I believed that all this morbid feeling would vanish if the chord of
sympathy between him and his countrymen were touched. But my persuasions
were vain, the mind could not be bent from its natural inclination.
Shelley shrunk instinctively from portraying human passion, with its
mixture of good and evil, of disappointment and disquiet. Such opened
again the wounds of his own heart; and he loved to shelter himself
rather in the airiest flights of fancy, forgetting love and hate, and
regret and lost hope, in such imaginations as borrowed their hues from
sunrise or sunset, from the yellow moonshine or paly twilight, from the
aspect of the far ocean or the shadows of the woods,--which celebrated
the singing of the winds among the pines, the flow of a murmuring
stream, and the thousand harmonious sounds which Nature creates in her
solitudes. These are the materials which form the "Witch of Atlas": it
is a brilliant congregation of ideas such as his senses gathered, and
his fancy coloured, during his rambles in the sunny land he so much
loved.

NOTE ON OEDIPUS TYRANNUS, BY MRS. SHELLEY.

In the brief journal I kept in those days, I find recorded, in August,
1820, Shelley 'begins "Swellfoot the Tyrant", suggested by the pigs at
the fair of San Giuliano.' This was the period of Queen Caroline's
landing in England, and the struggles made by George IV to get rid of
her claims; which failing, Lord Castlereagh placed the "Green Bag" on
the table of the House of Commons, demanding in the King's name that an
enquiry should be instituted into his wife's conduct. These
circumstances were the theme of all conversation among the English. We
were then at the Baths of San Giuliano. A friend came to visit us on the
day when a fair was held in the square, beneath our windows: Shelley