WHERE SHELLEY DIED

Waipa Post, Volume XXIV, Issue 1687, 17 November 1925, Page 2

WHERE SHELLEY DIED

One of the great romantic tragedies of the world is centred about Casa. Magni, a shabby white stone house with closed shutters, on the very edge of the sea (writes Beckley Wilson in the “Daily Mail”). For the sea is the Gulf of Spezia, where a century ago Percy Shelley was drowned with his companion, clutching a copy of Sophocles. The house is to-day very much as Shelley left it, and as it was described by Leigh Hunt and Byron and Trelawney. In its thick masonry and heavy shutters, its dark stone staircases) and secret '.'chambers’, 'it seems burdened with brooding memories. It had a strange history even before the Shelleys came to live in it. Although owned to-day by an English lady, it is untenanted for more than half the year. You stand out on the famous terrace level with the first floor, where Mary Shelley (authoress cf “Frankenstein”) and Jane Walliams and Clare Clairmont stood fearfully gazing seaward that fatal July day while the storm was raging. What a household! It w r as into this brilliant circle that scarce a week before the poet had made his oft-described return from his sea bath, stark-naked like Ariel, oblivious of his clothes. Here he had rushed about in the night awakened from a dream so terrible that it froze the blood of his hearers. A corner of the ground floor is now let as a little estaminet —ißel Vedere a youthful proprietor calls it. And there is actually a “Caffe Chelley” hard by the village of San Terenzo (the Shelley circle always wrote, it Sant Arenza and Shelley’s editors still continue the blunder), and there they tell you more. I even found an old man who recited for me “Quando le voci dolci vaniscono,” (When soft voices die) and the beautiful lines of Lerici. But there are growing to be so many tourists—0, so many tourists to San Terenzo, who gather quantities of laurel which grows in such profusion behind the Casa Magni. And one of these tourists —from Chicago—had show'n the 'padrone of the Cafe Chelley how to mix and dispense—o, horrors!—a Shelley cocktail. Yet it may be—who knows?—that Shelley would have smiled and is smiling now. One salutes genius as one can, in one’s own fashion. Perhaps if the author of “•Prometheus Unbound” had drunk cocktails he —but this is fo enter on a speculation as deep as the waters which engulfed his frail, yet mighty, spirit.