of the Great Park,--the poem that was almost as great an advance from _Queen Mab_ as the _Queen_ was in advance of his previous poetry. The first of his supremely great works--a poem that, had he lived to produce nothing greater, would, by itself, have given him a place amongst the poets who never die--_Alastor_, was published in an early (if not the earliest) month of 1816, together with the stanzas to Coleridge, the April-1814 stanzas (from which so many futile efforts have been made to extort evidence touching the causes of his defection from Harriett); the verses on Mutability, the lines on the verse from Ecclesiastes, the Lechlade verses, the sonnet to Wordsworth, the sonnet on the Fall of Bonaparte, the lines taken from _Queen Mab_ on Religion (styled _Superstition_ in the reprint, for security’s sake), the sonnet from Dante’s Italian, the revised fragments of _Queen Mab_, styled _The Demon of the World_, and the translation from Moschus,--the last-mentioned item of the miscellany being one of the reasons why successive Shelleyan biographers and editors have ante-dated the unfinished _Essay on Christianity_ by five or six years.