On September 24, 1818, the Shelleys' daughter, Clara Everina, barely a
year old, died at Venice. Mary and her children had gone from Bagni di
Lucca to Este to join Shelley at Byron's villa. Clara was not well
when they started, and she grew worse on the journey. From Este
Shelley and Mary took her to Venice to consult a physician, a trip
which was beset with delays and difficulties. She died almost as soon
as they arrived. According to Newman Ivey White,[xii] Mary, in the
unreasoning agony of her grief, blamed Shelley for the child's death
and for a time felt toward him an extreme physical antagonism which
subsided into apathy and spiritual alienation. Mary's black moods made
her difficult to live with, and Shelley himself fell into deep
dejection. He expressed his sense of their estrangement in some of the
lyrics of 1818--"all my saddest poems." In one fragment of verse, for
example, he lamented that Mary had left him "in this dreary world
alone."

Thy form is here indeed--a lovely one--
But thou art fled, gone down the dreary road,
That leads to Sorrow's most obscure abode.
Thou sittest on the hearth of pale despair,
Where
For thine own sake I cannot follow thee.

Professor White believed that Shelley recorded this estrangement only
"in veiled terms" in _Julian and Maddalo_ or in poems that he did not
show to Mary, and that Mary acknowledged it only after Shelley's
death, in her poem "The Choice" and in her editorial notes on his
poems of that year. But this unpublished story, written after the
death of their other child William, certainly contains, though also in
veiled terms, Mary's immediate recognition and remorse. Mary well