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Mrs. Shelley by Lucy Madox Brown Rossetti
page 59 of 219 (26%)
surrounded the family, who were, however, kept above the lowering
influences of narrow circumstances by the intellect of Godwin and his
friends. Even the speculations into which Mrs. Godwin is considered to
have rashly drawn her husband in the Skinner Street Juvenile Library,
perhaps, for a time, really assisted in bringing up the family and
educating the sons.

Before the meeting with Shelley, Mary was known as a young girl of
strong poetic and emotional nature. A story is still remembered by
friends, proving this: just before her last return from the Highlands
preceding her eventful meetings with Shelley, she visited, while
staying with the Baxters, some of the most picturesque parts of the
Highlands, in company with Mr. Miller, a bookseller of Edinburgh; and
he told of her passionate enthusiasm when taken into a room arranged
with looking-glasses round it to reflect the magic view without of
cascade and cloud-capped mountains; how she fell on her knees,
entranced at the sight, and thanked Providence for letting her witness
so much beauty. This was the nature, with its antecedents and
surroundings, to come shortly into communion with Shelley, at the time
of his despondency at his wife's hardness and supposed desertion;
Shelley then, so far from self-sufficiency, yearning after sympathy
and an ideal in life, with all his former idols shattered. Godwin's
house became for him the home of intellectual intercourse. Godwin,
surrounded by a cultivated family, was not thought less of by Shelley,
owing to the accident of his then having a book-shop to look
after--Shelley, whose childhood, though passed in the comforts of an
English country house, yet lacked the riches of the higher culture.
Through two months of various trials Shelley remained on terms of
great intimacy, visiting Godwin's house and constantly dining there.
This was during his wife's voluntary withdrawal to Bath, from
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