Mary W. Shelley - Page 2

ventured into the woods outside of
hallooing distance from the house. He could neither ride a horse, shoot,
nor sail a boat--and being well aware of it, never tried. All his farming
was done by proxy; and when he writes to Carlyle late in life, explaining
how he is worth forty thousand dollars, well secured by first mortgages,
he makes clear one-half of his ambition.

And yet, I call him master, and will match my admiration for him 'gainst
that of any other, six nights and days together. But I summon him here
only to contrast his character with that of another--another who, like
himself, was twice married.

In his "Essay on Love" Emerson reveals just an average sophomore insight;
and in his work I do not find a mention or a trace of influence exercised
by either of the two women he wedded, nor by any other woman. Shelley was
what he was through the influence of the two women he married.

Shelley wrecked the life of one of these women. She found surcease of
sorrow in death; and when her body was found in the Serpentine he had a
premonition that the hungry waves were waiting for him, too. But before
her death and through her death, she pressed home to him the bitterest
sorrow that man can ever know: the combined knowledge that he has mortally
injured a human soul and the sense of helplessness to minister to its
needs. Harriet Westbrook said to Shelley, drink ye all of it. And could he
speak now he would say that the bitterness of the potion was a formative
influence as potent as that of the gentle ministrations of Mary
Wollstonecraft, who broke over his head the precious vase of her heart's
love and wiped his feet with the hairs of her head.

In the poetic sweetness, gentleness, lovableness and beauty of their
natures, Emerson and Shelley were very similar. In a like environment they
would have done the same things. A pioneer ancestry with its struggle for
material existence would have given Shelley caution; and a noble
patronymic, fostered by the State, lax in its discipline, would have made
Emerson toss discretion to the winds.

Emerson and Shelley were both apostles of the good, the true and the
beautiful. One of them rests at Sleepy Hollow, his grave marked by a great
rough-hewn boulder, while overhead the winds sigh a requiem through the
pines. The ashes of the other were laid beneath the moss-grown wall of the
Eternal City, and the creeping vines and flowers, as if jealous of the
white, carven marble, snuggle close over the spot with their leaves and
petals.

Yet both of these men achieved immortality, for their thoughts live again
in the thoughts of the race, and their hopes and their aspirations mingle
and are one with the men and women of earth who think and feel and