who complained in a charming piece of unreasonableness that his wife's
love, which had been a fountain, was now only a well:

Such change, and at the very door
Of my fond heart, hath made me poor.

Wordsworth probably learned, what Shelley was incapable of learning, that
love can never permanently be a fountain. A living poet, in an article
{6} which you almost fear to breathe upon lest you should flutter some of
the frail pastel-like bloom, has said the thing: "Love itself has tidal
moments, lapses and flows due to the metrical rule of the interior
heart." Elementary reason should proclaim this true. Love is an
affection, its display an emotion: love is the air, its display is the
wind. An affection may be constant; an emotion can no more be constant
than the wind can constantly blow. All, therefore, that a man can
reasonably ask of his wife is that her love should be indeed a well. A
well; but a Bethesda-well, into which from time to time the angel of
tenderness descends to trouble the waters for the healing of the beloved.
Such a love Shelley's second wife appears unquestionably to have given
him. Nay, she was content that he should veer while she remained true;
she companioned him intellectually, shared his views, entered into his
aspirations, and yet--yet, even at the date of _Epipsychidion_ the
foolish child, her husband, assigned her the part of moon to Emilia
Viviani's sun, and lamented that he was barred from final, certain,
irreversible happiness by a cold and callous society. Yet few poets were
so mated before, and no poet was so mated afterwards, until Browning
stooped and picked up a fair-coined soul that lay rusting in a pool of
tears.

In truth, his very unhappiness and discontent with life, in so far as it