… incapacity & timidity always prevented my mingling in the nightly conversations of Diodati – they were as it were entirely tête-a-tête between my Shelley & Albe & thus as I have said – when Albe speaks & Shelley does not answer, it is as thunder without rain, The form of the sun without heat or light, as any familiar object might be shorn of its dearest & best attribute – & I listen with an unspeakable melancholy – that is not yet all pain. –
Mary Shelley’s journal entry, on Shelley and Byron (October 1822)
