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 years, she plucked up courage and resumed the task. Shelley, however absorbed by the creative ardour of his Annus mirabilis, could not but observe that his wife's 'spirits continued wretchedly depressed' (5 August 1819); and though masculine enough to resent the fact at times more than pity it, he was human enough to persevere in that habit of co-operative reading and writing which is one of the finest traits of his married life. 'I write in the morning,' his wife testifies, 'read Latin till 2, when we dine; then I read some English book, and two cantos of Dante with Shelley [Footnote: Letter to Mrs. Hunt, 28 August 1819.]--a fair average, no doubt, of the homely aspect of the great days which produced The Cenci and Prometheus.

On the 12th November, in Florence, the birth of a second son, Percy Florence Shelley, helped Mary out of her sense of bereavement. Subsequent letters still occasionally admit 'low spirits'. But the entries in the Journal make it clear that the year 1819-20 was one of the most pleasantly industrious of her life. Not Dante only, but a motley series of books, great and small, ancient and modern, English and foreign, bespoke her attention. Not content with Latin, and the extemporized translations which Shelley could give her of Plato's Republic, she started Greek in 1820, and soon came to delight in it. And again she thought of original composition. 'Write', 'work,'--the words now occur daily in her Journal. These must mainly refer to the long historical novel, which she had planned, as early as 1819, [Footnote: She had 'thought of it' at Marlow, as appears from her letter to Mrs. Gisborne, 30 June 1821 (in Mrs. Marshall, i. p. 291); but the materials for it were not found before the stay at Naples, and it was not actually begun 'till a year afterwards, at Pisa' (ibid.).] under the title of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca, and which was not published until 1823, as Valperga. It was indeed a laborious task. The novel 'illustrative of the manners of the Middle Ages in Italy' had to be 'raked out of fifty old books', as Shelley said. [Footnote: Letter to T. L. Peacock, November 1820.]

But heavy as the undertaking must have been, it certainly did not engross all the activities of Shelley's wife in this period. And it seems highly probable that the two little mythological dramas which we here publish belong to this same year 1820.

The evidence for this date is as follows. Shelley's lyrics, which these dramas include, were published by his wife (Posthumous Poems, 1824) among the 'poems written in 1820'. Another composition, in blank verse, curiously similar to Mary's own work, entitled Orpheus, has been allotted by Dr. Garnett (Relics of Shelley, 1862) to the same category.