The Birmingham age-herald., 1917-01-21
Shelley and Claire CIairmont


 Edith Wyatt in the North American
 Review.
 One may hope that perhaps few women are subjected to such miseries as Claire Clairmont had known. In these Shelley had sustained her and had seen her in her noblest and best moods and her most violent and unlovIy manifestations. She had remained dear to him; and obviously she would always have remained dear to him. There is something honorable to the generosity and staunchness of human nature in the circumstance.
 If her fortunes were hard, the tale of her life is that of a woman of deeply attaching quality. In her most outlawed and poverty stricken years of social dis approval for her one irregular alliance with Byron men of standing repeatedly wished to marry her. Shelley remem- bered her with a double benefaction in his will. Her old pupils loved her. In Florence and in Paris, where she spent most of her career she was long rernem- bered after her death at 81 for her kindness and generosity.
 More than those of any other group presented chiefly in personal letters that can recall stand out as though rend- cred for us by the hand of some master of fiction. They become so vivid to us that we look back on those care-free
  when little William read his lecture on ''The Influence of Government on the Character of a People and the girls danced and sang an hour"-with that humbled sence of sudden tears and amusement one experiences in the quick poetry of some actual human memory. This yividness is chiefly because of the native expressiveness of the letter writers. But it is partly for another reason One at least of the tales we follow-that of the tragedy of Allegra and Claire-is a great human story. It has the grand manner of the last simplicity. It has an elemental appeal to the sympathies com mon to all mankind. Allegra is of those beautiful children of fable who are drowned in the waves of the passion of men and women. She haunts the i'm agination like the Princess in the Tower, like the slain children of Medea, and the far-off voice of young Itylus dead:
 "Who has rememb cred me-who has for- gotten?"
 And in her mothers hopeless longing for her there is the tone of an emotion infinitely stirring, truly deep as the sea. As the helper by the wayside in Claire and Allegra's Journey through base distinction especially noble. Immemor- lially the world has driven Hagar and Ishmael into the desert. Shelley was, think, the first brother of mankind to go forth with the grace ol A Hdeui oi sympathy as their fellow traveller. Others have exhorted these outcasts. But he was better than their exhorter. He was their companion.
 Trelawney tells us that when In the same year with Allegra's death Shelley drowned body was found, and placed upon a pyre upon the coast at Massa' Byron could not face the scena He with drew to the beach and swan off to the Bolivar his vessel, in which he had been searching for the victims of the lost Ariel. Leigh Hunt remained in his carriage, Only Trelawney waited through the hnal rites beside the ashes of the dead poet he had loved so well. But what sur prised us all," he says, was that the heart remained entire
 It had held long, of course the fatal waters of the ocean. But the clrcum- stance may well serve us as symbol. After 100 years, as we read now the let ters of the dead men and women who lived and loved and suffered in his pres ence, many a strange wind of doctrine, many a vanished fashion of thought and speech sings to us with beauty across their thrilling histories. But the heart of Shelley has lived un- consumed in the ashes.