was shaken and saw visions, and Mary disliked the place at
first sight. Still, there was the sea washing their terrace,
and Shelley loved the sea (there is scarcely one of his poems
in which a boat does not figure, though it is usually made of
moonstone); and, while Williams fancied himself as a navigator,
Trelawny was really at home on the water. A certain Captain
Roberts was commissioned to get a boat built at Genoa, where
Byron also was fitting out a yacht, the 'Bolivar'. When the
'Ariel'--for so they called her--arrived, the friends were
delighted with her speed and handiness. She was a
thirty-footer, without a deck, ketch-rigged.[1] Shelley's
health was good, and this June, passed in bathing, sailing,
reading, and hearing Jane sing simple melodies to her guitar in
the moonlight, was a gleam of happiness before the end. It was
not so happy for Mary, who was ill and oppressed with
housekeeping for two families, and over whose relations with
Shelley a film of querulous jealousy had crept.

[1 Professor Dowden, 'Life of Shelley', vol. ii., p. 501, says
"schooner-rigged." This is a landsman's mistake.]

Leigh Hunt, that amiable, shiftless, Radical man of letters,
was coming out from England with his wife; on July 1st Shelley
and Williams sailed in the 'Ariel' to Leghorn to meet them, and
settle them into the ground-floor of Byron's palace at Pisa.
His business despatched, Shelley returned from Pisa to Leghorn,
with Hunt's copy of Keats's 'Hyperion' in his pocket to read on
the voyage home. Though the weather looked threatening, he put
to sea again on July 8th, with Williams and an English
sailor-boy. Trelawny wanted to convoy them in Byron's yacht,