a singularly variegated landscape
Although Mary Shelley depends for
the description here principally on her own observations, Byron's representation of the Rhine
landscape as a point in nature where one might observe a symbolic
reconciliation of opposite powers in harmonious symmetry (see Childe
Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto 3, stanzas 59-61) seems to touch her conception
here. That representation, in any case, would not be far from her mind,
since it was written in the summer of
1816 and, indeed, when the Shelleys returned to England they carried the manuscript of
the poem with them.
