The object of my visit

Percy Bysshe Shelley to Mary Shelley.

Bagni di Lucca,
Venice. Sunday morning [26 August, 1818].

My dearest Mary,

We arrived here last night at twelve o'clock, and it is now before breakfast the next morning. I can, of course, tell you nothing of the future, and though I shall not close this letter till post time, yet I do not know exactly when that is. Yet, if you are very impatient, look along the letter and you will see another date, when I may have something to relate.

We came from Padua hither in a gondola, and the gondoliere, among other things, without any hint on my part, began talking of Lord Byron. He said he was a giovinetto Inglese, with a nonie stravagante, who lived very luxuriously, and spent great sums of money. This man, it seems, was one of Lord Byron's gondolieri. No sooner had we arrived at the inn than the waiter began talking about him--said that he frequented Mrs. Hoppner's conversazioni very much.

Our journey from Florence to Padua contained nothing which may not be related another time. At Padua, as I said, we took a gondola, and left it at three o'clock. These gondolas are the most convenient and beautiful boats in the world. They are finely carpeted and furnished with black and painted black. The couches upon which you lean are extraordinarily soft, and are so disposed as to be the most comfortable to those who lean or sit. The windows have at will either Venetian plate-glass flowered, or Venetian blinds, or blinds of black cloth to shut out the light. The weather here is extremely cold; indeed, sometimes very painfully so, and yesterday it began to rain. We passed the Laguna in the middle of the night in a most violent storm of wind, rain and lightning. It was very curious to observe the elements above in a state of such tremendous convulsions, and the surface of the water almost calm; for these lagunas, though five miles broad--a space enough in a storm to sink any gondola--are so shallow that the boatmen drive the boat along with a pole. The sea-water, furiously agitated by the wind, shone with sparkles like stars. Venice, now hidden and now disclosed by the driving rain, shone dimly with its lights. We were all this while safe and comfortable, except that Claire was now and then a little frightened in our cabin.

Well, adieu, dearest : I shall, as Miss Byron says, resume the pen in the evening. . . .

At three o'clock I called on Lord Byron; he was delighted to see me, and our first conversation of course consisted in the object* of my visit. . . .

Well, my dear Mary, this talk went off, for I did not see in that moment how I could urge it further, and I thought that at least many points were gained in the willingness and good humour of our discussion. So he took me in his gondola--much against my will, for I wanted to return to Claire at the Hoppners' --across the Laguna to a long sandy island, which defends Venice from the Adriatic. When we disembarked, we found his horses waiting for us, and we rode along the sands of the sea talking. Our conversation consisted in the history of his wounded feelings, and questions as to my affairs, and great professions of friendship and regard for me. He said that if he had been in England at the time of the chancery affair, he would have moved heaven and earth to have prevented such a decision. We talked of literary matters--his fourth Canto, which he says is very good, and, indeed, repeated some stanzas of great energy to me--when we returned to his palace. . . .

Do you know, dearest, how this letter was written? By scraps and patches, and interrupted every minute. The gondola is now come to take us up to Fusina. Este is a little place, and the house found without difficulty. I shall count four days for this letter : one day for packing, four for coming here, and on the ninth or tenth day we shall meet. I am too late for the post, but I send an express to overtake it. Enclosed is an order for 50/. If you knew all that I had to do!

Dearest love, be well, be happy; come to me, and confide in your own constant and affectionate
P. B. S.

Kiss the blue-eyed darlings for me, and don't let William forget me. Clara cannot recollect me.

[*Percy Bysshe Shelley and Claire travelled to Venice to persuade Byron to allow Claire to take her daughter Allegra. Byron refused, but, believing Mary Shelley and the children to be with them, he permitted the Shelleys and Claire to visit Allegra at his villa in Este. Percy Bysshe Shelley urged Mary to make the journey quickly, and Mary and her children departed for Italy on August 31. They arrived on 5 September. The extraordinary rush to reach Italy had taken its toll on Mary Shelley and her children. Percy and Mary's child Clara Everina died in Venice on September 24 from dysentery.]

-from Selected Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley edited with an introduction by Richard Garnett (London: Kegan and Paul, Trench, & Co., 1882)

Shelley and Florence

Percy Bysshe Shelley to his wife Mary Shelley.

Bagni di Lucca, Florence.

Thursday, 2 o'clock [20 August, 1818].

Dearest Mary,

We have been delayed in this city four hours for the Austrian minister's passport, but are now on the point of setting out with a vetturino, who engages to take us on the third day to Padua, that is, we shall only sleep three nights on the road. Yesterday's journey, performed in a one-horse cabriolet, almost without springs, over a rough road, was excessively fatiguing. Claire suffered most from it, for, as to myself, there are occasions in which fatigue seems a useful medicine, as I have felt no pain in my side-- a most delightful respite--since I left you.

The country was various and exceedingly beautiful. Sometimes there were those low cultivated lands, with their vine festoons, and large bunches of grapes just becoming purple, at others we passed between high mountains, crowned with some of the most majestic Gothic ruins I ever saw, which frowned from the bare precipices, or were half seen among the olive copses. As we approached Florence, the country became cultivated to a very high degree; the plain was filled with the most beautiful villas, and as far as the eye could reach the mountains were covered with them, for the plains are bounded on all sides by blue and misty mountains. The vines are here trailed on low trellises of reeds interwoven into crosses to support them, and the grapes, now almost ripe, are exceedingly abundant. You everywhere meet those teams of beautiful white oxen, which are now labouring the little vine-divided fields with their Virgilian ploughs and carts.

Florence itself, that is the Lung' Arno, for I have seen no more, I think is the most beautiful city I have yet seen. It is surrounded with cultivated hills, and from the bridge which crosses the broad channel of the Arno the view is the most animated and elegant I ever saw. You see three or four bridges apparently supported by Corinthian pillars, and the white sails of the boats, relieved by the deep green of the forest, which comes to the water's edge, and the sloping hills covered with bright villas on every side. Domes and steeples rise on all sides, and fhe cleanliness is remarkably great. On the other side there are the foldings of the vale of Arno above, first the hills of olive and vine, then the chestnut woods, and then the blue and misty pine forests, which invest the aerial Apennines, that fade in the distance. I have seldom seen a city so lovely at first sight as Florence.

We shall travel hence within a few hours, with the speed of the post, since the distance is 190 miles, and we are to do it in three days, besides the half day, which is somewhat more than sixty miles a day. We have now got a comfortable carriage and two mules, and, thanks to Paolo, have made a very decent bargain, comprising everything, to Padua. I should say we had delightful fruit for breakfast--figs, very fine, and peaches, unfortunately gathered before they were ripe, whose smell was like what one fancies of the wakening of paradise flowers.

Well, my dearest Mary, are you very lonely? Tell me truth, my sweetest, do you ever cry ? I shall hear from you once at Venice, and once on my return here. If you love me, you will keep up your spirits, and, at all events, tell me truth about it, for, I assure jou, I am not of a disposition to be flattered by your sorrow, though I should be by your cheerfulness, and, above all, by seeing such fruits of my absence as were produced when we were at Geneva. What acquaintances have you made ? I might have travelled to Padua with a German, who had just come from Rome, and had scarce recovered from a malaria fever, caught in the Pontine Marshes a week or two since; and I conceded to Claire's entreaties, and to your absent suggestions, and omitted the opportunit, although I have no great faith in such species of contagion. It is not very hot, not at all too much so for my sensations, and the only thing that incommodes me are the gnats at night, who roar like so many humming tops in one's ear, and I do not always find zanzariere. How is William and little Clara? They must be kissed for me, and you must particularly remember to speak my name to William, and see that he does not quite forget me before I return. Adieu, my dearest girl, I think that we shall soon meet. I shall write again from Venice. Adieu, dear Mary !

I have been reading the Noble Kinsmen, in which, with the exception of that lovely scene to which you added so much grace in reading to me, I have been disappointed. The jailor's daughter is a poor imitation, and deformed. The whole story wants moral discrimination and modesty. I do not believe Shakespeare wrote a word of it.

-from Selected Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley edited with an introduction by Richard Garnett (London: Kegan and Paul, Trench, & Co., 1882)

The Newly Unfrozen

Percy Bysshe Shelley to Thomas Love Peacock.

Bagni di Lucca, 2 July, 1818.

My dear Peacock,
I received on the same day your letters marked five and six, the one directed to Pisa, and the other to Livorno, and I can assure you they are most welcome visitors. Our life here is as unvaried by any external events as if we were at Marlow, where a sail up the river or a journey to London makes an epoch. Since I last wrote to you, I have ridden over to Lucca, once with Claire, and once alone ; and we have been over to the Casino, where I cannot say there is anything remarkable, the women being far removed from anything which the most liberal annotator could interpret into beauty or grace, and apparently possessing no intellectual excellencies to compensate the deficiency. I assure you it is well that it is so, for these dances, especially the waltz, are so exquisitely beautiful that it would be a little dangerous to the newly unfrozen senses and imaginations of us migrators from the neighbourhood of the Pole. As it is--except in the dark--there could be no peril.

The atmosphere here, unlike that of the rest of Italy, is diversified with clouds, which grow in the middle of the day, and sometimes bring thunder and lightning, and hail about the size of a pigeon's egg, and decrease towards the evening, leaving only those finely woven webs of vapour which we see in English skies, and flocks of fleecy and slowly-moving clouds, which all vanish before sunset ; and the nights are for ever serene, and we see a star in the east at sunset--I think it is Jupiter--almost as fine as Venus was last summer; but it wants a certain silver and aerial radiance, and soft yet piercing splendour, which belongs, I suppose, to the latter planet by virtue of its at once divine and female nature. I have forgotten to ask the ladies if Jupiter produces on them the same effect.

I take great delight in watching the changes of the atmosphere. In the evening Mary and I often take a ride, for horses are cheap in this country. In the middle of the day, I bathe in a pool or fountain, formed in the middle of the forests by a torrent. It is surrounded on all sides by precipitous rocks, and the waterfall of the stream which forms it falls into it on one side with perpetual dashing. Close to it, on the top of the rocks, are alders, and, above, the great chestnut trees, whose long and pointed leaves pierce the deep blue sky in strong relief. The water of this pool, which, to venture an unrhythmical paraphrase, is "sixteen feet long and ten feet wide," is as transparent as the air, so that the stones and sand at the bottom seem, as it were, trembling in the light of noonday. It is exceedingly cold also. My custom is to undress and sit on the rocks, reading Herodotus, until the perspiration has subsided, and then to leap from the edge of the rock into this fountain--a practice in the hot weather exceedingly refreshing. This torrent is composed, as it were, of a succession of pools and waterfalls, up which I sometimes amuse myself by climbing when I bathe, and receiving the spray over all my body, whilst I clamber up the moist crags with difficulty.

I have lately found myself totally incapable of original composition. I have employed my mornings, therefore, in translating the Symposium, which I accomplished in ten days. Mary is now transcribing it, and I am writing a prefatory essay. I have been reading scarcely anything but Greek, and a little Italian poetry with Mary. We have finished Ariosto together--a thing I could not have done again alone.

"Frankenstein" seems to have been well received, for although the unfriendly criticism of the "Quarterly" is an evil for it, yet it proves that it is read in some considerable degree, and it would be difficult for them, with any appearance of fairness, to deny it merit altogether. Their notice of me, and their exposure of their true motives for not noticing my book*, show how well understood an hostility must subsist between me and them. . . .

P. B. Shelley


* Laon and Cythna; or, The Revolution of the Golden City: A Vision of the Nineteenth Century in the Stanza of Spenser (1817; revised and reissued in 1818 as The Revolt of Islam)

-from Selected Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley edited with an introduction by Richard Garnett (London: Kegan and Paul, Trench, & Co., 1882)

Shelley on Lake Como

Percy Bysshe Shelley To Thomas Love Peacock.

Milan, 20 April 1818.

My dear Peacock,

I had no conception that the distance between us, measured by time in respect of letters, was so great. I have but just received yours dated the 2nd, and when you will receive mine written from this city, somewhat later than the same date, I cannot know. I am sorry to hear that you have been obliged to remain at Marlow ; a certain degree of society being almost a necessity of life, particularly as we are not to see you this summer in Italy. But this, I suppose, must be as it is. I often revisit Marlow in thought. The curse of this life is that whatever is once known can never be unknown. You inhabit a spot, which before you inhabit it, is as indifferent to you as any other spot upon earth, and when, persuaded by some necessity, you think to leave it, you leave it not ; it clings to you, and with memories of things, which in your experience of them, gave no such promise, revenges your desertion. Time flows on, places are changed; friends who were with us are no longer with us ; yet what has been seems yet to be, but barren and stripped of life. See, I have sent you a study for Nightmare Abbey.

Since I last wrote to you we have been to Como, looking for a house. This lake exceeds anything I ever beheld in beauty, with the exception of the Arbutus Islands in Killarney. It is long and narrow, and has the appearance of a mighty river winding among the mountains and forests. We sailed from the town of Como to a trad of country called the Tremezina, and saw the various aspeds presented by that part of the lake. The mountains between Como and that village, or rather cluster of villages, are covered on high with chestnut forests, the eating chestnuts on which the inhabitants of the country subsist in time of scarcity, which sometimes descend to the very verge of the lake, overhanging it with their hoary branches. But usually the immediate border of this shore is composed of laurel-trees, and bay, and myrtle, and wild fig-trees, and olives, which grow in the crevices of the rocks, and overhang the caverns, and shadow the deep glens, which are filled with the flashing light of the waterfalls. Other flowering shrubs, which I cannot name, grow there also. On high, the towers of village churches are seen white among the dark forests. Beyond, on the opposite shore, which faces the south, the mountains descend less precipitously to the lake, and although they are much higher, and some covered with perpetual snow, there intervenes between them and the lake a range of lower hills, which have glens and rifts opening to the other, such as I should fancy the abysses of Ida or Parnassus. Here are plantations of olive, and orange, and lemon trees, which are now so loaded with fruit that there is more fruit than leaves ; and vineyards.

This shore of the lake is one continued village, and the Milanese nobility have their villas here. The union of culture and the untameable profusion and loveli- ness of nature is here so close that the line where they are divided can hardly be discovered. But the finest scenery is that of the Villa Pliniana, so called from a fountain which ebbs and flows every three hours, described by the younger Pliny, which is in the courtyard. This house, which was once a magnificent palace, and is now half in ruins, we are endeavouring to procure. It is built upon terraces raised from the bottom of the lake, together with its garden, at the foot of a semicircular precipice, overshadowed by profound forests of chestnut. The scene from the colonnade is the most extraordinary, at once, and the most lovely that eye ever beheld. On one side is the mountain, and immediately over you are clusters of cypress-trees of an astonishing height, which seem to pierce the sky. Above you, from among the clouds, as it were, descends a waterfall of immense size, broken by the woody rocks into a thousand channels to the lake. On the other side is seen the blue extent of the lake and the mountains, speckled with sails and spires. The apartments of the Pliniana are immensely large, but ill furnished and antique. The terraces, which overlook the lake, and conclude under the shade of such immense laurel-trees as deserve the epithet of Pythian, are most delightful. We stayed at Como two days, and have now returned to Milan, waiting the issue of our negotiation about a house. Como is only six leagues from Milan, and its mountains are seen from the cathedral.

This cathedral is a most astonishing work of art. It is built of white marble, and cut into pinnacles of immense height, and the utmost delicacy of workmanship, and loaded with sculpture. The effect of it, piercing the solid blue with those groups of dazzling spires, relieved by the serene depth of this Italian heaven, or by moonlight when the stars seem gathered among those clustered shapes, is beyond anything I had imagined architeture capable of producing. The interior, though very sublime, is of a more earthly character, and with its stained glass and massy granite columns overloaded with antique figures, and the silver lamps that burn for ever under the canopy of black cloth beside the brazen altar and the marble fretwork of the dome, give it the asped of some gorgeous sepulchre. There is one solitary spot among those aisles, behind the altar, where the light of day is dim and yellow under the storied window, which I have chosen to visit, and read Dante there.

I have devoted this summer, and indeed the next year, to the composition of a tragedy on the subject of Tasso's madness, which I find upon inspection is, if properly treated, admirably dramatic and poetical. But, you will say, I have no dramatic talent; very true, in a certain sense; but I have taken the resolution to see what kind of a tragedy a person without dramatic talent could write. It shall be better morality than Fazio, and better poetry than Bertram, at least. You tell me nothing of Rhodo daphne, a book from which, I confess, I expected extraordinary success.

P. B. S.

-from Selected Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley edited with an introduction by Richard Garnett (London: Kegan and Paul, Trench, & Co., 1882)