Salt Lake Telegram | 1939-01-28 | Page 12 | Strange as it Seems

strange as It Seems By John IIlx PNR4 Of5 BROTHERS vivJ COINCIDENCE OF DROWNINGS The life of Percy Bysshe Shelley. British poet, was singularly doggsd by what has been called a "hydropathic fatality" a strange sequence of deaths by drowning. His first wife. Harriet Westbrook. threw herself Into the Serpentine in London and waa drowned early In November, 1816. The month before, Fanny Wolletonecraft, half-sister of his second wife, committed suicide by drowning, aaeertedly because she waa "hopelessly in love with Shelley." Shel-ley." Hia second wife'a mother, the famous Mary Wolletonecraft, had attempted aulcide by drowning In 1795. Aa if foreseeing a similar fate for himself, Shelley once wrote: "Till death like sleep might steal on ma And I might feel In the warm air My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea Breathe o'er my dying brain ita last monotony." On July I. 1822, Shelley's yacht, Ariel, sank in the bay of Speizia. Italy, and he, too, met death by drowning. His body waa washed ashore and the remaina cremated. Strange aa It aeems, for some unexplained reason hia heart refuaed to burn. It waa snatched from tha flames, returned re-turned to England and buried.