other time did either Shelley or Mary regret what they had done.
To the very end of the poet's brief career they were inseparable.

Later he was able to pension Harriet, who, being of a morbid
disposition, ended her life by drowning--not, it may be said,
because of grief for Shelley. It has been told that Fanny Imlay,
Mary's sister, likewise committed suicide because Shelley did not
care for her, but this has also been disproved. There was really
nothing to mar the inner happiness of the poet and the woman who,
at the very end, became his wife. Living, as they did, in Italy
and Switzerland, they saw much of their own countrymen, such as
Landor and Leigh Hunt and Byron, to whose fascinations poor Miss
Clairmont yielded, and became the mother of the little girl
Allegra.

But there could have been no truer union than this of Shelley's
with the woman whom nature had intended for him. It was in his
love-life, far more than in his poetry, that he attained
completeness. When he died by drowning, in 1822, and his body was
burned in the presence of Lord Byron, he was truly mourned by the
one whom he had only lately made his wife. As a poet he never
reached the same perfection; for his genius was fitful and
uncertain, rare in its flights, and mingled always with that which
disappoints.

As the lover and husband of Mary Godwin, there was nothing left to
wish. In his verse, however, the truest word concerning him will
always be that exquisite sentence of Matthew Arnold:

"A beautiful and ineffectual angel beating his luminous wings