And an unquiet drooping of the eye,

As if its lid were charged with unshed tears.
What could her grief be?—she had all she loved,
And he who had so loved her was not there
To trouble with bad hopes, or evil wish,
Or ill-repressed affliction, her pure thoughts.
What could her grief be?—she had loved him not,
Nor given him cause to deem himself beloved,
Nor could he be a part of that which preyed
Upon her mind-a spectre of the past.

Lord Byron then describes his own marriage, and the lamentable change which ensued, still through the seeming dream :

my

A change came o'er the spirit of dream-
The wanderer was returned.-I saw him stand
Before an altar-with a gentle bride;

Her face was fair, but was not that which made
The starlight of his boyhood;-as he stood
Even at the altar, o'er his brow there came
The selfsame aspect, and the quivering shock
That in the antique Oratory shook
His bosom in its solitude; and then—
As in that hour-a moment o'er his face
The tablet of unutterable thoughts
Was traced-and then it faded as it came,
And he stood calm and quiet, and he spoke
The fitting vows, but heard not his own words,
And all things reeled around him; he could see

Not that which was, nor that which should have been-
But the old mansion, and the accustomed hall,
And the remembered chambers, and the place,
The day, the hour, the sun-shine, and the shade,
All things pertaining to that place and hour,
And her who was his destiny, came back,
And thrust themselves between him and the light:
What business had they there at such a time?

A change came o'er the spirit of my dream.—
The lady of his love;-oh! she was changed
As by the sickness of the soul; her mind

Had wandered from its dwelling, and her eyes
They had not their own lustre, but the look
Which is not of the earth; she was become
The queen of a fantastic realm; her thoughts
Were combinations of disjointed things,
And forms impalpable, and unperceived
Of others' sight, familiar were to hers.

And this the world calls frenzy; but the wise
Have a far deeper madness, and the glance
Of melancholy is a fearful gift;

What is it but the telescope of truth,

Which strips the distance of its phantasies,
And brings life near in utter nakedness,

Making the cold reality too real?

If any doubt could be entertained, as to the identity of the dreamer and the bard, the following passage would remove it:

A change came o'er the spirit of my dream.-
The wanderer was alone as heretofore,
The beings which surrounded him were gone,
Or were at war with him; he was a mark
For blight and desolation, compassed round
With Hatred and Contention; Pain was mixed
In all which was served up to him, until,
Like to the Pontic monarch of old days,
He fed on poisons, and they had no power,

But were a kind of nutriment; he lived

Through that which had been death to many men,

And made him friends of mountains: with the stars

And the quick Spirit of the Universe

He held his dialogues and they did teach

To him the magic of their mysteries;
To him the book of Night was opened wide,
And voices from the deep abyss revealed
A marvel and a secret-Be it so.

My dream was past; it had no further change.

It was of a strange order, that the doom

Of these two creatures should be thus traced out
Almost like a reality-the one

To end in madness-both in misery.

Lord Byron passed his time at Geneva in a very retired manner. Madame de Stael, who was then living at Coppel, had very friendly intentions towards him; but, notwithstanding this feeling, she was the cause of very great pain to him. She interfered in the quarrel between him and Lady Byron; and, as she was not perhaps the fittest person in the world for a mediator, she entirely failed of success. She was

rather inclined to take Lady Byron's side, and this, of course, was highly unpalatable to his lordship, who had by this time so often repeated that he was 'more sinned against than sinning,' that he even believed it himself. He had a mortal hatred against blue-stockingsand who can blame him? Madame de Stael, perhaps, united in her own person all the most striking as well as the most disagreeable parts of blue-stockingism. She invited Lord Byron, upon more occasions than one, to her parties, when they were filled with English people, solely for the purpose of showing him up; and once went so far as to read him a long lecture before such a company on the immorality of his life.

If her charges had been true, this method of preferring them would have been sufficiently injudicious on her part and painful to his lordship; but they were in fact mere inventions-some so absurd that no one could really believe them; others so trifling, that, if they had been true, the schooling might have been spared. Lord Byron could not forgive this. He learned, also, that his actions were watched, and that the absurd reports to which the misrepresentations of these people gave rise were all repeated at Madame de Stael's parties; that himself and his supposed vices formed a principal subject of the conversation there; and that they were afterwards magnified and horrified in all possible shapes for the English markets.

Lord Byron took no other vengeance on Madame de Stael, for all the wrongs of which she had been, perhaps, the unwitting occasion, than by saying that if she had talked less she would have written better, and by praising her husband, M. Rocca, of whom Madame de Stael was a little ashamed, though without the slightest reason, and whose name she declined to bear. He was a very sensible man, and Lord Byron said he could say good things in a very agreeeable manner. It was he who, when Lord Byron was regretting that the rocks of Meilleirie (rendered, as his lordship thought, sacred, by Rousseau's having connected with them the loves of St. Preux and his Julie) had been cut away to make a road, replied that a good road was better than all the recollections in the world.'

Perhaps Lord Byron would have been content with this revenge, and

would have continued to pursue his amusement of sailing round the beautiful lake of Geneva. Happy in the society of a very few friends, among whom Mr. Shelley and Mr. Hobhouse were the highest in his estimation, he might have bid defiance to the little calumnies of Madame de Stael and her gossips, but that he found their lies reached England, and had found their way into the newspapers. Fond as he was of notoriety—and he was fond of it to a passion-this was not the sort of fame that he coveted. He learned that the senseless stories were believed as well as circulated, and that he was looked upon as little better than a very worthless person, who, after trying all modes of extravagance, had settled down into mere indolence and vice.

No man was more sensitive of the opinion of others than Lord Byron; and perhaps no man ever took greater pains to conceal this disposition, which he himself knew was a weakness. Upon such a mind, therefore, it may be imagined that the repetition of the senseless calumnies which had got abroad in England with respect to him acted with an almost torturing effect. He had been living in perfect retirement, and in a most temperate and harmless manner, when, on a sudden, he learned that all sorts of crime and dissipation were even then imputed to him. His rage was beyond bounds; and he said, in one of those childish transports into which he was sometimes betrayed, that his enemies in England should not say, nor should the people of England believe, these things of him without a cause. He gave orders for removing from Switzerland, and went to Venice, where he executed his threat by plunging into all the excesses for which that city affords such unlimited opportunities.

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CHAPTER VII.

LORD BYRON'S going to Venice was a piece of wanton foolery ; but it was such as could hardly be surprising in one who, from youth to manhood, had been, in the widest sense of the phrase, an enfant gaté. He threw himself recklessly into all sorts of excesses, and, with the exception of the years immediately preceding his travels into the East, when he was a mad rake upon town, he never gave way to so much profligacy. He gamed, drank, and intrigued, as much at least as any other person in Venice, and this is saying not a little against him... His reputation had preceded him, and his fame as a poet had been

already sufficiently spread in Italy by means of translations of his best poems. He was a sort of rage, and particularly with old women of fashion-a race as profligate as they are disagreeable and who in Venice are, if possible, a thousand times worse than in any other place. Among the many affairs of gallantry in which Lord Byron had the credit of being engaged none made so much noise as that with a woman who was whimsically enough called his Fornarina. An engraving of her is about in England, and is well known, although it has never been published. This woman was a baker's wife, and a perfect specimen of Venetian beauty. Her hair and eyes were black; her complexion pale, but quite clear; her teeth of exquisite whiteness; and the usual expression of her face was of that languid melancholy description which bespeaks an intensely passionate temperament. Lord Byron was not very fond of her: he used to say that he liked to make love-not to be made love to. This woman was very ardently attached to him, and not only insisted upon taking up her abode in his house, but in keeping every other woman out of it. She was inconceivably jealous; and being, besides, as great a vixen as ever lived, her passion sometimes led her to very odd vagaries. Of the lowest order of the Venetians, and possessing sentiments which, however strong, were not much more refined than her language, she used to give herself up to abusing every woman who became an object of her suspicion, and this never in choice Italian.'

One day two English ladies, who were intimate acquaintances of Lord Byron, and who had heard a great deal of this woman-then the lown talk, at least among the English residents at Venice-went in their gondola to Lord Byron's palazzo, for the purpose of seeing her. The Fornarina, who was upon the look-out, discovered that the gondola contained ladies; and met the gondolier, who was landing to inquire whether Lord Byron was at home. She answered his questions very vehemently-said his lordship was not at home-and that, it he were, he would not wish to be troubled with visitors. She was proceeding in her own peculiar style, which was rather eloquent than polished, and which the English ladies were so fortunate as not to understand, when the gondolier, whose ears were more familiar with the Fornarina's slang, desired her to desist. She, however, was very much disposed to continue, and seemed inclined to pull caps with her supposed rivals, until the gondolier silenced her effectually, and made her retreat into the house, by telling her that one of the ladies was the wife of a gentleman of high diplomatic authority; and the Venetians have always too great an awe of such persons to enter into a con