After a few weeks spent in this retreat, which was interspersed by
visits to Venice, we proceeded southward.


NOTE ON "PROMETHEUS UNBOUND", BY MRS. SHELLEY.

On the 12th of March, 1818, Shelley quitted England, never to return.
His principal motive was the hope that his health would be improved by a
milder climate; he suffered very much during the winter previous to his
emigration, and this decided his vacillating purpose. In December, 1817,
he had written from Marlow to a friend, saying:

'My health has been materially worse. My feelings at intervals are of a
deadly and torpid kind, or awakened to such a state of unnatural and
keen excitement that, only to instance the organ of sight, I find the
very blades of grass and the boughs of distant trees present themselves
to me with microscopic distinctness. Towards evening I sink into a state
of lethargy and inanimation, and often remain for hours on the sofa
between sleep and waking, a prey to the most painful irritability of
thought. Such, with little intermission, is my condition. The hours
devoted to study are selected with vigilant caution from among these
periods of endurance. It is not for this that I think of travelling to
Italy, even if I knew that Italy would relieve me. But I have
experienced a decisive pulmonary attack; and although at present it has
passed away without any considerable vestige of its existence, yet this
symptom sufficiently shows the true nature of my disease to be
consumptive. It is to my advantage that this malady is in its nature
slow, and, if one is sufficiently alive to its advances, is susceptible
of cure from a warm climate. In the event of its assuming any decided