The biographer says of Harriet, "If words of tender affection and
motherly pride proved the reality of love, then undoubtedly she loved her
firstborn child." That is, if mere empty words can prove it, it stands
proved--and in this way, without committing himself, he gives the reader
a chance to infer that there isn't any extant evidence but words, and
that he doesn't take much stock in them. How seldom he shows his hand!
He is always lurking behind a non-committal "if" or something of that
kind; always gliding and dodging around, distributing colorless poison
here and there and everywhere, but always leaving himself in a position
to say that his language will be found innocuous if taken to pieces and
examined. He clearly exhibits a steady and never-relaxing purpose to
make Harriet the scapegoat for her husband's first great sin--but it is
in the general view that this is revealed, not in the details. His
insidious literature is like blue water; you know what it is that makes
it blue, but you cannot produce and verify any detail of the cloud of
microscopic dust in it that does it. Your adversary can dip up a
glassful and show you that it is pure white and you cannot deny it; and
he can dip the lake dry, glass by glass, and show that every glassful is
white, and prove it to any one's eye--and yet that lake was blue and you
can swear it. This book is blue--with slander in solution.

Let the reader examine, for example, the paragraph of comment which
immediately follows the letter containing Shelley's self-exposure which
we have been considering. This is it. One should inspect the individual
sentences as they go by, then pass them in procession and review the
cake-walk as a whole:

"Shelley's happiness in his home, as is evident from this
pathetic letter, had been fatally stricken; it is evident,