After the badly decomposed body of the English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley had washed ashore 10 days after he drowned at sea, his body had to be disinterred and cremated on the beach in Viareggio where it was found. His friends, the poets Lord Byron and Leigh Hunt and Captain Edward John Trelawny, had a portable crematorium built for him. According to Trelawny’s account: ‘The fire was so fierce as to produce a white heat on the iron, and to reduce its contents to grey ashes. The only portions that were not consumed were some fragments of bones, the jaw, and the skull, but what surprised us all was that the heart remained entire. In snatching this relic from the fiery furnace my hand was severely burnt.’ The possession of the poet’s heart was then contested. Trelawny gave the heart to Leigh Hunt, after he supposedly ‘begged’ for it. When Mary wrote to Hunt to ask him for it, he refused, telling her that his love for his friend negated ‘the claims of any other love’. Byron weighed in and eventually Hunt gave Mary the heart, who carried it with her in a silken shroud everywhere she went for the rest of her life.
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'Home is where the heart is,' is a proverb meaning that, wherever a person is and whomever they are with, their home and family provide the greatest sense of comfort and emotional bond.
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