Trelawny

I

TRELAWNY sat crouched on a low bare rock out at sea off the coast of Jersey, staring at the dark water, waiting impatiently for sunrise and the turn of the tide, but with no desire for what day might bring. A few feet away the two smuggler-fishermen bribed by De Ruyter to carry him across the Channel and set him safe on the English shore lay stretched out beside their boat drawn up on the rock, fast asleep and snoring contentedly, having already earned their money.

Trelawny could not sleep. He was tired and cold and wet and hungry — a supper of shellfish washed down with Nantz had failed to satisfy him. He was sunk in one of his blackest moods. Bidding good-bye to De Ruyter had meant bidding good-bye to the only human being in the world whom he loved, or who cared a rush whether he lived or died. It had snapped the last tie that held him to the past; to Zela, to all that warm, bright, sun-drenched East where he belonged. What was he doing here in England? Chilly, damp, inhospitable England. If he were to jump off into the next wave that came curling in, who would care? His family? He laughed aloud, remembering that homesick little boy turned out by his father ‘with as little remorse as he would have ordered a blind puppy to be drowned.’

Yet a prodigal who has made his way half across the world and is almost in sight of home must risk the last few steps, no matter how poor a welcome he may get at the end of the road. A few hours later he was on dry land, making his way to the nearest village.

His forebodings were justified. The East had left him too restless for civilized life. London became intolerable. In the end he rented a little cottage in Middlesex, and let himself sink deep into the soft green bosom of the English countryside, hoping to relax and to forget. The rural experiment amused him for a time. Then restlessness returned. The year 1820 took him to the Continent. In August he was staying in Ouchy on the Lake of Geneva near Lausanne, seeing something of a more cosmopolitan society than he had ever before encountered. At this time ‘Lausanne,’ he wrote later, ‘was one of the inland harbors of refuge where wanderers from all countries sought shelter.’

Trelawny soon made an acquaintance — one of those chance acquaintances not personally important whose influence may be far-reaching: a young bookseller, graduate of a German university, ‘more interested in literature than in lucre,’ and trained to express himself with eloquence and exactitude. He was probably the first highly educated man Trelawny had ever met. The young bookseller was a linguist; bits of Goethe and Kant and other great foreign writers were translated for Trelawny’s benefit, their philosophy, religion, and politics exhaustively discussed in the light of modern thought. Then one memorable day a new name ‘swam into his ken,’ a name that was to echo all through Trelawny’s life on and on into extreme old age — the name of Shelley.

It was a midsummer day, hot and sunny; Trelawny had happened to pass a terrace shaded by feathery acacias, saw his friend sitting there absorbed in a book, and joined him. The book turned out to be Queen Mab, Shelley’s adolescent arraignment of the enemies of mankind, — religion, government, and war, — which the bookseller had just come across by accident.

‘It is crude, but well flavored,’ remarked the bookseller. ‘They say the author is but a boy; if that be true we shall hear of him again.’

Trelawny nodded. He was already reading, already excited by what he read.

Queen Mab was of course an appetizer. Other poems by Shelley were unearthed, and the more Trelawny read, the more admiring he became. Before long he had yielded so entirely to the charm of Shelley’s song and Shelley’s preaching that it was something of a shock to be brought up with a round turn, as he was floating happily along on the full tide of enchantment, by the adverse criticism of a poet whose opinion could not well be ignored, and who was, incidentally, the first of his tribe Trelawny had ever encountered.

The meeting came about through an English friend of Trelawny’s who happened to be staying at a hotel in Lausanne. Captain Daniel Roberts — a son of that ‘ stout fellow ‘ Lieutenant Roberts who had gone around the world with Captain Cook and was in command of the pinnace at the time of Cook’s murder — was at loose ends now, like so many Army and Navy men after the Peace, and traveling for pleasure on half pay. He and Trelawny had much in common. For one thing, Roberts had met both Byron and Shelley some years before in Geneva, had dined at the Villa Diodati and seen Byron later on in Venice, and Trelawny listened eagerly to all he had to say of the two poets. It was disillusioning to hear Roberts speak of Byron as not really a handsome man, too short and stout; but delightful to find him a wholehearted admirer of Shelley. According to Roberts, ‘Never were manly wit and sense combined with such ingenuousness, or trust in mankind and unacquaintance with the world, as in Shelley.’

So here he was waiting for Captain Roberts one clear shining September morning, in a hotel in Lausanne, having been invited to breakfast and wishing his friend would return, — Roberts had gone sketching, — for he had walked in from Ouchy and was getting hungrier every minute. At last the captain came in, but not alone. He was accompanied by three travelers whom he had happened to meet on their way to the hotel: a man and two ladies.

‘I saw by their utilitarian garb,’ Trelawny wrote later, ‘as well as by the blisters on their cheeks and noses that they were pedestrian tourists fresh from the blazing sun and frosty air of snowcovered mountains. The man was evidently a denizen of the north; his accent harsh, skin white, of an angular and bony build, and self-confident and dogmatic in his opinions. But the precision and quaintness of his language, and his eccentric remarks on common things, stimulated my mind. Our icy islanders thaw rapidly when they have drifted into warmer latitudes. These, flushed with health, delighted with their excursion, and with appetites earned by bodily and mental activity, were in such high spirits that Roberts and I caught the infection of their mirth. We all talked as loud and fast as if under the influence of champagne instead of café au lait.’

Breakfast over, a carriage arrived to take the travelers on their way. As they were leaving, Roberts whispered to Trelawny that they were the Wordsworths — the poet himself, his wife, and his sister—and Trelawny could not resist an eager question: What did Mr. Wordsworth think of Shelley as a poet?

‘Nothing,’ he answered shortly. ‘A poet who has not produced a good poem before he is twenty-five will never do so.'

’The Cenci?’ Trelawny ventured.

‘Won’t do.’ William shook his head and got into the carriage, followed by a rough-coated Scotch terrier.

‘This hairy fellow is our flea trap,’ he shouted, and they drove away.

Trelawny was left staring after them, wondering if it were jealousy or lack of poetic taste that had prompted the verdict.

II

Soon after, Trelawny went on to Geneva, and here at Plongeon he met two young Army men, Edward Ellerker Williams and Thomas Medwin. It was extraordinarily exciting to discover that Medwin was actually a cousin of Shelley’s and a schoolfellow.

‘Medwin had known Shelley from childhood,’ Trelawny wrote later. ‘From all I could gather, Shelley lived as he wrote, the life of a true poet, loving solitude but by no means a cynic. Irrespective of his genius, we all longed to meet him.’

England seemed prosaic after Switzerland, the air heavy, his friends dull. Trelawny’s dissatisfaction with London society that winter of 1821 was increased by hearing from Edward Williams, who had now met Shelley. The poet, according to Edward, looked the part to perfection. He was young, amiable, full of life and fun, and could talk brilliantly on any abstract subject; but even his ordinary conversation was ‘akin to poetry; for he saw everything in the most singular and pleasing light.’

But the poet’s chief pleasure was boating. When Edward Williams wrote that Shelley had had a little boat built at Leghorn and they expected to enjoy delightful trips exploring the various streams and canals in the neighborhood, Trelawny was filled with envy, tinged with the contempt all sailors feel for soldiers who venture on the water. In Edward’s case this contempt was justified. Edward wrote: ‘A few nights ago I nearly put an end to the poet and myself. We went to Leghorn to see after the little boat and, as the wind blew excessively hard and fair, we resolved upon returning to Pisa in her, and accordingly started with a huge sail, and at 10 o’clock P.M. capsized her.’

Neither Williams nor Shelley thought of their escape as a warning. Yet it was not their first. That winter, while they were sailing on the Arno in an even smaller boat, Williams stood up suddenly, caught at the mast to steady himself, and tipped the boat over. He could swim a little and managed to struggle ashore; but Shelley could not swim a stroke and would have sunk like a stone if a more competent friend had not been with them.

These experiences, however, only increased Shelley’s romantic passion for the water, and the correspondence between Edward Williams and Trelawny must often have touched on boatbuilding, for at the end of 1821 Williams wrote: ‘Have a boat we must, and if we can get Roberts to build one so much the better.’

In the meantime Trelawny had returned to the Continent, having planned to spend the winter of 1822 shooting in the wildest part of the Maremma with his friend Roberts, a keen sportsman, and the summer in Pisa, making the acquaintance of Byron and Shelley.

This agreeable combination of sport and poetry decided upon, he had gone to Chalon to get the horse and cabriolet he had left there with the Williamses; to Geneva, where Captain Roberts was waiting for him; and at last, after long anticipation, he found himself actually headed for Italy.

‘In my Swiss carriage,’ he wrote, ‘we could go on or stop, where and when we pleased. We could sketch, shoot, fish and observe everything at our leisure. If our progress was slow, it was most pleasant. We crossed Mount Cenis and, in due course, arrived at Genoa. After a long stop in that city of painted palaces, anxious to see the Poet, I drove on to Pisa alone.’

III

When Trelawny arrived in Pisa, January 14, 1822, the Shelleys had been drifting from one Italian town to another for nearly four years. They both knew that a mild climate was better for Percy’s health, and Italian scenery more stimulating to his mind than the quiet English landscape, and Mary had accepted a roving life in foreign parts for his sake. But those four years had not been as happy for her as for Percy. She had lost two children; she was often desperately homesick; she distrusted the strange Italian way of living; she was not strong enough to share Percy’s long walks and rides and dangerous excursions on the water; she found his liking for solitude and dislike of society very hard to endure, and although she still loved him and still believed in him wholeheartedly as a poet, she was beginning to wonder whether it had been worth while to sacrifice so much for those wild radical theories that had banished him — the gentlest, kindest soul that ever lived — from his father’s house and made him ‘a scorn and a hissing’ to his compatriots. But, though Love had often fluttered perilously close to the window sill, he had never actually flown away; and here, in Pisa, Mary was as contented as it was in her nature to be, and Shelley was happy — the first, six months of 1822, except for one unhappy interlude, were probably the most serene of his life.

Both the contentment and the serenity of this time came largely from the presence of those amiable, slightly commonplace young persons, the Williamses, Edward and Jane; ‘temperamentally,’ according to Miss Glynn Grylls, ‘the most normal friends the Shelleys ever had.’ At first they had both liked Edward better than Jane. But Percy soon discovered that Jane — for all she was so simple, shallow, and cheerful — stimulated his poetic imagination to a quite extraordinary degree. Mary, realizing this was true, accepted the situation as just another of ‘Percy’s Platonics,’ and found Jane’s liveliness a relief from the intolerable boredom of Tom Medwin (he stayed on and on — Mary wrote to a friend, ‘The burden of Tom grows very heavy!’); and even when Percy gave Jane a guitar, with some pretty lines calling himself ‘Ariel’ and Jane ‘Miranda,’ she was only a very little jealous, for she knew that Percy was only a very little in love.

So the intimacy flourished, and when autumn made village life impossible Shelley found apartments for both families in the same house in Pisa. They were scarcely settled in before another friend, — a friend less soothing than the Williamses,— Lord Byron, arrived to take up his residence on the opposite side of the river.

It was Shelley’s doing. For various reasons, he had wanted Byron to come to Pisa; had made it easy for him (Shelley could be efficient when he chose — Matthew Arnold’s nickname, ‘ ineffectual angel,’ had little foundation in fact) by choosing a palace that even Byron would think suitable for his way of living — the magnificent Palazzo Lanfranchi, supposed to have been built by Michael Angelo, on the Lungarno; and here in due time the great man had arrived from Ravenna ‘with his servants, his horses, his monkey, bulldog, mastiff, cats, peafowl, hens and other livestock’ — as well as that still more indispensable article, his mistress, Countess Guiccioli, lodged, however, at a discreet distance in another quarter of the town and chaperoned by her complacent family, the Gambas — to give sleepy Pisa a taste of the noisy, bright-colored, pompous comedy that a Byronic entrance on a new scene always provided.

Trelawny’s arrival two months later was a very different affair. He came alone — having left Captain Roberts in Genoa, probably to see about that little matter of building a boat for Mr. Shelley. It was late, almost dark, when he drove in from the north in his little Swiss carriage, and Pisa’s marble palaces and towers stood up white and ghostlike in the twilight. He found an inn, stabled his tired horse, ate a hurried dinner, and then made his way through empty, illlighted streets, depressed by the sadness of the ancient town, to find himself at last in the cheerful apartment of his friends, the Williamses.

Their welcome could not have been warmer. The three had much to talk about and were laughing and telling one another all that had happened since they had parted at Chalon a year ago, when Trelawny became aware of eyes — glittering eyes — looking in at him from the dark passage with disconcerting intentness.

Jane laughed. ‘Come in, Shelley!’ she called. ‘It’s only our friend Tre, just arrived.’

‘Swiftly gliding in, blushing like a girl, a tall thin stripling held out both his hands,’ Trelawny wrote thirty-six years later, still able to recall the meeting as if it had been yesterday.

For the ‘stripling’ who came into the room that winter’s evening was to become the one great romantic figure of Trelawny’s life. He was to accept all Shelley’s beliefs and denials, theories and practices, — sensible and fantastic, little and big, — and make them his own. The friendship was to color his whole life through. Yet it had only six months to ripen. The shadow of the little American schooner was taking shape in the mind of Roberts, the boat-builder. Another six months and it would become reality, and Shelley would go the way that ‘golden lads and girls all must.’

Trelawny’s first feeling as he saw Shelley’s ‘flushed, feminine and artless face’ was merely incredulous surprise. Could this be the rebel poet — ‘this mild-looking, beardless boy, dressed like a boy in a black jacket and trousers he seemed to have outgrown’? Was this ‘ the veritable monster at war with all the world, excommunicated by the Fathers of the Church, deprived of his civil rights by a grim Lord Chancellor, discarded by his family and denounced by rival sages of literature as the founder of a Satanic school’? He could not believe it; it must be a hoax!

Jane, seeing Trelawny’s bewilderment, broke in with a tactful question: ‘What book is that you have in your hand, Shelley?’ she asked. ‘Calderon’s Magico Prodigioso? Oh, read it to us! ‘

‘ Shoved off from the shore of commonplace incidents,’ Trelawny wrote, ‘and fairly launched on a theme that interested him, he became oblivious of everything but the book in his hand. . . . His lucid interpretation of the story, and the ease with which he translated the most subtle and imaginative passages of the Spanish poet, were marvelous. ... I no longer doubted his identity.’

IV

Trelawny, always quick as a flash in his likes and dislikes, knew with conviction that he admired both the Shelleys and wanted them for his friends. How did they feel about him? What impression did he make that evening? Mary’s reaction seems to have been excitement mingled with doubt. Her journal of January 14 noted ‘Trelawny arrives,’ as an important event, but a few days later: ‘Trelawny is extravagant — un giovanni stravagante. . . He tells strange stories of himself, horrific ones.’

Obviously Mary was too conventional to give immediate approval to this exotic newcomer. Shelley, on the other hand, aware of the admiration in the ‘dark gray expressive eyes’ gazing at him with such intentness as he read from Calderón, must have felt an answering wave of friendliness. For admiration seldom came Shelley’s way. No great poet ever lived so entirely without applause — the Literary Gazette had dismissed Adonais as ‘ a mere collection of bloated words ‘ — and no man of so sweet a nature ever had to get along with so few friends. Here in Pisa he was living in strange isolation cut off from the great world — the world of publishers, readers, critics; living in a ‘glass house,’ hearing the stones of the Philistines rattling on the roof and eager to reply, but always finding his sling too weak. For no publisher dared to take his poems; they were ‘forbidden fruit,’ printed at his own expense, read on the sly.

So Shelley was not so overrun with friends that he could not find room for another. But, whether or not he returned Trelawny’s liking at once, their first evening together was cut short. Jane’s tea tray appeared, Shelley vanished; not, however, before making an appointment for the following day. Mr. Trelawny would like to make Lord Byron’s acquaintance? They would go together.

So next afternoon found the two, so oddly unlike, — fair, slight, boyish Ariel, tall, dark Pirate, — strolling along the Lungarno to the Palazzo Lanfranchi. They entered a vast marble hall, mounted a vast marble stairway, were ushered through a vast salon and on into a small billiard room empty except for Byron’s bulldog, Moretto, who was welcoming them with a growl when his master came in from an adjoining room.

The usual politenesses were exchanged. But Trelawny — himself always at ease in any society — realized with some amusement that the great man was feeling a little embarrassed at meeting a stranger and was trying to cover it with an affectation of nonchalance. Neither embarrassment nor affectation, however, could live long in Shelley’s presence; both soon wore off. Byron asked Shelley to look over a poem he had been writing, Shelley instantly became absorbed; Byron picked up a cue and suggested a game of billiards. Trelawny agreed; they began knocking the balls about. But neither was interested in the game. Byron was too occupied in talking— telling anecdotes likely to impress this new acquaintance, such as the story of his swim across the Hellespont — and Trelawny much too intent on listening and watching, making the most of this interview with a famous poet, hero of a thousand scandals.

Those ‘dark expressive eyes’ of Trelawny’s never missed anything they wanted to see, and he was blessed with an excellent visual memory. The portrait he drew of Byron in his Recollections is as vivid as if he had used paint instead of words.

The portrait is a handsome one. Byron happened to be thin at the time. The months in Venice that Mary Shelley mildly termed ‘the gaieties and incorrectness of his Venetian life’ had taken off some of the fat that was the plague of his life, and he had adopted a slimming diet — cold potatoes and vinegar, biscuits and soda water — that kept him looking as a poet should look. ‘By starving his body,’ Trelawny wrote, ‘Byron kept his brains clear; no man had brighter eyes, or a clearer voice.’

As he watched this pale young man with soft white hands, brandishing a billiard cue, bending languidly over the table, chattering of nothing, boasting of everything, he told himself that, having ‘come prepared to see a solemn mystery,’ he seemed likely to be bored with a rather dull farce. But he was wrong— very wrong, as he soon found out.

Shelley rejoined them, and almost at once Byron’s cloak of affectation fell from him. It was always so. Byron could sneer at Shelley behind his back, he could be unutterably false to their friendship, but he could never resist Shelley’s charm when they were face to face. Now, as the two poets talked of their trade, Trelawny listened in wondering admiration — surprised at first to find the great poet not only inviting criticism from the little one but accepting it, then astonished by the brilliance of Byron’s defense, his mental agility, and a memory for apt quotations that would have floored most opponents. This was the real Byron, creator of Childe Harold and Don Juan, the man he had traveled so far to see!

Interruption came too soon. A servant appeared; his lordship’s horses were at the door. So Trelawny sent to the inn for his own Swiss horse. They were joined by Count Taaffe, an Irish poet conspicuous in Pisa, but a bad rider and almost as great a bore as Medwin. They all set off; rode for an hour or so out into the country, — Byron talking with wit and animation, for he was in good spirits, — reached a podere, drank wine and ate cake; wandered out into the vineyard, and amused themselves pistol shooting — the marks, five-paul pieces stuck in the tip of a cleft stick.

V

It was only the first of many pleasant days Trelawny would spend in the old Italian town during those halcyon months of 1822. His friendship with Shelley grew apace. There was no disillusionment here; the more he saw of Shelley, the more he admired. Shelley had but one fault: he worked too hard. ‘He would set to work on a pyramid of books, his eyes glistening with an energy as fierce as a gold digger who works at a rock of quartz, crushing his way through all impediments, no grain of pure ore escaping his eager scrutiny. . . . He had seen no more of the world than a girl in a boarding school, and his habit of brooding on his own thoughts, in solitude and silence, damaged his health of mind and body.’ After leaving him one morning, standing in front of the fireplace reading a book open on the mantelshelf, and returning at night to find him still there, still standing, having forgotten to sit down, forgotten to eat the food that had been brought to him, Trelawny decided that ‘the dreamy bard needed glimpses of rough life,’ and took it upon himself to drag poor Shelley away from books as often as possible.

Trelawny’s naïve comment, ‘He disliked it, but he could not resist my importunities,’ illustrates his amazing selfconfidence; for Shelley must have found this ruthless interference with work rather trying. Perhaps he did not have the heart to refuse, when Trelawny came breezing into the study, hearty and confident as a trainer who is bent on making a strong man out of a weedy boy. Perhaps the physique of this big sunburned sailorman excited his emulation. Anyway he seems to have submitted to the ‘glimpses’ fairly often and to have accepted a certain amount of training with a docility that, on one occasion, came near putting an end to him for good and all.

Trelawny had been bathing in a deep pool in the Arno while Shelley sat watching him from the bank, and had been showing off, ‘exciting the astonishment of the poet by a series of aquatic gymnastics learnt from the natives of the South Seas.’ As he came ashore, Shelley asked mournfully: ‘Why can’t I swim? It seems so easy.’

‘Because you think you can’t,’Trelawny answered. ‘Take a header off this bank, and when you rise turn over on your back; you will float like a duck.’

He obeyed on the instant; stripped himself of jacket and trousers, kicked off his shoes, and plunged in. But, to Trelawny’s horror, he did not come up: ‘he lay there stretched on the bottom like a conger eel, not making the least effort to struggle or save himself,’ and would have drowned if Trelawny had not dived in and fished him out at once.

He was not grateful; when he recovered his breath, he said wistfully: ‘They say Truth lies at the bottom of the well. In another minute I should have found it, and you would have found an empty shell. It is an easy way of getting rid of the body.’

‘What would Mrs. Shelley have said to me if I had gone back with your empty cage?’

‘Don’t tell Mary — not a word! But it’s a great temptation; in another minute I might have been in another planet.’

The experience must have given Trelawny a shock. But he was not discouraged. He was forever coming in with tempting proposals, and one day, finding the poet already flown, consented at Mary’s suggestion to follow him to his remote sanctum in the pineta.

With no landmarks to guide me, I was bewildered in this wilderness of pines and ponds; so I sat down and smoked a cigar, reflecting that a red man would have known Ids course by the trees themselves, their growth and color; or if a footstep had passed that day, he would have hit upon his trail. As I mused upon his sagacity and my own stupidity, the braying of a brother jackass startled me. He was followed by an old man picking up pine cones. I asked him if he had seen a stranger. ‘L’Inglese melancolico haunts the woods maledetta,’ he answered. ‘I will show you his nest.’

As we advanced, the ground swelled into mounds and hollows. By-and-by the old fellow pointed with his stick to a hat, books and loose papers lying about and then to a deep pool of dark glimmering water, saying ‘Eccolo!’ I thought he meant that Shelley was under the water. The careless, not to say impatient, way in which the Poet bore his burden of life, caused a vague dread amongst his family and friends that he might lose or cast it away at any moment.

The strong light streamed through the opening of the trees. One of the pines, undermined by the water, had fallen into it. Under its lee, and nearly hidden, sat the Poet, gazing on the dark mirror beneath, so lost in his bardish reverie, that he did not hear my approach. There the trees were stunted and bent and their crowns were shorn like friars by the sea breezes, excepting a cluster of three, under which Shelley’s traps were lying; these overtopped the rest. To avoid startling the Poet out of his dream, I squatted under the lofty trees, and opened his books. One was a volume of his favorite Greek dramatist, Sophocles — the same that I found in his pocket after his death — and the other was a volume of Shakespeare. ... He had been writing verses on a guitar. I picked up a fragment, but could only make out two lines: —

It was a frightful scrawl; words smeared out with his finger and all run together. It might have been taken for a sketch of a marsh overgrown with bullrushes and the blots for wild ducks. ... I then hailed him, and, turning his head, he answered faintly: ‘Hello. Come in.’

The interruption must have been sufficiently annoying. A less sweet-tempered man would have protested at being roused so abruptly from his ‘green thought in a green shade.’ But when Trelawny told him his wife was waiting for him, he crept obediently out of his pine-scented arbor, though he gathered up his books and papers with a sigh.

‘Poor Mary,’ he murmured, ‘hers is a sad fate; she can’t bear solitude, nor I society.’

As they left the sea and turned inland, Trelawny spoke of the scrap of verse he had found and tried in vain to read. Shelley nodded; his first draft of a poem was always very nearly illegible.

‘When my brain gets heated with thought,’he explained, ‘it soon boils and throws off images and words faster than I can skim them off. In the morning, out of the rude sketch, as you justly call it, I shall attempt a drawing. If you ask me why I publish what few or none will care to read, it is that the spirits I have raised haunt me until they are sent to the devil of a printer. All authors are anxious to breech their bantlings,’ he ended sadly — almost as if he had known he would not live to see that bantling breeched. The lovely lines, ‘With a Guitar, to Jane,’ were not published until after his death.

Nor was that still more perfect poem — perhaps the most perfect thing of its kind in the English language: ‘The Invitation,’ also written for Jane. Sweet, commonplace, unimportant little Jane Williams, to live forever as Shelley’s ‘best and brightest’! — extreme proof of how trivial a spark is needed to fire poetic imagination.

One memorable day they drove to Leghorn, probably in Trelawny’s little Swiss carriage, and spent a delightful morning examining the ships that crowded the waterfront.

‘The nationalities of all the world are here,’ Trelawny remarked; and as they strolled along he named the vessels one by one: ‘An English cutter, a French chasse marée, an American clipper, a Spanish tartan, an Austrian trabacolo, a Genoese felucca, a Sardinian xebec, a Neapolitan brig, a Sicilian sparanza, a Dutch galiot, a Danish snow, a Russian hermaphrodite, a Turkish sackalever, a Greek bombard. . . . What do you say to taking a closer look at that Greek ship over there, the San Spiridione? You are writing a poem about Hellas. You ought to see something of the Greeks of today. Here comes the Capitano Zarita; I know him.’

The captain was introduced. They went on board his ship; stood for a moment on the deck surveying the crew, crouched about in small groups, shrieking, gesticulating, smoking, eating, and gambling. Then the captain invited them to his cabin for coffee and pipes. They went down. ‘Over the rudder-head there was a gilt box enshrining a flaming gaudy daub of a saint, with a lamp burning before it; this was Il Padre Santo Spiridione, the ship’s godfather. The skipper crossed himself and squatted on the dirty divan. Shelley talked to him about the Greek revolution, but the captain was opposed to it; it would interrupt trade.’

By this time Shelley had seen all he wanted to of the modern Greek. ‘There is not a drop of the old Hellenic blood here,’ he muttered.

But there was another vessel that Trelawny wanted to see — and not only, one may be sure, on Shelley’s account: the American schooner.

‘You must allow,’ he said as they approached her, ‘that graceful craft was designed by a man who had a poet’s feeling for things beautiful.’

Shelley agreed. They went on board, examined the ship from stem to stern. This skipper too was most polite. He offered them ‘a chaw of real Virginia cake, and a cool drink of peach brandy.’ Shelley was persuaded to drink a glass of weak grog — the first and last he was ever known to taste — on the plea of drinking to the memory of Washington. He wrote a few lines of verse in the logbook — that logbook would be worth its weight in gold today; they bade the captain good-bye, and were soon on their way back to Pisa.

Both had enjoyed the expedition. Trelawny noted with pleasure that Shelley ‘was in high glee and full of fun. He talked of ships, sailors and the sea. . . . He regretted having wasted his life in Greek and Latin instead of the useful arts of swimming and sailoring, and resolved to have a good-sized boat forthwith. I proposed we should form a colony at the Gulf of Spezia. I said, “Get Byron to join us, and with your family and the Williamses, and books, and horses, and boats, undisturbed by the botherations of the world, we shall have all that reasonable people require.” This scheme enchanted him. . . . During the rest of our drive we had nothing but sea yarns.’

The yarns brought Shelley home more eager than ever for a boat of his own. And it must be a schooner, like the graceful American schooner they had seen in Leghorn. Williams had spoken of a friend in Genoa, a Captain Roberts, who could build boats. Trelawny must write to him at once. And Byron ought to have a boat too; Trelawny must speak to Byron at once. Byron was more likely to listen to him, as he was new; Byron was always influenced by his last acquaintance. Would Trelawny see about all this at once? Trelawny would, and did.

Byron needed no persuasion. He liked the idea of the Pisa circle transferring itself in part to Lerici or some such little seashore village for the summer. He would of course need a boat: a large comfortable yacht fitted up with every luxury. Trelawny would please communicate with Captain Roberts at once.

Captain Roberts was written to; he got permission to build the boats in the government dock yards at Genoa, and soon the two schooners were under way — a small open boat for Shelley, a larger decked one for Byron — and estimates came from Roberts.

‘Like all estimates,’ Trelawny wrote, ‘they were a delusion, which made Byron wroth but did not ruffle Shelley’s serenity. . . . Shelley’s boyish eagerness to possess the new toy was pleasant to behold. Williams was inspired with the same enthusiasm. We used to draw plans on the sands of the Arno of the exact dimensions of the boat, dividing her into compartments (the forepart was decked for stowage) and then, squatting down within the lines, I marked off the imaginary cabin. With a chart of the Mediterranean spread out before them, and with faces as grave and anxious as those of Columbus and his companions, they held councils as to the islands to be visited, coasts explored, courses steered, the amount of armament, stores, water and provisions which would be necessary.

. . . We would relate instances of the daring of the old navigators; of the extraordinary runs and enterprises conducted in open boats, of equal or less tonnage than the one we were building, from the earliest times to those of Captain Bligh; Byron, with the smile of a Mephistopheles, standing by.’

VI

For all his affectation of superiority, Byron must have been listening to these tales: his next long narrative poem, The Island, was founded on that old favorite of Trelawny’s, Bligh’s story of the mutiny of the Bounty, and he remained sincerely interested in the building of his yacht. Byron and Shelley were amateurs too ignorant to offer more than tentative suggestions, and even Edward Williams, although he considered himself a nautical authority, was willing to listen when Trelawny held forth. For, after all, a man who had not only commanded a schooner in the Indian Ocean, but taken her through typhoons and pirate attacks, ought to know what he was talking about.

Mary Shelley wrote to a friend: ‘ Trelawny came in one afternoon in high spirits, with news concerning the building of the boat, saying, “Oh, we must all embark, all live aboard; we will all ‘suffer a sea change,’ ” and dearest Shelley was delighted with the quotation, saying he must have it for the motto of his boat .’

The exact spot where this watery existence was to be enjoyed was left vague. But it had been agreed that some village on the Gulf of Spezia, where the coast rose above the low fetid Maremma, might provide a suitable setting. So one winter’s morning Trelawny and Edward Williams started off on horseback to explore the shore, hoping to find modest but comfortable accommodations for the Shelleys and Williamses and even some country house large enough for Byron’s more luxurious requirements. They were disappointed. Only a few miserable fishing villages dotted the margin of the bay. They rode on, Trelawny grumbling his usual complaint: if ‘tyranny had not paralyzed the energies and enterprise of man,’ this stretch of coast would be as prosperous as the Bay of Naples. But it was very unlike that populous shore, very desolate. They had almost given up the search when they came upon a ramshackle building called the Casa Magni, near the village of Lerici, unfurnished and forlorn enough except for its situation, which they thought Mary and Jane might consider habitable for a few months. Anyway there was nothing better for them, and nothing whatever that ‘Milord Inglese’ would tolerate for a moment.

The report was not encouraging. Mary’s heart sank. Why move to a horrible little fishing village when life was so pleasant here in Pisa! However, the question need not be decided at once, and a week of really hot weather might dissipate her reluctance. She determined to postpone the thought of a prolonged villeggiatura and make the most of urban society while it was within her reach.

In this pursuit she found, rather to her surprise, that Trelawny could be made useful as an escort. That blackbrowed piratical aspect of his was deceptive; he had a kind heart and, strange to say, no objection to society. In fact he actually liked parties! Such a contrast to poor dear Percy! When the invitations had come for one of Mrs. Beauclerc’s balls and Percy’s lamentations were, as usual, threatening to take the edge off her pleasure, and Trelawny had offered to accompany her, she had accepted, but with misgivings — unnecessary misgivings. Trelawny’s dancing was not at all bad — it seemed he had practised the latest quadrilles in London; it was amusing to have a big bad wolf for a partner, see everyone staring at him, coming to be introduced. But she found him more than a good dancing partner. Her journal noted: ’I am glad to have met with one who, among other valuable qualities, has the rare merit of exciting my imagination. . . . His company is delightful, he excites me to think.’ And her timid qualification, ‘If any evil shade the intercourse, that time will unveil,— the sun will rise or night darken all,’ seems soon to have been forgotten. She no longer thought of him as ‘a strange web which I am endeavoring to unravel,’ but accepted him with confidence as a friend; and when he took to dropping in of an evening to listen while Percy read aloud she realized with pleasure that Percy not only accepted him but, like herself, found Trelawny’s personality ‘exciting to the imagination.’

That winter Shelley began a drama, ‘undertaken,’according to Mary, ‘for the amusement of the persons who com-

posed our intimate society.’ Edward Williams’s diary notes: ‘Trelawny dined and passed the evening. We talked of a play of his singular life, and a plot to give it the air of a romance.’ Shelley’s hero was ‘a Pirate, a man of savage but noble nature’; the scene was laid in ‘an island of the Indian archipelago.’

The ‘intimate society,’ including Trelawny himself, must have been more than a little amused by the description of the Pirate: —

But amusement would have faded when Shelley struck another note and sang of lhe island as only he could sing, so that they saw it rise before their eyes out of a blue-green sea and hang there hovering like a mirage; an island ‘paved with flowers and moss,’ with a garden and a ‘glassy pool’ set in ‘old hoary stones,’ sweet with ‘unblown violets,’ and lilies peeping ‘from their bright green masks’: one lovely word flowing out of another until his hearers sighed with delight.

And Trelawny? One may be sure that Trelawny was listening with pain and longing and a sense of irrevocable loss. As Shelley read, —

he drifted back into the past. The Shelleys’ fireside vanished. He was far away, in an island garden . . . Zola bent over a glassy pool, watching her reflection come and go in the blue water. They sat together under the yakoonoo tree; she made patterns on the sandy garden path, embroidered the white sand with crimson pomegranate seeds. . . .

The drama was never finished. Shelley was extraordinarily sensitive to atmosphere; it is just possible that he felt he had cut too near reality. Anyway, the drama was left a fragment.

Another dramatic project of that winter also came to nothing. Mary wrote later: ‘Lord Byron talked vehemently of our getting up a play in his great hall of Lanfranchi; it was to be Othello. He cast the characters thus: Byron, Iago; Trelawny, Othello; Williams, Cassio; Medwin, Roderigo; Mrs. Shelley, Desdemona; Mrs. Williams, Emilia. “Who is to be our audience?” I asked. “All Pisa,” he rejoined. He recited a great portion of his part with great gusto; it exactly suited him, — he looked it too.’

Society was not to see a performance of Othello in the Palazzo Lanfranchi, but Byron entertained there a good deal and every Wednesday gave a dinner for what Medwin called the ‘convives’ of Pisa and any distinguished travelers that happened along. Even poets were made welcome — if they were not too modern; Byron considered Rogers, next to Scott, the foremost poet of the day, immeasurably superior to ‘that dirty little blackguard, Keats,’ and far above Wordsworth and the other ‘Pond Poets,’ all of them a mere ‘puddle of water worms.’ But Shelley disliked dinner parties and seldom attended them; he wrote to a friend: ‘My nerves are generally shaken to pieces by sitting up, contemplating the rest of the company making themselves vats of claret, etc., till three o’clock in the morning.’

This aversion of Shelley’s to society was growing upon him. Trelawny wrote of a day when the Poet came hurrying into the Williamses’ apartment with such a woebegone face that Jane became really alarmed.

‘Mary is threatening me!’ he cried.

They exclaimed. He explained.

‘Mary says she will have a party; there are English singers here, the Sinclairs, and she will ask them, and everyone she or you know — Oh, the horror!’

They laughed. He went on: ‘For pity go to Mary and intercede for me. I will submit to any other species of torture than that of being bored to death by idle ladies and gentlemen.’

Ned Williams kindly offered to see what he could do. Shelley remained ‘in a state of restless ecstasy; he could not read or sit’ till Ned returned.

‘The lady,’ Ned announced sadly, ‘has set her heart on having a party and will not be baulked. But,’ he added, seeing the poet’s despair, ‘it is to be limited to those here assembled and some of Count Gamba’s family; and instead of a musical feast we are to have a dinner’; and the Poet, Trelawny wrote, ‘hopped off rejoicing, making a noise I should have thought whistling but that he was ignorant of that accomplishment.’

So the weeks went by, and winter warmed to spring, and the boats were nearly done, and Byron named his the Bolivar, and Trelawny agreed to captain her, and Shelley bought Byron’s share of the smaller boat — paid eighty pounds to make her all his own, and rode to Lerici and decided the Casa Magni might do; and Mary read Greek and drove every afternoon with Countess Guiccioli, whom she found ‘a nice pretty girl, without pretensions, good-hearted and amiable,’ and saw something of that agreeable lightweight Count Gamba — Byron’s brother-in-law in the sight of Heaven, known as Pierino; and Shelley and Jane wandered in the pineta picking violets, and life was slipping along in idle pleasant fashion for all the little Pisa circle when in April their peace was broken. Clare came.