translated,' he wrote; 'remember, remember _Charles the First_ and
_Myrrha_,' he insisted; and he quoted, for her benefit, the
presumptuous aphorism of Godwin, in _St. Leon_, 'There is nothing
which the human mind can conceive which it may not execute'.
[Footnote: Letter from Padua, 22 September 1818.]

But in the year that followed these auspicious days, the strain and
stress of her life proved more powerful on Mary Shelley than the
inspiration of literature. The loss of her little girl Clara, at
Venice, on the 24th of September 1818, was cruel enough. However, she
tried hard not to show the 'pusillanimous disposition' which, Godwin
assured his daughter, characterizes the persons 'that sink long under
a calamity of this nature'. [Footnote: 27 October 1818] But the death
of her boy, William, at Rome, on the 4th of June 1819, reduced her to
a 'kind of despair'. Whatever it could be to her husband, Italy no
longer was for her a 'paradise of exiles'. The flush and excitement of
the early months, the 'first fine careless rapture', were for ever
gone. 'I shall never recover that blow,' Mary wrote on the 27th of
June 1819; 'the thought never leaves me for a single moment;
everything on earth has lost its interest for me,' This time her
imperturbable father 'philosophized' in vain. With a more sympathetic
and acuter intelligence of her case, Leigh Hunt insisted (July 1819)
that she should try and give her paralysing sorrow some literary
expression, 'strike her pen into some... genial subject... and bring
up a fountain of gentle tears for us'. But the poor childless mother
could only rehearse her complaint--'to have won, and thus cruelly to
have lost' (4 August 1819). In fact she had, on William's death,
discontinued her diary.

Yet on the date just mentioned, as Shelley reached his twenty-seven