After a journey through France and a short stay in Switzerland, Shelley and Mary returned to England and settled at Bishopsgate, on the edge of Windsor Forest. He wrote "Alastor", his first notable poem, in the autumn of 1815. In May, 1816, Shelley and Mary visited Geneva, where they met the British poet George Gordon, Lord Byron. In the poems "Mont Blanc" and "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" Shelley left a poetic record of his exciting impressions of that period.
In September, 1816, he and Mary returned to England, where he wrote parts of "Prince Athanase", a portion of "Rosalind and Helen", and the long narrative poem "Laon and Cythna". On Nov. 9, 1816, Harriet Westbrook Shelley committed suicide. Shelley made Mary his lawful wife on Dec. 30, 1816. In the spring of 1818, fearing that he had a pulmonary disease, Shelley went to Italy with his wife and their two children.
During the summer of 1818, while living in Lucca, Shelley finished "Rosalind and Helen" and translated the Greek philosopher Plato's dialogue Symposium, under the title The Banquet. In September and October, 1818, he wrote at Este the first act of the great lyrical drama, Prometheus Unbound. A year later he completed the tragedy The Cenci. He produced also a prose treatise, entitled A Philosophical View of Reform, and "The Mask of Anarchy", a poetical appeal to his countrymen written on the occasion of the Peterloo Massacre (Aug. 16, 1819). In addition, he translated the tragedy Cyclops by the Greek poet and dramatist Euripides and wrote some of his best lyric poems, including "Ode to the West Wind", during that year.
In January, 1820, the Shelley household moved to Pisa, where the poet spent most of the remainder of his life. During the following year his chief writings included the verse "Letter to Maria Gisborne", a translation from the Greek of the so-called "Homeric Hymn to Mercury", a symbolical narrative entitled "The Witch of Atlas", and the satirical drama Oedipus Tyrannus or Swellfoot the Tyrant.
In 1821 Shelley formed an intense platonic friendship with a young Italian noblewoman, the Contessina Emilia Viviani, who inspired his transcendental love poem "Epipsychidion". Later in the year he wrote the elegy Adonais in memory of the British poet John Keats; in the late summer and autumn he composed the lyrical drama Hellas, which was inspired by the movement for national independence in Greece. Shelley moved in April, 1822, to a primitive house near Lerici, on the shore of the Gulf of Spezia. Early in July Shelley sailed from Lerici to Leghorn in a small schooner named Ariel; on July 8, during the return voyage, the craft was destroyed in a violent squall and he was drowned. His body. which was thrown up on the shore of Viareggio, was burned under the supervision of Byron, and the ashes were buried in Rome.
