Richard Edgcumbe

‘Intesi, che a cosi fatto tormento Enno dannati i peccator carnali Che la ragion sommettono al talento.’ Inferno, Canto V., 37-39.

WHAT THE POEMS REVEAL

‘Every author in some degree portrays himself in his works, even be it against his will.’—Goethe.

Lady Byron has expressed her opinion that almost every incident in Byron’s poems was drawn from his personal experience. In a letter to Lady Anne Barnard, written two years after the separation, she says:

‘In regard to [Byron’s] poetry, egotism is the vital principle of his imagination, which it is difficult for him to kindle on any subject with which his own character and interests are not identified; but by the introduction of fictitious incidents, by change of scene or time, he has enveloped his poetical disclosures in a system impenetrable except to a very few.’

Byron himself has told us in ‘Don Juan’ that his music ‘has some mystic diapasons, with much which could not be appreciated in any manner by the uninitiated.’ In a letter to John Murray (August 23, 1821), he says: ‘Almost all “Don Juan” is real life, either my own or from people I knew.’

It is no exaggeration to say that in Byron’s poems some of the mysterious incidents in his life are plainly revealed. For example, ‘Childe Harold,’ ‘The Giaour,’ ‘The Bride of Abydos,’ ‘The Corsair,’ ‘Lara,’ ‘The Dream,’ ‘Manfred,’ ‘Don Juan,’ and several of the smaller pieces, all disclose episodes connected with his own personal experience. In the so-called ‘Fugitive Pieces’ we get a glimpse of his school life and friendships; his pursuits during the time that he resided with his mother at Southwell; and his introduction to Cambridge. In the ‘Hours of Idleness’ we are introduced to Mary Chaworth, after her marriage and the ruin of his hopes.

In the verse ‘Remembrance’ we realize that the dawn of his life is overcast. We see, from some verses written in 1808, how, three years after that marriage, he was still the victim of a fatal infatuation:

‘I deem’d that Time, I deem’d that Pride,
Had quench’d at length my boyish flame;
Nor knew, till seated by thy side,
My heart in all—save hope—the same.’

After lingering for three months in the neighbourhood of the woman whom he so unwisely loved, he finally resolved to break the chain:

‘In flight I shall be surely wise,
Escaping from temptation’s snare;
I cannot view my Paradise
Without the wish of dwelling there.’

When about to leave England, in vain pursuit of the happiness he had lost, he addresses passionate verses to Mary Chaworth:

‘And I must from this land be gone,
Because I cannot love but one.’

He tells her that he has had love passages with another woman, in the vain hope of destroying the love of his life:

‘But some unconquerable spell
Forbade my bleeding breast to own
A kindred care for aught but one.’

He wished to say farewell, but dared not trust himself. In the cantos of ‘Childe Harold,’ written during his absence, he recurs to the subject nearest to his heart. He says that before leaving Newstead—

‘Oft-times in his maddest mirthful mood
Strange pangs would flash along Childe Harold’s brow,
As if the memory of some deadly feud
Or disappointed passion lurked below:
But this none knew, nor haply cared to know.’

He mentions his mother, from whom he dreaded to part, and his sister Augusta, whom he loved, but had not seen for some time. After his return to England in 1811, he wrote the ‘Thyrza’ poems, and added some stanzas to ‘Childe Harold,’ wherein he expresses a hope that the separation between himself and Mary Chaworth may not be eternal. He then pours out the sorrows of his heart to Francis Hodgson. We cannot doubt that the ‘Lines written beneath a Picture,’ composed at Athens in January, 1811,

‘Dear object of defeated care!
Though now of Love and thee bereft,’

referred to Mary Chaworth, for he mentions the deathblow of his hope. In the ‘Epistle to a Friend,’ Byron mentions the effect which a chance meeting with Mary had upon him, causing him to realize that ‘Time had not made him love the less.’

The poems that have puzzled the commentator most were those which Byron addressed to ‘Thyrza’—a mysterious personage, whose identity has not hitherto been discovered. The present writer proposes to enter fully, and, he hopes, impartially, into the subject, trusting that the conclusions at which he has arrived may ultimately be endorsed by others who have given their serious attention to the question at issue.

In any attempt to unravel the mystery of the ‘Thyrza’ poems, it will be necessary to consider, not only the circumstances in which they were written, but also those associations of Byron’s youth which inspired a love that endured throughout his life.

Byron’s attachment to his distant cousin, Mary Anne Chaworth, is well known. We know that his boyish love was not returned, and that the young heiress of Annesley married, in 1805, Mr. John Musters, of Colwick, in the neighbourhood of Nottingham. In order to account for these love-poems, it has been suggested that, subsequent to this marriage, Byron fell in love with some incognita, whose identity has never been established, and who died soon after his return to England in 1811.

We are unable to concur with so simple a solution of the mystery, for the following reasons: It will be remembered that shortly after Mary Chaworth’s marriage Byron entered Trinity College, Cambridge, where he formed a romantic attachment to a young chorister, named Edleston, whose life he had saved from drowning. Writing to Miss Elizabeth Pigot on June 30, 1807, Byron says:

‘I quit Cambridge with very little regret, because our set are vanished, and my musical protÉgÉ (Edleston), before mentioned, has left the choir, and is stationed in a mercantile house of considerable eminence in the Metropolis. You may have heard me observe he is, exactly to an hour, two years younger than myself. I found him grown considerably, and, as you may suppose, very glad to see his former Patron.[30] He is nearly my height, very thin, very fair complexion, dark eyes, and light locks.

‘My opinion of his mind you already know; I hope I shall never have occasion to change it.’

On July 5, 1807, Byron again wrote to Miss Pigot:

‘At this moment I write with a bottle of claret in my head and tears in my eyes; for I have just parted with my “Cornelian,”[31] who spent the evening with me. As it was our last interview, I postponed my engagement to devote the hours of the Sabbath to friendship: Edleston and I have separated for the present, and my mind is a chaos of hope and sorrow.... I rejoice to hear you are interested in my protÉgÉ; he has been my almost constant associate since October, 1805, when I entered Trinity College. His voice first attracted my attention, his countenance fixed it, and his manner attached me to him for ever. He departs for a mercantile house in Town in October, and we shall probably not meet till the expiration of my minority, when I shall leave to his decision, either entering as a partner through my interest, or residing with me altogether. Of course he would, in his present frame of mind, prefer the latter, but he may alter his opinion previous to that period; however, he shall have his choice. I certainly love him more than any human being, and neither time nor distance have had the least effect on my (in general) changeable disposition. In short, we shall put Lady E. Butler and Miss Ponsonby (the “Ladies of Llangollen,” as they were called) to the blush, Pylades and Orestes out of countenance, and want nothing but a catastrophe like Nisus and Euryalus, to give Jonathan and David the “go by.” He certainly is perhaps more attached to me than even I am in return. During the whole of my residence at Cambridge we met every day, summer and winter, without passing one tiresome moment, and separated each time with increasing reluctance. I hope you will one day see us together. He is the only being I esteem, though I like many.’

This letter shows the depth of the boyish affection that had sprung up between two lads with little experience of life. The attachment on both sides was sincere, but not more so than many similar boy friendships, which, alas! fade away under the chilling influences of time and circumstance. In this case the ‘Cornelian Heart’ that had sparkled with the tears of Edleston, and which, in the fervour of his feelings, Byron had suspended round his neck, was, not long afterwards, transferred to Miss Elizabeth Pigot.

A vague notion seems to prevail that the inspiration of these ‘Thyrza’ poems is in some way connected with Edleston. This idea seems to have arisen from Byron’s allusion to a pledge of affection given in better days:

‘Thou bitter pledge! thou mournful token!’

We cannot accept this theory, being of opinion, not lightly formed, that the ‘bitter pledge’ referred to had a far deeper and a more lasting significance than ever could have belonged to ‘the Cornelian heart that was broken.’

In later years, it will be remembered, Byron told Medwin that, shortly after his arrival at Cambridge, he fell into habits of dissipation, in order to drown the remembrance of a hopeless passion for Mary Chaworth. That Mary Chaworth held his affections at that time is beyond question. She also had given Byron ‘a token,’ which was still in his possession when the ‘Thyrza’ poems were written; whereas Edleston’s gift had passed to other hands. The following anecdote, related by the Countess Guiccioli, may be accepted on Byron’s authority:

‘One day (while Byron and Musters were bathing in the Trent—a river that runs through the grounds of Colwick) Mr. Musters perceived a ring among Lord Byron’s clothes, left on the bank. To see and take possession of it was the affair of a moment. Musters had recognized it as having belonged to Miss Chaworth. Lord Byron claimed it, but Musters would not restore the ring. High words were exchanged. On returning to the house, Musters jumped on a horse, and galloped off to ask an explanation from Miss Chaworth, who, being forced to confess that Lord Byron wore the ring with her consent, felt obliged to make amends to Musters, by promising to declare immediately her engagement with him.’

It is therefore probable that the ‘dear simple gift,’ of the first draft, was the ring which Mary Chaworth had given to her boy lover in 1804, and that the words we have quoted had no connection whatever with young Edleston.

Assuming that the ‘Thyrza’ poems were addressed to a woman—and there is abundant proof of this—it is remarkable that, neither in the whole course of his correspondence with his friends, nor from any source whatever, can any traces be found of any other serious attachment which would account for the poems in question. Between the date of the marriage, in 1805, and the autumn of 1808, Byron and Mary Chaworth had not met. It will be remembered that in the autumn—only eight months before he left England with Hobhouse—Byron met Mary Chaworth at dinner in her own home. The effect of that meeting, which he has himself described, shows the depth of his feelings, and precludes the idea that he could at that time have been deeply interested in anyone else. After that meeting Byron remained three months in the neighbourhood of Annesley; and it may be inferred that an intimacy sprang up between them, which was broken off somewhat abruptly by Mary’s husband. There are traces of this in ‘Lara.’

At the end of November, 1808, Byron writes from Newstead to his sister:

‘I am living here alone, which suits my inclination better than society of any kind.... I am a very unlucky fellow, for I think I had naturally not a bad heart; but it has been so bent, twisted, and trampled on, that it has now become as hard as a Highlander’s heelpiece.’

A fortnight later he writes to Hanson, his agent, and talks of either marrying for money or blowing his brains out. It was then that he wrote those verses addressed to Mary Chaworth:

‘When man, expell’d from Eden’s bowers,
A moment linger’d near the gate,
Each scene recall’d the vanish’d hours,
And bade him curse his future fate.
‘In flight I shall be surely wise,
Escaping from temptation’s snare;
I cannot view my Paradise
Without the wish of dwelling there.’

On January 25, 1809, Byron returned to London. It is hard to believe that during those three months Byron did not often meet the lady of his love. It is more than probable that the old friendship between them had been renewed, since there is evidence to prove that, after Byron had taken his seat in the House of Lords on March 13, 1809, he confided his Parliamentary robes to Mary Chaworth’s safe-keeping, a circumstance which suggests a certain amount of neighbourly friendship.

In May, Byron again visited Newstead, where he entertained Matthews and some of his college friends. That sÉrÉnade indiscrÈte,

‘’Tis done—and shivering in the gale,’

which was addressed to Mary Chaworth from Falmouth on, or about, June 22, shows the state of his feelings towards her; but she does not seem to have given him any encouragement, and there was no correspondence between them during Byron’s absence from England. Between July 2, 1809, and July 15, 1811, Byron’s thoughts were fully occupied in other directions. His distractions, which may be traced in his writings, were, however, not sufficient to crush out the remembrance of that fatal infatuation. When, in 1811, he returned to England, it was without pleasure, and without the faintest hope of any renewal of an intimacy which Mary Chaworth had broken off for both their sakes. He was in no hurry to visit Newstead, where his mother anxiously awaited him, and dawdled about town, under various pretexts, until the first week in August, when he heard of his mother’s serious illness. Before Byron reached Newstead his mother had died. He seems to have heard of her illness one day, and of her death on the day following. Although there had long been a certain estrangement between them, all was now forgotten, and Byron felt his mother’s death acutely.

It was at this time that he wrote to his friend Scrope Davies:

‘Some curse hangs over me and mine. My mother lies a corpse in this house; one of my best friends (Charles Skinner Matthews) is drowned in a ditch. What can I say, or think, or do? I received a letter from him the day before yesterday.... Come to me, Scrope; I am almost desolate—left almost alone in the world.’

In that gloomy frame of mind, in the solitude of a ruin—for Newstead at that time was but little better than a ruin—Byron, on August 12, drew up some directions for his will, in which he desired to be buried in the garden at Newstead, by the side of his favourite dog Boatswain.

On the same day he wrote to Dallas, who was superintending the printing of the first and second cantos of ‘Childe Harold’:

‘Peace be with the dead! Regret cannot wake them. With a sigh to the departed, let us resume the dull business of life, in the certainty that we also shall have our repose. Besides her who gave me being, I have lost more than one who made that being tolerable. Matthews, a man of the first talents, and also not the worst of my narrow circle, has perished miserably in the muddy waves of the Cam, always fatal to genius; my poor schoolfellow, Wingfield, at Coimbra—within a month; and whilst I had heard from all three, but not seen one.... But let this pass; we shall all one day pass along with the rest. The world is too full of such things, and our very sorrow is selfish.... I am already too familiar with the dead. It is strange that I look on the skulls which stand beside me (I have always had four in my study) without emotion, but I cannot strip the features of those I have known of their fleshy covering, even in idea, without a hideous sensation; but the worms are less ceremonious. Surely, the Romans did well when they burned the dead.’

The writer of this letter was in his twenty-fourth year!

Ten days later Byron writes to Hodgson:

‘Indeed the blows followed each other so rapidly that I am yet stupid from the shock; and though I do eat, and drink, and talk, and even laugh at times, yet I can hardly persuade myself that I am awake, did not every morning convince me mournfully to the contrary. I shall now waive the subject, the dead are at rest, and none but the dead can be so.... I am solitary, and I never felt solitude irksome before.’

At about the same date, in a letter to Dallas, Byron writes:

‘At three-and-twenty I am left alone, and what more can we be at seventy? It is true I am young enough to begin again, but with whom can I retrace the laughing part of my life? It is odd how few of my friends have died a quiet death—I mean, in their beds!

‘I cannot settle to anything, and my days pass, with the exception of bodily exercise to some extent, with uniform indolence and idle insipidity.’

The verses, ‘Oh! banish care,’ etc., were written at this time.

In the following lines we see that his grief at the losses he had sustained was deepened by the haunting memory of Mary Chaworth:

‘I’ve seen my bride another’s bride—
Have seen her seated by his side—
Have seen the infant which she bore
Wear the sweet smile the mother wore,
When she and I in youth have smiled
As fond and faultless as her child;
Have seen her eyes, in cold disdain,
Ask if I felt no secret pain.
And I have acted well my part,
And made my cheek belie my heart,
Returned the freezing glance she gave,
Yet felt the while that woman’s slave;
Have kissed, as if without design,
The babe which ought to have been mine,
And showed, alas! in each caress
Time had not made me love the less.’

Moore, who knew more of the inner workings of Byron’s mind in later years than anyone else, has told us that the poems addressed to ‘Thyrza’ were merely ‘the abstract spirit of many griefs,’ and that the pseudonym was given to an ‘object of affection’ to whom he poured out the sorrows of his heart.

‘All these recollections,’ says Moore, ‘of the young and dead now came to mingle themselves in his mind with the image of her who, though living, was for him as much lost as they, and diffused that general feeling of sadness and fondness through his soul, which found a vent in these poems. No friendship, however warm, could have inspired sorrow so passionate; as no love, however pure, could have kept passion so chastened.

‘It was the blending of the two affections in his memory and imagination that thus gave birth to an ideal object combining the best features of both, and drew from him these saddest and tenderest of love-poems, in which we find all the depth and intensity of real feeling, touched over with such a light as no reality ever wore.’

Moore here expresses himself guardedly. He was one of the very few who knew the whole story of Mary Chaworth’s associations with Byron. He could not, of course, betray his full knowledge; but he has made it sufficiently clear that Byron, in writing the ‘Thyrza’ group of poems, was merely strewing the flowers of poetry on the grave of his love for Mary Chaworth.

The first of these poems was written on the day on which he heard of the death of Edleston. In a letter to Dallas he says:

‘I have been again shocked by a death, and have lost one very dear to me in happier times. I have become callous, nor have I a tear left for an event which, five years ago, would have bowed down my head to the earth. It seems as though I were to experience in my youth the greatest misery of age. My friends fall around me, and I shall be left a lonely tree before I am withered. Other men can always take refuge in their families; I have no resource but my own reflections, and they present no prospect here or hereafter, except the selfish satisfaction of surviving my betters. I am indeed very wretched, and you will excuse my saying so, as you know I am not apt to cant of sensibility.’[32]

Shortly after this letter was written Byron visited Cambridge, where, among the many memories which that place awakened, a remembrance of the young chorister and their ardent friendship was most vivid. Byron recollected the Cornelian that Edleston gave him as a token of friendship, and, now that the giver had passed away for ever, he regretted that he had parted with it. The following letter to Mrs. Pigot explains itself:

‘Cambridge,
‘October 28, 1811.

‘Dear Madam,

‘I am about to write to you on a silly subject, and yet I cannot well do otherwise. You may remember a cornelian which some years ago I consigned to Miss Pigot—indeed I gave to her—and now I am going to make the most selfish and rude of requests. The person who gave it to me, when I was very young, is dead, and though a long time has elapsed since we met, as it was the only memorial I possessed of that person (in whom I was very much interested), it has acquired a value by this event I could have wished it never to have borne in my eyes. If, therefore, Miss Pigot should have preserved it, I must, under these circumstances, beg her to excuse my requesting it to be transmitted to me at No. 8, St. James’ Street, London, and I will replace it by something she may remember me by equally well. As she was always so kind as to feel interested in the fate of him that formed the subject of our conversation, you may tell her that the giver of that cornelian died in May last of a consumption at the age of twenty-one, making the sixth, within four months, of friends and relatives that I have lost between May and the end of August.

‘Believe me, dear madam,
‘Yours very sincerely,
‘Byron.’

The cornelian when found, was returned to Byron, but apparently in a broken condition.

‘Ill-fated Heart! and can it be,
That thou shouldst thus be rent in twain?’It was through the depressing influence of solitude that the idea entered Byron’s mind to depict his (possibly eternal) separation from Mary Chaworth in terms synonymous with death. With a deep feeling of desolation he recalled every incident of his boyish love. We have seen how the image of his lost Mary, now the wife of his rival, deepened the gloom caused by the sudden death of his mother, and of some of his college friends. It was to Mary, whom he dared not name, that he cried in his agony:

‘By many a shore and many a sea
Divided, yet beloved in vain;
The Past, the Future fled to thee,
To bid us meet—no, ne’er again!’

Her absence from Annesley, where he had hoped to find her on his return home, was a great disappointment to him.

‘Thou too art gone, thou loved and lovely one!
Whom Youth and Youth’s affections bound to me;
Who did for me what none beside have done,
Nor shrank from one albeit unworthy thee.
What is my Being! thou hast ceased to be!
Nor staid to welcome here thy wanderer home,
Who mourns o’er hours which we no more shall see—
Would they had never been, or were to come!
Would he had ne’er returned to find fresh cause to roam!
‘Oh I ever loving, lovely, and beloved!
How selfish Sorrow ponders on the past,
And clings to thoughts now better far removed!
But Time shall tear thy shadow from me last.
All thou couldst have of mine, stern Death! thou hast;
The Parent, Friend, and now the more than Friend:
Ne’er yet for one thine arrows flew so fast,
And grief with grief continuing still to blend,
Hath snatch’d the little joy that Life hath yet to lend.
********
‘What is the worst of woes that wait on Age?
What stamps the wrinkle deeper on the brow?
To view each loved one blotted from Life’s page,
And be alone on earth, as I am now.
Before the Chastener humbly let me bow,
O’er Hearts divided and o’er Hopes destroyed:
Roll on, vain days! full reckless may ye flow,
Since Time hath reft whate’er my soul enjoyed,
And with the ills of Eld mine earlier years alloyed.’

These stanzas were attached to the second canto of ‘Childe Harold,’ after that poem was in the press. Mr. Ernest Hartley Coleridge, who so ably edited the latest edition of the poetry of Byron, states that they were sent to Dallas on the same day that Byron composed the poem ‘To Thyrza.’ This is significant, as also his attempt to mystify Dallas by telling him that he had again (October 11, 1811) been shocked by a death. This was true enough, for he had on that day heard of the death of Edleston; but it was not true that the stanzas we have quoted had any connection with that event. Mr. Coleridge in a note says:

‘In connection with this subject, it may be noted that the lines 6 and 7 of Stanza XCV.,

‘“Nor staid to welcome here thy wanderer home,
Who mourns o’er hours which we no more shall see,”

do not bear out Byron’s contention to Dallas (Letters, October 14 and 31, 1811) that in these three in memoriam stanzas (IX., XCV., XCVI.) he is bewailing an event which took place after he returned to Newstead.[33] The “more than friend” had “ceased to be” before the “wanderer” returned. It is evident that Byron did not take Dallas into his confidence.’

Assuredly he did not. The ‘more than friend’ was not dead; she had merely absented herself, and did not stay to welcome the ‘wanderer’ on his return from his travels. She was, however, dead to him in a sense far deeper than mere absence at such a time.

‘The absent are the dead—for they are cold,
And ne’er can be what once we did behold.’[34]

Mary Chaworth’s presence would have consoled him at a time when he felt alone in the world. He feared that she was lost to him for ever. He knew her too well to suppose that she could ever be more to him than a friend; and yet it was just that female sympathy and friendship for which he so ardently yearned. In his unreasonableness, he was both hurt and disappointed that this companion of his earlier days should have kept away from her home at that particular time, and of course misconstrued the cause. With the feeling that this parting must be eternal, he wished that they could have met once more.

‘Could this have been—a word, a look,
That softly said, “We part in peace,”
Had taught my bosom how to brook,
With fainter sighs, thy soul’s release.’

In the bitterness of his desolation he recalled the days when they were at Newstead together—probably stolen interviews, which find no place in history—when

‘many a day
In these, to me, deserted towers,
Ere called but for a time away,
Affection’s mingling tears were ours?
Ours, too, the glance none saw beside;
The smile none else might understand;
The whispered thought: the walks aside;
The pressure of the thrilling hand;
The kiss so guiltless and relined,
That Love each warmer wish forbore;
Those eyes proclaimed so pure a mind,
Ev’n Passion blushed to plead for more.
The tone that taught me to rejoice,
When prone, unlike thee, to repine;
The song, celestial from thy voice,
But sweet to me from none but thine;
The pledge we wore—I wear it still,
But where is thine? Ah! where art thou?
Oft have I borne the weight of ill,
But never bent beneath till now!’

Six days after these lines were written Byron left Newstead. Writing to Hodgson from his lodgings in St. James’s Street, he enclosed some stanzas which he had written a day or two before, ‘on hearing a song of former days.’ The lady, whose singing now so deeply impressed Byron, was the Hon. Mrs. George Lamb, whom he had met at Melbourne House.

In this, the second of the ‘Thyrza’ poems, the allusions to Mary Chaworth are even more marked. Byron says the songs of Mrs. George Lamb ‘speak to him of brighter days,’ and that he hopes to hear those strains no more:

‘For now, alas!
I must not think, I may not gaze,
On what I am—on what I was.
The voice that made those sounds more sweet
Is hush’d, and all their charms are fled.
******
‘On my ear
The well-remembered echoes thrill;
I hear a voice I would not hear,
A voice that now might well be still.
******
‘Sweet Thyrza! waking as in sleep,
Thou art but now a lovely dream;
A Star that trembled o’er the deep,
Then turned from earth its tender beam.
But he who through Life’s dreary way
Must pass, when Heaven is veiled in wrath,
Will long lament the vanished ray
That scattered gladness o’er his path.’

In Byron’s imagination Mary Chaworth was always hovering over him like a star. She was the ‘starlight of his boyhood,’ the ‘star of his destiny,’ and three years later the poet, in his unpublished fragment ‘Harmodia,’ speaks of Mary as his

‘melancholy star
Whose tearful beam shoots trembling from afar.’

The third and last of the ‘Thyrza’ poems must have been written at about the same time as the other two. It appeared with ‘Childe Harold’ in 1812. Byron, weary of the gloom of solitude, and tortured by ‘pangs that rent his heart in twain,’ now determined to break away and seek inspiration for that mental energy which formed part of his nature. Man, he says, was not made to live alone.

‘I’ll be that light unmeaning thing
That smiles with all, and weeps with none.
It was not thus in days more dear,
It never would have been, but thou
Hast fled, and left me lonely here.’

Byron’s thoughts went back to the days when he was sailing over the bright waters of the blue Ægean, in the Salsette frigate, commanded by ‘good old Bathurst’[35]—those halcyon days when he was weaving his visions into stanzas for ‘Childe Harold.’

‘On many a lone and lovely night
It soothed to gaze upon the sky;
For then I deemed the heavenly light
Shone sweetly on thy pensive eye:
And oft I thought at Cynthia’s noon,
When sailing o’er the Ægean wave,
“Now Thyrza gazes on that moon”—
Alas! it gleamed upon her grave!
‘When stretched on Fever’s sleepless bed,
And sickness shrunk my throbbing veins,
“’Tis comfort still,” I faintly said,
“That Thyrza cannot know my pains.”
Like freedom to the timeworn slave—
A boon ’tis idle then to give—
Relenting Nature vainly gave
My life, when Thyrza ceased to live!
‘My Thyrza’s pledge in better days,
When Love and Life alike were new!
How different now thou meet’st my gaze!
How tinged by time with Sorrow’s hue!
The heart that gave itself with thee
Is silent—ah, were mine as still!
Though cold as e’en the dead can be,
It feels, it sickens with the chill.’

Byron here suggests that the pledge in question was given with the giver’s heart. Lovers are apt to interpret such gifts as ‘love-tokens,’ without suspicion that they may possibly have been due to a feeling far less flattering to their hopes.

‘Thou bitter pledge! thou mournful token!
Though painful, welcome to my breast!
Still, still, preserve that love unbroken,
Or break the heart to which thou’rt pressed.
Time tempers Love, but not removes,
More hallowed when its Hope is fled.’

These three pieces comprise the so-called ‘Thyrza’ poems, and, in the absence of proof to the contrary, we may reasonably suppose that their subject was Mary Chaworth. This is the more likely because the original manuscripts were the property of Byron’s sister, to whom they were probably given by Mary Chaworth, when, in later years, she destroyed or parted with all the letters and documents which she had received from Byron since the days of their childhood.

Byron did not give up the hope of winning Mary Chaworth’s love until her marriage in 1805. Two months later he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, and from that time, until his departure with Hobhouse on his first foreign tour, those who were in constant intercourse with him never mentioned any other object of adoration who might fit in with the Thyrza of the poems. If such a person had really existed, Byron would certainly, either in conversation or in writing, have disclosed her identity. Moore makes it clear that the one passion of Byron’s life was Mary Chaworth. He tells us that there were many fleeting love-episodes, but only one passion strong enough to have inspired the poems in question. If Byron’s heart, during the two years that he passed abroad, had been overflowing with love for some incognita, it was not in his nature to have kept silence. From his well-known effusiveness, reticence under such circumstances is inconceivable.

Finally, as there were no poems, no letters, and no allusion to any such person in the first draft of ‘Childe Harold,’ we may confidently assume that the poet, in the loneliness of his heart, appealed to the only woman whom he ever really loved, and that the legendary Thyrza was a myth.

It will be remembered that the ninth stanza in the second canto of ‘Childe Harold’ was interpolated long after the manuscript had been given to Dallas. It was forwarded for that purpose, three days after the date of the poem ‘To Thyrza,’ and essentially belongs to that period of desolation which inspired those poems:

‘There, Thou! whose Love and Life, together fled,
Have left me here to love and live in vain—
Twined with my heart, and can I deem thee dead,
When busy Memory flashes on my brain?
Well—I will dream that we may meet again,
And woo the vision to my vacant breast:
If aught of young Remembrance then remain,
Be as it may Futurity’s behest,
Or seeing thee no more, to sink to sullen rest.’[36]

It is difficult to believe that this stanza was inspired by a memory of the dead. Are we not told that ‘Love and Life together fled’—in other words, when Mary withdrew her love, she was dead to him?

He tells her that in abandoning him she has left him to love and live in vain. And yet he will not give up the hope of meeting her again some day; this is now his sole consolation. Memory of the past (possibly those meetings which took place by stealth, shortly before his departure from England in 1809) feeds the hope that now sustains him. But he will leave everything to chance, and if fate decides that they shall be parted for ever, then will he sink to sullen apathy.

We may remind the reader that at this period (1811) Byron had no belief in any existence after death.

‘I will have nothing to do with your immortality,’ he writes to Hodgson in September; ‘we are miserable enough in this life, without the absurdity of speculating upon another. If men are to live, why die at all? and if they die, why disturb the sweet and sound sleep that “knows no waking”?

‘“Post mortem nihil est, ipsaque Mors nihil ... quÆris quo jaceas post obitum loco? Quo non Nata jacent.”’

Even when, in later years, Byron somewhat modified the views of his youth, he expressed an opinion that

‘A material resurrection seems strange, and even absurd, except for purposes of punishment, and all punishment which is to revenge rather than correct must be morally wrong.’

It is therefore tolerably certain that, on the day when he expressed a hope that he might meet his lady-love again, the meeting was to have been in this world, and not in that ‘land of souls beyond the sable shore.’ It must also be remembered that the eighth stanza in the second canto of ‘Childe Harold’ was substituted for one in which Byron deliberately stated that he did not look for Life, where life may never be. The revise was written to please Dallas, and does not pretend to be a confession of belief in immortality, but merely an admission that, on a subject where ‘nothing can be known,’ no final decision is possible.

In the summer of 1813 Byron underwent grave vicissitudes, mental, moral, and financial. His letters and journals teem with allusions to some catastrophe. It seemed as though he were threatened with impending ruin. In his depressed state of mind he found relief only, as he tells us, in the composition of poetry. It was at this time that he wrote in swift succession ‘The Giaour,’ ‘The Bride of Abydos,’ and ‘The Corsair.’ It is clear that Byron’s dejection was the result of a hopeless attachment. Mr. Hartley Coleridge assumes that Byron’s innamorata was Lady Frances Wedderburn Webster. But that bright star did not long shine in Byron’s orbit—certainly not after October, 1813—and it is doubtful whether they were ever on terms of close intimacy. Her husband had long been Byron’s friend. Byron had lent him money, and had given him advice, which he seems to have sorely needed. It is difficult to understand why Lady Frances Webster should have been especially regarded as Byron’s Calypso. There is nothing to show that she ever seriously occupied his thoughts. Writing to Moore on September 27, 1813, Byron says:

‘I stayed a week with the Websters, and behaved very well, though the lady of the house is young, religious, and pretty, and the master is my particular friend. I felt no wish for anything but a poodle dog, which they kindly gave me.’

So little does Byron seem to have been attracted by Lady Frances, that he only once more visited the Websters, and then only for a few days, on his way to Newstead, between October 3 and 10, 1813.

On June 3 of that year Byron wrote to Mr. John Hanson, his solicitor, a letter which shows the state of his mind at that time. He tells Hanson that he is about to visit Salt Hill, near Maidenhead, and that he will be absent for one week. He is determined to go abroad. The prospective lawsuit with Mr. Claughton (about the sale of Newstead) is to be dropped, if it cannot be carried on in Byron’s absence. At all hazards, at all losses, he is determined that nothing shall prevent him from leaving the country.

‘If utter ruin were or is before me on the one hand, and wealth at home on the other, I have made my choice, and go I will.’

The pictures, and every movable that could be converted into cash, were, by Byron’s orders, to be sold. ‘All I want is a few thousand pounds, and then, Adieu. You shan’t be troubled with me these ten years, if ever.’ Clearly, there must have been something more than a passing fancy which could have induced Byron to sacrifice his chances of selling Newstead, for the sake of a few thousand pounds of ready-money. It had been his intention to accompany Lord and Lady Oxford on their travels, but this project was abandoned. After three weeks—spent in running backwards and forwards between Salt Hill and London—Byron confided his troubles to Augusta. She was always his rock of refuge in all his deeper troubles. Augusta Leigh thought that absence might mend matters, and tried hard to keep her brother up to his resolve of going abroad; she even volunteered to accompany him. But Lady Melbourne—who must have had a prurient mind—persuaded Byron that the gossips about town would not consider it ‘proper’ for him and his sister to travel alone! As Byron was at that time under the influence of an irresistible infatuation, Lady Melbourne’s warning turned the scale, and the project fell through. Meanwhile the plot thickened. Something—he told Moore—had ruined all his prospects of matrimony. His financial circumstances, he said, were mending; ‘and were not my other prospects blackening, I would take a wife.’

In July he still wishes to get out of England. ‘They had better let me go,’ he says; ‘one can die anywhere.’

On August 22, after another visit to Salt Hill, Byron writes to Moore:

‘I have said nothing of the brilliant sex; but the fact is, I am at this moment in a far more serious, and entirely new, scrape, than any of the last twelve months, and that is saying a good deal. It is unlucky we can neither live with nor without these women.’

A week later he wrote again to Moore:

‘I would incorporate with any woman of decent demeanour to-morrow—that is, I would a month ago, but at present....’

Moore suggested that Byron’s case was similar to that of the youth apostrophized by Horace in his twenty-seventh ode, and invited his confidence:

‘Come, whisper it—the tender truth—
To safe and friendly ears!
What! Her? O miserable youth!
Oh! doomed to grief and tears!
In what a whirlpool are you tost,
Your rudder broke, your pilot lost!’

Recent research has convinced the present writer that the incident which affected Byron so profoundly at this time—about eighteen months before his marriage—indirectly brought about the separation between Lord and Lady Byron in 1816. A careful student of Byron’s character could not fail to notice, among all the contradictions and inconsistencies of his life, one point upon which he was resolute—namely, a consistent reticence on the subject of the intimacy which sprang up between himself and Mary Chaworth in the summer of 1813. The strongest impulse of his life—even to the last—was a steadfast, unwavering, hopeless attachment to that lady. Throughout his turbulent youth, in his early as in his later days, the same theme floats through the chords of his melodious verse, a deathless love and a deep remorse. Even at the last, when the shadow of Death was creeping slowly over the flats at Missolonghi, the same wild, despairing note found involuntary expression, and the last words that Byron ever wrote tell the sad story with a distinctness which might well open the eyes even of the blind.

When he first met his fate, he was a schoolboy of sixteen—precocious, pugnacious, probably a prig, and by no means handsome. He must have appeared to Mary much as we see him in his portrait by Sanders. Mary was two years older, and already in love with a fox-hunting squire of good family. ‘Love dwells not in our will,’ and a nature like Byron’s, once under its spell, was sure to feel its force acutely. There was romance, too, in the situation; and the poetic temperament—always precocious—responded to an impulse on the gossamer chance of achieving the impossible. Mary was probably half amused and half flattered by the adoration of a boy of whose destiny she divined nothing.

There is no reason to suppose that there was any meeting between Byron and Mary Chaworth after the spring of 1809, until the summer of 1813. Their separation seemed destined to be final. Although Byron, in after-years, wished it to be believed that they had not met since 1808, it is certain that a meeting took place in the summer of 1813. Although Byron took, as we shall see presently, great pains to conceal that fact from the public, he did not attempt to deceive either Moore, Hobhouse, or Hodgson. In his letter to Monsieur Coulmann, written in July, 1823, we have the version which Byron wished the public to believe.

‘I had not seen her [Mary Chaworth] for many years. When an occasion offered, I was upon the point, with her consent, of paying her a visit, when my sister, who has always had more influence over me than anyone else, persuaded me not to do it. “For,” said she, “if you go, you will fall in love again, and then there will be a scene; one step will lead to another, et cela fera un Éclat,” etc. I was guided by these reasons, and shortly after I married.... Mrs. Chaworth some time after, being separated from her husband, became insane; but she has since recovered her reason, and is, I believe, reconciled to her husband.’

At about the same time Byron told Medwin that, after Mary’s separation from her husband, she proposed an interview with him—a suggestion which Byron, by the advice of Mrs. Leigh, declined. He also said to Medwin:

‘She [Mary Chaworth] was the beau-idÉal of all that my youthful fancy could paint of beautiful; and I have taken all my fables about the celestial nature of women from the perfection my imagination created in her—I say created, for I found her, like the rest of her sex, anything but angelic.’

It is difficult to see how Byron could have arrived at so unflattering an estimate of a woman whom he had only once seen since her marriage—at a dinner-party, when, as he has told us, he was overcome by shyness and a feeling of awkwardness! But let that pass. Byron wished the world to believe (1) that Mary Chaworth, after the separation from her husband in 1813, proposed a meeting with Byron; (2) that he declined to meet her; (3) that, after his unfortunate marriage, Mary became insane; and (4) that he found her, ‘like the rest of her sex, anything but angelic.’

It is quite possible, of course, that Byron may have at first refused to meet the only woman on earth whom he sincerely loved, and more than likely that Mrs. Leigh did her utmost to dissuade him from so rash a proceeding. But it is on record that Byron incautiously admitted to Medwin that he did meet Mary Chaworth after his return from Greece.[37] It will be remembered that he returned from Greece in 1811. Their intimacy had long before been broken off by Mr. John Musters; and, as we have seen, Mary, faithful to a promise which she had made to her husband, kept away from Annesley during the period (1811) when the ‘Thyrza’ poems were written. It is doubtful whether they would ever again have met if her husband had shown any consideration for her feelings. But he showed her none. When, nearly forty years ago, the present writer visited Annesley, there were several people living who remembered both Mary Chaworth and her husband. These people stated that their married life, so full of grief and bitterness, was a constant source of comment both at Annesley and Newstead. The trouble was attributed to the harsh and capricious conduct, and the well-known infidelities, of one to whose kindness and affection Mary had a sacred claim. She seems to have been left for long periods at Annesley with only one companion, Miss Anne Radford, who had been brought up with her from childhood. This state of things eventually broke down, and when, in the early part of 1813, Mary could stand the strain no longer, a separation took place by mutual consent.

In the summer of that year Byron and this unhappy woman were thrown together by the merest accident, and, unfortunately for both, renewed their dangerous friendship.

Byron’s friend and biographer, Thomas Moore, took great pains to suppress every allusion to Mary Chaworth in Byron’s memoranda and letters. He faithfully kept the secret. There is nothing in Byron’s letters or journals, as revised by Moore, to show that they ever met after 1808, and yet they undoubtedly did meet in 1813, after Mary’s estrangement from her husband. That they were in constant correspondence in November of that year may be gathered from Byron’s journal, where Mary’s name is veiled by asterisks.

On November 24 he writes:

‘I am tremendously in arrear with my letters, except to ****, and to her my thoughts overpower me: my words never compass them.’‘I have been pondering,’ he writes on the 26th, ‘on the miseries of separation, that—oh! how seldom we see those we love! Yet we live ages in moments when met.’

Then follows, on the 27th, a clue:

‘I believe, with Clym o’ the Clow, or Robin Hood,

‘“By our Mary (dear name!) thou art both Mother and May,
I think it never was a man’s lot to die before his day.”’

It is attested, by all those who were acquainted with Mary Chaworth, that she always bore an exemplary character. It was well known that her marriage was an unhappy one, and that she had been for some time deserted by her husband. In June, 1813, when she fell under the fatal spell of Byron, then the most fascinating man in society,[38] she was living in deep dejection, parted from her lawful protector, with whom she had a serious disagreement. He had neglected her, and she well knew that she had a rival in his affections at that time.

It was in these distressing circumstances that Byron, with the world at his feet, came to worship her in great humility. As he looked back upon the past, he realized that this neglected woman had always been the light of his life, the lodestar of his destiny. And now that he beheld his ‘Morning Star of Annesley’ shedding ineffectual rays upon the dead embers of a lost love, the old feeling returned to him with resistless force.

‘We met—we gazed—I saw, and sighed;
She did not speak, and yet replied;
There are ten thousand tones and signs
We hear and see, but none defines—
Involuntary sparks of thought,
Which strike from out the heart o’erwrought,
And form a strange intelligence,
Alike mysterious and intense,
Which link the burning chain that binds,
Without their will, young hearts and minds.
I saw, and sighed—in silence wept,
And still reluctant distance kept,
Until I was made known to her,
And we might then and there confer
Without suspicion—then, even then,
I longed, and was resolved to speak;
But on my lips they died again,
The accents tremulous and weak,
Until one hour...
******
‘I would have given
My life but to have called her mine
In the full view of Earth and Heaven;
For I did oft and long repine
That we could only meet by stealth.’

In the remorseful words of Manfred,

‘Her faults were mine—her virtues were her own—
I loved her, and destroyed her!...
Not with my hand, but heart—which broke her heart—
It gazed on mine and withered.’

Without attempting to excuse Byron’s conduct—indeed, that were useless—it must be remembered that he was only twenty-five years of age, and Mary was very unhappy. After all hope of meeting her again had been abandoned, the force of destiny, so to speak, had unexpectedly restored his lost Thyrza—the Theresa of ‘Mazeppa.’

‘I loved her then, I love her still;
And such as I am, love indeed
In fierce extremes—in good and ill—
But still we love...
Haunted to our very age
With the vain shadow of the past.’Byron’s punishment was in this world. The remorse which followed endured throughout the remaining portion of his life. It wrecked what might have proved a happy marriage, and drove him, from stone to stone, along life’s causeway, to that ‘Sea Sodom’ where, for many months, he tried to destroy the memory of his crime by reckless profligacy.

Mary Chaworth no sooner realized her awful danger—the madness of an impulse which not even love could excuse—than she recoiled from the precipice which yawned before her. She had been momentarily blinded by the irresistible fascination of one who, after all, really and truly loved her. But she was a good woman in spite of this one episode, and to the last hour of her existence she never swerved from that narrow path which led to an honoured grave.

Although it was too late for happiness, too late to evade the consequences of her weakness, there was still time for repentance. The secret was kept inviolate by the very few to whom it was confided, and the present writer deeply regrets that circumstances have compelled him to break the seal.

If ‘Astarte’ had not been written, there would have been no need to lift the veil. Lord Lovelace has besmirched the good name of Mrs. Leigh, and it is but an act of simple justice to defend her.

When Mary Chaworth escaped from Byron’s fatal influence, he reproached her for leaving him, and tried to shake her resolution with heart-rending appeals. Happily for both, they fell upon deaf ears.

‘Astarte! my beloved! speak to me;
Say that thou loath’st me not—that I do bear
This punishment for both.’

The depth and sincerity of Byron’s love for Mary Chaworth cannot be questioned. Moore, who knew him well, says:

‘The all-absorbing and unsuccessful (unsatisfied) love for Mary Chaworth was the agony, without being the death, of an unsated desire which lived on through life, filled his poetry with the very soul of tenderness, lent the colouring of its light to even those unworthy ties which vanity or passion led him afterwards to form, and was the last aspiration of his fervid spirit, in those stanzas written but a few months before his death.’

It was, in fact, a love of such unreasonableness and persistence as might be termed, without exaggeration, a madness of the heart.

Although Mary escaped for ever from that baneful infatuation, which in an unguarded moment had destroyed her peace of mind, her separation from Byron was not complete until he married. Not only did they correspond frequently, but they also met occasionally. In the following January (1814) Byron introduced Mary to Augusta Leigh. From that eventful meeting, when probable contingencies were provided for, until Mary’s death in 1832, these two women, who had suffered so much through Byron, continued in the closest intimacy; and in November, 1819, Augusta stood sponsor for Mary’s youngest daughter.

In a poem which must have been written in 1813, an apostrophe ‘To Time,’ Byron refers to Mary’s resolutions.

‘In Joy I’ve sighed to think thy flight
Would soon subside from swift to slow;
Thy cloud could overcast the light,
But could not add a night to Woe;
For then, however drear and dark,
My soul was suited to thy sky;
One star alone shot forth a spark
To prove thee—not Eternity.
That beam hath sunk.’It is of course true that matters were not, and could never again be, on the same footing as in July of that year; but Mary Chaworth was constancy itself, in a higher and a nobler sense than Byron attached to it, when he reproached her for broken vows.

‘Thy vows are all broken,
And light is thy fame:
I hear thy name spoken,
And share in its shame.’

During the remainder of Byron’s life, Mary took a deep interest in everything that affected him. In 1814, believing that marriage would be his salvation, she used her influence in that direction. We know that she did not approve of the choice which Byron so recklessly made, and she certainly had ample cause to deplore its results. Through her close intimacy with Augusta Leigh—an intimacy which has not hitherto been suspected—she became acquainted with every phase in Byron’s subsequent career. She could read ‘between the lines,’ and solve the mysteries to be found in such poems as ‘Lara,’ ‘Mazeppa,’ ‘Manfred,’ and ‘Don Juan.’

We believe that Byron’s love for Mary was the main cause of the indifference he felt towards his wife. In order to shield Mary from the possible consequences of a public investigation into conduct prior to his marriage, Byron, in 1816, consented to a separation from his wife.

After Byron had left England Mary broke down under the strain she had borne so bravely, and her mind gave way. When at last, in April, 1817, a reconciliation took place between Mary and her husband, it was apparent to everyone that she had, during those four anxious years, become a changed woman. She never entirely regained either health or spirits. Her mind ‘had acquired a tinge of religious melancholy, which never afterwards left it.’ Sorrow and disappointment had subdued a naturally buoyant nature, and ‘melancholy marked her for its own.’ Shortly before her death, in 1832, she destroyed every letter she had received from Byron since those distant fateful years when, as boy and girl, they had wandered on the Hills of Annesley. For eight sad years Mary Chaworth survived the lover of her youth. Shortly before her death, in a letter to one of her daughters, she drew her own character which might fitly form her epitaph: ‘Soon led, easily pleased, very hasty, and very relenting, with a heart moulded in a warm and affectionate fashion.’

Such was the woman who, though parted by fate, maintained through sunshine and storm an ascendancy over the heart of Byron which neither time nor absence could impair, and which endured to the end of his earthly existence. We may well believe that those inarticulate words which the dying poet murmured to the bewildered Fletcher—those broken sentences which ended with, ‘Tell her everything; you are friends with her’—may have referred, not to Lady Byron, as policy suggested, but to Mary Chaworth, with whom Fletcher had been acquainted since his youth.

We have incontestable proof that, only two months before he died, Byron’s thoughts were occupied with one whom he had named ‘the starlight of his boyhood.’ How deeply Byron thought about Mary Chaworth at the last is proved by the poem which was found among his papers at Missolonghi. In six stanzas the poet revealed the story that he would fain have hidden. A note in his handwriting states that they were addressed ‘to no one in particular,’ and that they were merely ‘a poetical scherzo.’ There is, however, no room for doubt that the poem bears a deep significance.

I.
‘I watched thee when the foe was at our side,
Ready to strike at him—or thee and me
Were safety hopeless—rather than divide
Aught with one loved, save love and liberty.’

We have here a glimpse of that turbulent scene when Mary’s husband, in a fit of jealousy, put an end to their dangerous intimacy.

II.
‘I watched thee on the breakers, when the rock
Received our prow, and all was storm and fear,
And bade thee cling to me through every shock;
This arm would be thy bark, or breast thy bier.’

This brings us to that period of suspense and fear, in 1814, which preceded the birth of Medora. In a letter which Byron at that time wrote to Miss Milbanke, we find these words:

‘I am at present a little feverish—I mean mentally—and, as usual, on the brink of something or other, which will probably crush me at last, and cut our correspondence short, with everything else.’

Twelve days later (March 3, 1814), Byron tells Moore that he is ‘uncomfortable,’ and that he has ‘no lack of argument to ponder upon of the most gloomy description.’

‘Some day or other,’ he writes, ‘when we are veterans, I may tell you a tale of present and past times; and it is not from want of confidence that I do not now.... All this would be very well if I had no heart; but, unluckily, I have found that there is such a thing still about me, though in no very good repair, and also that it has a habit of attaching itself to one, whether I will or no. Divide et impera, I begin to think, will only do for politics.’

When Moore, who was puzzled, asked Byron to explain himself more clearly, he replied: ‘Guess darkly, and you will seldom err.’

Thirty-four days later Medora was born, April 15, 1814.

III.
‘I watched thee when the fever glazed thine eyes,
Yielding my couch, and stretched me on the ground,
When overworn with watching, ne’er to rise
From thence if thou an early grave had found.’

Here we see Byron’s agony of remorse. Like Herod, he lamented for Mariamne:

‘And mine’s the guilt, and mine the hell,
This bosom’s desolation dooming;
And I have earned those tortures well
Which unconsumed are still consuming!’

In ‘Manfred’ we find a note of remembrance in the deprecating words:

‘Oh! no, no, no!
My injuries came down on those who loved me—
On those whom I best loved: I never quelled
An enemy, save in my just defence—
But my embrace was fatal.’
IV.
‘The earthquake came, and rocked the quivering wall,
And men and Nature reeled as if with wine:
Whom did I seek around the tottering hall?
For thee. Whose safety first provide for? Thine.’

We now see Byron, at the supreme crisis of his life, standing in solitude on his hearth, with all his household gods shivered around him. We perceive that not least among his troubles at that time was the ever-haunting fear lest the secret of Medora’s birth should be disclosed. His greatest anxiety was for Mary’s safety, and this could only be secured by keeping his matrimonial squabbles out of a court of law. It was, in fact, by agreeing to sign the deed of separation that the whole situation was saved. The loyalty of Augusta Leigh on this occasion was never forgotten:

‘There was soft Remembrance and sweet Trust
In one fond breast.’
‘That love was pure—and, far above disguise,
Had stood the test of mortal enmities
Still undivided, and cemented more
By peril, dreaded most in female eyes,
But this was firm.’

In the fifth stanza we see Byron, eight years later, at Missolonghi, struck down by that attack of epilepsy which preceded his death by only two months:

V.
‘And when convulsive throes denied my breath
The faintest utterance to my fading thought,
To thee—to thee—e’en in the gasp of death
My spirit turned, oh! oftener than it ought.’

In the sixth and final stanza, probably the last lines that Byron ever wrote, we find him reiterating, with all a lover’s persistency, a belief that Mary could never have loved him, otherwise she would not have left him.

VI.
‘Thus much and more; and yet thou lov’st me not,
And never will! Love dwells not in our will.
Nor can I blame thee, though it be my lot
To strongly, wrongly, vainly love thee still.’

The reproaches of lovers are often unjust. Byron either could not, or perhaps would not, see that in abandoning him Mary had been actuated by the highest, the purest motives, and that the renunciation must have afforded her deep pain—a sacrifice, not lightly made, for Byron’s sake quite as much as for her own. That Byron for a time resented her conduct in this respect is evident from a remark made in a letter to Miss Milbanke, dated November 29, 1813. After saying that he once thought that Mary Chaworth could have made him happy, he added, ‘but subsequent events have proved that my expectations might not have been fulfilled had I ever proposed to and received my idol.’[39]

What those ‘subsequent events’ were may be guessed from reproaches which at this period appear among his poems:

‘The wholly false the heart despises,
And spurns deceiver and deceit;
But she who not a thought disguises,
Whose love is as sincere as sweet—
When she can change, who loved so truly,
It feels what mine has felt so newly.’

In the letter written five years after their final separation, Byron again reproaches Mary Chaworth, but this time without a tinge of bitterness:

‘My own, we may have been very wrong, but I repent of nothing except that cursed marriage, and your refusing to continue to love me as you had loved me. I can neither forget nor quite forgive you for that precious piece of reformation. But I can never be other than I have been, and whenever I love anything, it is because it reminds me in some way or other of yourself.’

‘The Giaour’ was begun in May and finished in November, 1813. Those parts which relate to Mary Chaworth were added to that poem in July and August:

‘She was a form of Life and Light,
That, seen, became a part of sight;
And rose, where’er I turned mine eye,
The Morning-Star of Memory!’Byron says that, like the bird that sings within the brake, like the swan that swims upon the waters, he can only have one mate. He despises those who sneer at constancy. He does not envy them their fickleness, and regards such heartless men as lower in the scale of creation than the solitary swan.

‘Such shame at least was never mine—
Leila! each thought was only thine!
My good, my guilt, my weal, my woe,
My hope on high—my all below.
Earth holds no other like to thee,
Or, if it doth, in vain for me:
... Thou wert, thou art,
The cherished madness of my heart!’
‘Yes, Love indeed is light from heaven;
A spark of that immortal fire
With angels shared, by Alla given,
To lift from earth our low desire.
I grant my love imperfect, all
That mortals by the name miscall;
Then deem it evil, what thou wilt;
But say, oh say, hers was not Guilt!
And she was lost—and yet I breathed,
But not the breath of human life:
A serpent round my heart was wreathed,
And stung my every thought to strife.’

Who can doubt that the friend ‘of earlier days,’ whose memory the Giaour wishes to bless before he dies, but whom he dares not bless lest Heaven should ‘mark the vain attempt’ of guilt praying for the guiltless, was Mary Chaworth. He bids the friar tell that friend

‘What thou didst behold:
The withered frame—the ruined mind,
The wreck that Passion leaves behind—
The shrivelled and discoloured leaf,
Seared by the Autumn blast of Grief.’

He wonders whether that friend is still his friend, as in those earlier days, when hearts were blended in that sweet land where bloom his native valley’s bowers. To that friend he sends a ring, which was the memorial of a youthful vow:

‘Tell him—unheeding as I was,
Through many a busy bitter scene
Of all our golden youth hath been,
In pain, my faltering tongue had tried
To bless his memory—ere I died;
I do not ask him not to blame,
Too gentle he to wound my name;
I do not ask him not to mourn,
Such cold request might sound like scorn.
But bear this ring, his own of old,
And tell him what thou dost behold!’

The motto chosen by Byron for ‘The Giaour’ is in itself suggestive:

‘One fatal remembrance—one sorrow that throws
Its bleak shade alike o’er our Joys and our Woes—
To which Life nothing darker nor brighter can bring,
For which Joy hath no balm—and affliction no sting.’

On October 10, 1813, Byron arrived at Newstead, where he stayed for a month. Mary Chaworth was at Annesley during that time. On his return to town he wrote (November 8) to his sister:

‘My dearest Augusta,

‘I have only time to say that my long silence has been occasioned by a thousand things (with which you are not concerned). It is not Lady Caroline, nor Lady Oxford; but perhaps you may guess, and if you do, do not tell. You do not know what mischief your being with me might have prevented. You shall hear from me to-morrow; in the meantime don’t be alarmed. I am in no immediate peril.

‘Believe me, ever yours,
‘B.’

On November 30 Byron wrote to Moore:

‘We were once very near neighbours this autumn;[40] and a good and bad neighbourhood it has proved to me. Suffice it to say that your French quotation (Si je rÉcommenÇais ma carriÈre, je ferais tout ce que j’ai fait) was confoundedly to the purpose,—though very unexpectedly pertinent, as you may imagine by what I said before, and my silence since. However, “Richard’s himself again,” and, except all night and some part of the morning, I don’t think very much about the matter. All convulsions end with me in rhyme; and to solace my midnights I have scribbled another Turkish story [‘The Bride of Abydos’] which you will receive soon after this.... I have written this, and published it, for the sake of employment—to wring my thoughts from reality, and take refuge in “imaginings,” however “horrible.”... This is the work of a week....’

In order the more effectually to dispose of the theory that Lady Frances Wedderburn Webster was the cause of Byron’s disquietude, we insert an extract from his journal, dated a fortnight earlier (November 14, 1813):

‘Last night I finished “Zuleika” [the name was afterwards changed to ‘The Bride of Abydos’], my second Turkish tale. I believe the composition of it kept me alive—for it was written to drive my thoughts from the recollection of **** “Dear sacred name, rest ever unrevealed.” At least, even here, my hand would tremble to write it.... I have some idea of expectorating a romance, but what romance could equal the events

‘“... quÆque ipse ... vidi,
Et quorum pars magna fui”?’

Surely the name that Byron dared not write, even in his own journal, was not that of Lady Frances Webster, whose name appears often in his correspondence. The ‘sacred name’ was that of one of whom he afterwards wrote, ‘Thou art both Mother and May.’

During October, November, and December, 1813, Byron’s mind was in a perturbed condition. We gather, from a letter which he wrote to Moore on November 30, that his thoughts were centred on a lady living in Nottinghamshire[41], and that the scrape, which he mentions in his letter to Augusta on November 8, referred to that lady and the dreaded prospects of maternity.

Mr. Coleridge believes that the verses, ‘Remember him, whom Passion’s power,’ were addressed to Lady Frances Wedderburn Webster. There is nothing, so far as the present writer knows, to support that opinion. There is no evidence to show the month in which they were written; and, in view of the statement that the lady in question had lived in comparative retirement, ‘Thy soul from long seclusion pure,’ and that she had, because of his presumption, banished the poet in 1813, it could not well have been Lady Frances Webster, who in September of that year had asked Byron to be godfather to her child, and in October had invited him to her house. It is noteworthy that Byron expressly forbade Murray to publish those verses with ‘The Corsair,’ where, it must be owned, they would have been sadly out of place. ‘Farewell, if ever fondest prayer,’ was decidedly more appropriate to the state of things existing at that time.

The motto chosen for his ‘Bride of Abydos’ is taken from Burns:

‘Had we never loved sae kindly,
Had we never loved sae blindly,
Never met—or never parted,
We had ne’er been broken-hearted.’

The poem was written early in November, 1813.

Byron has told us that it was written to divert his mind,[42] ‘to wring his thoughts from reality to imagination, from selfish regrets to vivid recollections’; to ‘distract his thoughts from the recollection of **** “Dear sacred name, rest ever unrevealed,”’ and in a letter to John Galt (December 11, 1813) he says that parts of the poem were drawn ‘from existence.’ He had been staying at Newstead, in close proximity to Annesley, from October 10 to November 8, during which time, as he says, he regretted the absence of his sister Augusta, ‘who might have saved him much trouble.’ He says, ‘All convulsions end with me in rhyme,’ and that ‘The Bride of Abydos’ was ‘the work of a week.’ In speaking of a ‘dear sacred name, rest ever unrevealed,’ he says: ‘At least even here my hand would tremble to write it’; and on November 30 he writes to Moore: ‘Since I last wrote’ (October 2), ‘much has happened to me.’ On November 27 he writes in his journal: ‘Mary—dear name—thou art both Mother and May.’[43] At the end of November, after he had returned to town, he writes in his journal:

‘**** is distant, and will be at ****, still more distant, till the spring. No one else, except Augusta, cares for me.... I am tremendously in arrears with my letters, except to ****, and to her my thoughts overpower me—my words never compass them.’

On November 14 Byron sends a device for the seals of himself and ****; the seal in question is at present in the possession of the Chaworth-Musters family. On December 10, we find from one of Byron’s letters that he had thoughts of committing suicide, and was deterred by the idea that ‘it would annoy Augusta, and perhaps ****.’

Byron seems to have put into the mouth of Zuleika words which conveyed his own thoughts:

‘Think’st thou that I could bear to part
With thee, and learn to halve my heart?
Ah! were I severed from thy side,
Where were thy friend—and who my guide?
Years have not seen, Time shall not see,
The hour that tears my soul from thee:
Ev’n Azrael, from his deadly quiver
When flies that shaft, and fly it must,
That parts all else, shall doom for ever
Our hearts to undivided dust!
***** *
What other can she seek to see
Than thee, companion of her bower,
The partner of her infancy?
These cherished thoughts with life begun,
Say, why must I no more avow?’

Selim suggests that Zuleika should brave the world and fly with him:

‘But be the Star that guides the wanderer, Thou!
Thou, my Zuleika, share and bless my bark;
The Dove of peace and promise to mine ark!
Or, since that hope denied in worlds of strife,
Be thou the rainbow to the storms of life!
The evening beam that smiles the clouds away,
And tints to-morrow with prophetic ray!
*******
Not blind to Fate, I see, where’er I rove,
Unnumbered perils,—but one only love!
Yet well my toils shall that fond breast repay,
Though Fortune frown, or falser friends betray.’

Zuleika, we are told, was the ‘last of Giaffir’s race.’[44] Selim tells her that ‘life is hazard at the best,’ and there is much to fear:

‘Yes, fear! the doubt, the dread of losing thee.
That dread shall vanish with the favouring gale;
Which Love to-night has promised to my sail.
No danger daunts the pair his smile hath blest,
Their steps still roving, but their hearts at rest.
With thee all toils are sweet, each clime hath charms;
Earth—Sea alike—our world within our arms!’

‘The Corsair’ was written between December 18, 1813, and January 11, 1814. While it was passing through the press, Byron was at Newstead. He gives a little of his own spirit to Conrad, and all Mary’s virtues to Medora—a name which was afterwards given to his child. Conrad

‘Knew himself a villain—but he deemed
The rest no better than the thing he seemed;
And scorned the best as hypocrites who hid
Those deeds the bolder spirit plainly did.
Lone, wild, and strange, he stood alike exempt
From all affection and from all contempt.
None are all evil—quickening round his heart,
One softer feeling would not yet depart.
Yet ’gainst that passion vainly still he strove,
And even in him it asks the name of Love!
Yes, it was Love—unchangeable—unchanged,
Felt but for one from whom he never ranged.
Yes—it was Love—if thoughts of tenderness,
Tried in temptation, strengthened by distress,
Unmoved by absence, firm in every clime,
And yet—oh! more than all! untired by Time.
If there be Love in mortals—this was Love!
He was a villain—aye, reproaches shower
On him—but not the Passion, nor its power,
Which only proved—all other virtues gone—
Not Guilt itself could quench this earliest one!’

The following verses are full of meaning for the initiated:

I.
‘Deep in my soul that tender secret dwells,
Lonely and lost to light for evermore,
Save when to thine my heart responsive swells,
Then trembles into silence as before.
II.
‘There, in its centre, a sepulchral lamp
Burns the slow flame, eternal—but unseen;
Which not the darkness of Despair can damp,
Though vain its ray as it had never been.
III.
‘Remember me—oh! pass not thou my grave
Without one thought whose relics there recline:
The only pang my bosom dare not brave
Must be to find forgetfulness in thine.
IV.
‘My fondest—faintest—latest accents hear—
Grief for the dead not Virtue can reprove;
Then give me all I ever asked—a tear,
The first—last—sole reward of so much love!’

Conrad and Medora part, to meet no more in life

‘But she is nothing—wherefore is he here?...
By the first glance on that still, marble brow—
It was enough—she died—what recked it how?
The love of youth, the hope of better years,
The source of softest wishes, tenderest fears,
The only living thing he could not hate,
Was reft at once—and he deserved his fate,
But did not feel it less.’

The blow he feared the most had fallen at last. The only woman whom he loved had withdrawn her society from him, and his heart,

‘Formed for softness—warped to wrong,
Betrayed too early, and beguiled too long,’

was petrified at last!

‘Yet tempests wear, and lightning cleaves the rock;
If such his heart, so shattered it the shock.
There grew one flower beneath its rugged brow,
Though dark the shade—it sheltered—saved till now.
The thunder came—that bolt hath blasted both,
The Granite’s firmness, and the Lily’s growth:
The gentle plant hath left no leaf to tell
Its tale, but shrunk and withered where it fell;
And of its cold protector, blacken round
But shivered fragments on the barren ground!’

In moments of deep emotion, even the most reticent of men may sometimes reveal themselves. ‘The Giaour,’ ‘The Bride of Abydos,’ and ‘The Corsair,’ formed a trilogy, through which the tragedy of Byron’s life swept like a musical theme. Those poems acted like a recording instrument which, by registering his transient moods, was destined ultimately to betray a secret which he had been at so much pains to hide. In ‘The Giaour’ we see remorse for a crime, which he was at first willing to expiate in sorrow and repentance. In ‘The Bride of Abydos’ we find him, in an access of madness and passion, proposing to share the fate of his victim, if she will but consent to fly with him. Happily for both, Mary would never have consented to an act of social suicide. In ‘The Corsair’ we behold his dreams dispelled by the death of his Love and the hope of better years.

‘He asked no question—all were answered now!’

With the dramatic fate of Medora the curtain falls, and the poet, in whom

‘I suoi pensieri in lui dormir non ponno,’

crosses the threshold of a new life. He reappears later on the scene of all his woes, a broken, friendless stranger, in the person of Lara—that last phase, in which the poet discloses his identity with characteristic insouciance, brings the tragedy abruptly to a close.[45]

On January 6, 1814, Byron wrote a remarkable letter to Moore, at that time in Nottinghamshire:

‘... I have a confidence for you—a perplexing one to me, and just at present in a state of abeyance in itself.... [Here probably follows the disclosure.] However, we shall see. In the meantime you may amuse yourself with my suspense, and put all the justices of peace in requisition, in case I come into your county [Nottinghamshire] with hackbut bent.[46] Seriously, whether I am to hear from her or him, it is a pause, which I can fill up with as few thoughts of my own as I can borrow from other people. Anything is better than stagnation; and now, in the interregnum of my autumn and a strange summer adventure, which I don’t like to think of.... Of course you will keep my secret, and don’t even talk in your sleep of it. Happen what may, your dedication is ensured, being already written; and I shall copy it out fair to-night, in case business or amusement—Amant alterna CamoenÆ.’

Byron here refers to ‘The Corsair,’ which he dedicated to Thomas Moore. In order to understand this letter, it may be inferred that one of the letters he had written to his lady-love had remained so long unanswered that Byron feared it might have fallen into her husband’s hands. Writing to Moore on the following day, Byron says:

‘My last epistle would probably put you in a fidget. But the devil, who ought to be civil on such occasions, proved so, and took my letter to the right place.... Is it not odd? the very fate I said she had escaped from **** she has now undergone from the worthy ****.’

An undated letter from Mary Chaworth, preserved among the Byron letters in Mr. Murray’s possession, seems to belong to this period:

On or about January 7, 1814, Byron writes to his sister Augusta in reference to Mary Chaworth:

Five days later Byron again writes to Augusta Leigh:

Medora was born on or about April 15, 1814. ‘Lara’ was written between May 4 and 14. The opening lines, which would have set every tongue wagging, were withheld from publication until January, 1887. They were written in London early in May, and were addressed to the mother of Medora:

‘When thou art gone—the loved, the lost—the one
Whose smile hath gladdened, though perchance undone—
Whose name too dearly cherished to impart
Dies on the lip, but trembles in the heart;
Whose sudden mention can almost convulse,
And lightens through the ungovernable pulse—
Till the heart leaps so keenly to the word
We fear that throb can hardly beat unheard—[48]
Then sinks at once beneath that sickly chill
That follows when we find her absent still.
When thou art gone—too far again to bless—
Oh! God—how slowly comes Forgetfulness!
Let none complain how faithless and how brief
The brain’s remembrance, or the bosom’s grief,
Or ere they thus forbid us to forget
Let Mercy strip the memory of regret;
Yet—selfish still—we would not be forgot,
What lip dare say—“My Love—remember not”?
Oh! best—and dearest! Thou whose thrilling name
My heart adores too deeply to proclaim—
My memory, almost ceasing to repine,
Would mount to Hope if once secure of thine.
Meantime the tale I weave must mournful be—
As absence to the heart that lives on thee!’

Lord Lovelace has told us that ‘nothing is too stupid for belief.’ We are disposed to agree with him, especially as he produces these lines in support of his accusation against Augusta Leigh. The absurdity of supposing that they were addressed to Byron’s sister appears to us to be so evident that it seems unnecessary to waste words in disputation. There is abundant proof that during this period Mrs. Leigh and Byron were in constant correspondence, and that he visited her almost daily during her simulated confinement and convalescence. When Murray sent her some books to while away the time, Byron wrote (April 9) on her behalf to thank him. And finally, as Augusta Leigh had no intention whatever of leaving London, she could in no sense have been ‘the lost one’ whose prospective departure filled Byron with despair. The poet and his sister—whom he was accustomed to address as ‘Goose’[49]—were then, and always, on most familiar terms. The ‘mention of her name’ (which was often on his lips) would certainly not have convulsed him, nor have caused his heart to beat so loudly that he feared lest others should hear it! The woman to whom those lines were addressed was Mary Chaworth, whose condition induced him, on April 18, to begin a fragment entitled ‘Magdalen’—she of whom he wrote on May 4:

‘I speak not—I trace not—I breathe not thy name—
There is Love in the sound—there is Guilt in the fame.’Lord Lovelace, in his impetuosity, and with very imperfect knowledge of Byron’s life-story, ties every doubtful scrap of his grandfather’s poetry into his bundle of proofs against Augusta Leigh, without perceiving any discrepancy in the nature of his evidence. A moment’s reflection might have convinced him that the lines we have quoted could not, by any possibility, have applied to one whom he subsequently addressed as:

‘My sister! my sweet sister! if a name
Dearer and purer were, it should be thine;
*******
Had I but sooner learnt the crowd to shun,
I had been better than I now can be;
The passions which have torn me would have slept;
I had not suffered, and thou hadst not wept.’

It must be admitted that Byron, through indiscreet confidences and reckless mystifications, was partly the cause of the suspicions which afterwards fell upon his sister. Lady Byron has left it on record that Byron early in 1814—before the birth of Medora—told Lady Caroline Lamb that a woman he passionately loved was with child by him, and that if a daughter was born it should be called Medora.[50] At about the same time ‘he advanced, at Holland House, the most extraordinary theories about the relations of brother and sister, which originated the reports about Mrs. Leigh.’

That, after ninety years, such nonsense should be regarded as evidence against a woman so well known in the society of her day as was Mrs. Leigh, justifies our concurrence with Lord Lovelace’s opinion that ‘nothing is too stupid for belief.’

It appears that one day Lady Byron was talking to her husband about ‘Lara,’ which seemed to her to be ‘like the darkness in which one fears to behold spectres.’ This bait was evidently too tempting for Byron to resist. He replied: ‘“Lara”—there’s more in that than in any of them.’ As he spoke he shuddered, and turned his eyes to the ground.

Before we examine that poem to see how much it may contain of illuminating matter, we will touch upon a remark Byron made to his wife, which Lord Lovelace quotes without perceiving its depth and meaning. We will quote ‘Astarte’:

This is perfectly true. Byron proposed to Miss Milbanke in 1812. If she had married him then, he would not have renewed his intimacy with Mary Chaworth in June, 1813. There would have been no heart-hunger, no misery, no remorse, and, in short, no inspiration for ‘The Giaour,’ ‘The Bride,’ ‘The Corsair,’ and ‘Lara.’ Miss Milbanke’s refusal of his offer of marriage in 1812 rankled long in Byron’s mind, and provoked those ungenerous reproaches which have been, with more or less exaggeration, reported by persons in Lady Byron’s confidence. The mischief was done between the date of Miss Milbanke’s refusal and her acceptance of his offer, which occurred after the fury of his passion for Mary Chaworth had burnt itself out. No blame attaches to Lady Byron for this misfortune. When Byron first proposed, her affections were elsewhere engaged; she could not, therefore, dispose of her heart to him. When she at last accepted him, it was too late for happiness.

In a letter which Byron wrote to Miss Milbanke previous to his marriage,[51] he unconsciously prophesied the worst:

When Byron said that he had doubts whether the past would not eventually reflect injuriously upon his future wife, he referred, not to Augusta Leigh, but to his fatal intercourse with Mary Chaworth. The following sentences taken from Mrs. Leigh’s letters to Francis Hodgson, who knew the truth, prove that the mystery only incidentally affected Augusta. The letters were written February, 1816.

These are the expressions, not of a person connected with a tragedy, but rather of one who was a spectator of it. Every impartial person must see that. When, on another occasion, Byron told his wife that he wished he had gone abroad—as he had intended—in June, 1813, he undoubtedly implied that the fatal intimacy with Mary Chaworth would have been avoided. This seems so clear to us that we are surprised that Byron’s statement on the subject of his poems should have made no impression on the mind of Lord Lovelace, and should have elicited nothing from him in ‘Astarte,’ except the banale suggestion that Byron’s literary activity must have been accidental!

Lara, like Conrad, is a portion of Byron himself, and the poem opens with his return to Newstead after some bitter experiences, at which he darkly hints:

‘Short was the course his restlessness had run,
But long enough to leave him half undone.’

He tells us that ‘Another chief consoled his destined bride.’ ‘One is absent that most might decorate that gloomy pile.’

‘Why slept he not when others were at rest?
Why heard no music, and received no guest?
All was not well, they deemed—but where the wrong?
Some knew perchance.’

In stanzas 17, 18, and 19, Byron draws a picture of himself, so like that his sister remarked upon it in a letter to Hodgson. After telling us that ‘his heart was not by nature hard,’ he says that

‘His blood in temperate seeming now would flow:
Ah! happier if it ne’er with guilt had glowed,
But ever in that icy smoothness flowed!’

The poet tells us that after Lara’s death he was mourned by one whose quiet grief endured for long.

‘Vain was all question asked her of the past,
And vain e’en menace—silent to the last.’
‘Why did she love him? Curious fool!—be still—
Is human love the growth of human will?
To her he might be gentleness; the stern
Have deeper thoughts than your dull eyes discern,
And when they love, your smilers guess not how
Beats the strong heart, though less the lips avow.
They were not common links, that formed the chain
That bound to Lara Kaled’s heart and brain;
But that wild tale she brooked not to unfold,
And sealed is now each lip that could have told.
********
‘The tempest of his heart in scorn had gazed
On that the feebler Elements hath raised.
The Rapture of his Heart had looked on high,
And asked if greater dwelt beyond the sky:
Chained to excess, the slave of each extreme,
How woke he from the wildness of that dream!
Alas! he told not—but he did awake
To curse the withered heart that would not break.’

On September 8, 1814, four months after Byron had finished ‘Lara,’ while he was at Newstead with his sister and her children—the little Medora among them—he wrote his fragment ‘Harmodia.’ The rough draft was given after his marriage to Lady Byron, who had no idea to what it could possibly refer. When the scandal about Augusta was at its height, this fragment was impounded among other incriminating documents, and eventually saw the light in ‘Astarte.’ Lord Lovelace was firmly convinced that it was addressed to Augusta Leigh!

Between September 7 and 15 Byron and Mary Chaworth were considering the desirability of marriage for Byron, and letters were passing between the distracted poet and two young ladies—Miss Milbanke and another—with that object in view. Although Byron was still in love with Mary Chaworth, he had come to understand that her determination to break the dangerous intimacy was irrevocable, so he resolved to follow her advice and marry. The tone of his letter to Moore, written on September 15, shows that he was not very keen about wedlock. He was making plans for a journey to Italy in the event of his proposal being rejected.

It is possible that, in a conversation between Mary and himself, the former may have spoken of the risks they had incurred in the past, and of her resolve never to transgress again. To which Byron replied:

Harmodia.
‘The things that were—and what and whence are they?
Those clouds and rainbows of thy yesterday?
Their path has vanish’d from th’ eternal sky,
And now its hues are of a different dye.
Thus speeds from day to day, and Pole to Pole,
The change of parts, the sameness of the whole;
And all we snatch, amidst the breathing strife,
But gives to Memory what it takes from Life:
Despoils a substance to adorn a shade—
And that frail shadow lengthens but to fade.
Sun of the sleepless! Melancholy Star!
Whose tearful beam shoots trembling from afar—
That chang’st the darkness thou canst not dispel—
How like art thou to Joy, remembered well!
Such is the past—the light of other days
That shines, but warms not with its powerless rays—
A moonbeam Sorrow watcheth to behold,
Distinct, but distant—clear, but death-like cold.
‘Oh! as full thought comes rushing o’er the Mind
Of all we saw before—to leave behind—
Of all!—but words, what are they? Can they give
A trace of truth to thoughts while yet they live?
No—Passion—Feeling speak not—or in vain—
The tear for Grief—the Groan must speak for Pain—
Joy hath its smile—and Love its blush and sigh—
Despair her silence—Hate her lip and eye—
These their interpreters, where deeply lurk—
The Soul’s despoilers warring as they work—
The strife once o’er—then words may find their way,
Yet how enfeebled from the forced delay!
‘But who could paint the progress of the wreck—
Himself still clinging to the dangerous deck?
Safe on the shore the artist first must stand,
And then the pencil trembles in his hand.’

When, four years later, Byron was writing the first canto of ‘Don Juan,’ with feelings chastened by suffering and time, he recurred to that period—never effaced from his memory—the time when he wrote:

‘When thou art gone—the loved—the lost—the one
Whose smile hath gladdened—though, perchance, undone!’

Time could not change the feelings of his youth, nor keep his thoughts for long from the object of his early love.

‘They tell me ’tis decided you depart:
’Tis wise—’tis well, but not the less a pain;
I have no further claim on your young heart,
Mine is the victim, and would be again:
To love too much has been the only art
I used.’
‘I loved, I love you, for this love have lost
State, station, Heaven, Mankind’s, my own esteem,
And yet can not regret what it hath cost,
So dear is still the memory of that dream;
Yet, if I name my guilt, ’tis not to boast,
None can deem harshlier of me than I deem.’
‘All is o’er
For me on earth, except some years to hide
My shame and sorrow deep in my heart’s core:
These I could bear, but cannot cast aside
The passion which still rages as before—
And so farewell—forgive me, love me—No,
That word is idle now—but let it go.’
*******
‘My heart is feminine, nor can forget—
To all, except one image, madly blind;
So shakes the needle, and so stands the pole,
As vibrates my fond heart to my fixed soul.’It was early in 1814 that Byron also wrote his farewell verses to Mary Chaworth, which appeared in the second edition of ‘The Corsair’:

I.
‘Farewell! if ever fondest prayer
For other’s weal availed on high,
Mine will not all be lost in air,
But waft thy name beyond the sky.
’Twere vain to speak—to weep—to sigh:
Oh! more than tears of blood can tell,
When wrung from Guilt’s expiring eye,
Are in that word—Farewell! Farewell!
II.
‘These lips are mute, these eyes are dry;
But in my breast, and in my brain,
Awake the pangs that pass not by,
The thought that ne’er shall sleep again.
My soul nor deigns nor dares complain,
Though Grief and Passion there rebel:
I only know we loved in vain—
I only feel—Farewell! Farewell!’

Even in the ‘Hebrew Melodies,’ which were probably begun in the autumn of 1814, and finished after Byron’s marriage in January, 1815, there are traces of that deathless remorse and love, whose expression could not be altogether repressed. We select some examples at random. In the poem ‘Oh, snatched away in Beauty’s bloom,’ the poet had added two verses which were subsequently suppressed:

‘Nor need I write to tell the tale,
My pen were doubly weak.
Oh! what can idle words avail,
Unless my heart could speak?
‘By day or night, in weal or woe,
That heart, no longer free,
Must bear the love it cannot show,
And silent turn for thee.’In ‘Herod’s Lament for Mariamne’ we find:

‘She’s gone, who shared my diadem;
She sunk, with her my joys entombing;
I swept that flower from Judah’s stem,
Whose leaves for me alone were blooming;
And mine’s the guilt, and mine the Hell,
This bosom’s desolation dooming;
And I have earned those tortures well,
Which unconsumed are still consuming!’

While admitting that Byron’s avowed object was to portray the remorse of Herod, we suspect that the haunting image of one so dear to him—one who had suffered through guilt which he so frequently deplored in verse—must have been in the poet’s mind when these lines were written.

On January 17, 1814, Byron went to Newstead with Augusta Leigh, and stayed there one month.

On the following day Byron wrote to his friend Wedderburn Webster:

This strange apology for what might have been considered a very natural act of neighbourly friendship, inevitably reminds us of a French proverb, Qui s’excuse s’accuse. It is worthy of note that, after Byron had been ten days at Newstead with his sister, he wrote to his lawyer—who must have been surprised at the irrelevant information—to say that Augusta Leigh was ‘in the family way.’ The significance of this communication has hitherto passed unnoticed. We gather from Byron’s letters that he was much depressed by Mary Chaworth’s state of health, involving all the risks of discovery.

Soon after his return to London Byron wrote to Moore: ‘Seriously, I am in what the learned call a dilemma, and the vulgar, a scrape....’

Moore took care, with his asterisks, that we should not know the nature of that scrape, which certainly had nothing to do with his ‘Lines to a Lady Weeping’ which appeared in the first edition of ‘The Corsair.’ If the reader has any doubts on this point, let him refer to Byron’s letters to Murray, notably to that one in which the angry poet protests against the suppression of those lines in the second edition of ‘The Corsair’:

Moore’s asterisks veiled the record of a deeper scrape, as Byron’s letter to him, written three weeks later, plainly show.

On April 10, 1814, Byron wrote in his journal:

The latter portion of the journal at this period is much mutilated. There is a gap between April 10 and 19, when, four days after the birth of Medora, he writes in deep dejection:

It was at this time that Byron wrote the following lines, in which he tells Mary Chaworth that all danger of the discovery of their secret is over:

‘There is no more for me to hope,
There is no more for thee to fear;
And, if I give my sorrow scope,
That sorrow thou shalt never hear.
Why did I hold thy love so dear?
Why shed for such a heart one tear?
Let deep and dreary silence be
My only memory of thee!
When all are fled who flatter now,
Save thoughts which will not flatter then;
And thou recall’st the broken vow
To him who must not love again—
Each hour of now forgotten years
Thou, then, shalt number with thy tears;
And every drop of grief shall be
A vain remembrancer of me!’

On May 4, 1814, Byron sent to Moore the following verses. We quote from Lady Byron’s manuscript:

‘I speak not—I trace not—I breathe not thy name—
There is love in the sound—there is Guilt in the fame—
But the tear which now burns on my cheek may impart
The deep thoughts that dwell in that silence of heart.
‘Too brief for our passion—too long for our peace—
Was that hour—can its hope—can its memory cease?
We repent—we abjure—we will break from our chain:
We must part—we must fly to—unite it again!
‘Oh! thine be the gladness—and mine be the Guilt!
Forgive me—adored one—forsake if thou wilt—
But the heart which is thine shall expire undebased,
And Man shall not break it whatever thou mayst.
‘Oh! proud to the mighty—but humble to thee
This soul in its bitterest moment shall be,
And our days glide as swift—and our moments more sweet
With thee at my side—than the world at my feet.
‘One tear of thy sorrow—one smile of thy love—
Shall turn me or fix—shall reward or reprove—
And the heartless may wonder at all I resign:
Thy lip shall reply—not to them—but to mine.’

These verses were not published until Byron had been five years in his grave. They tell the story plainly, and the manuscript in Mr. Murray’s possession speaks plainer still. Before Byron gave the manuscript to his wife, he erased the following lines:

‘We have loved—and oh! still, my adored one, we love!’
‘Oh! the moment is past when that passion might cease.’
‘But I cannot repent what we ne’er can recall.’

After Medora’s birth Byron became more and more dejected, and on April 29 he wrote a remarkable letter to Murray, enclosing a draft to redeem the copyrights of his poems, and releasing Murray from his engagement to pay £1,000, agreed on for ‘The Giaour’ and ‘The Bride of Abydos.’ Byron was evidently afraid that Mr. Chaworth Musters would discover the truth, and that a duel and disgrace would be the inevitable consequence.

Two days later Byron seems to have conquered his immediate apprehensions, and, in reply to an appeal from Murray, writes:

It had evidently dawned on Byron’s mind that a sudden suppression of his poems would have aroused public curiosity, and that a motive for his action would either have been found or invented. This would have been fatal to all concerned. If trouble were to come, it would be wiser not to meet it halfway. Happily, the birth of Medora passed unnoticed.

As time wore on, Byron’s hopes that Mary would relent grew apace. But he was doomed to disappointment. Mary Chaworth had the courage and the wisdom to crush a love so disastrous to both. Byron in his blindness reproached her:

‘Thou art not false, but thou art fickle.’

He tells her that he would despise her if she were false; but he knows that her love is sincere:

‘When she can change who loved so truly!’
‘Ah! sure such grief is Fancy’s scheming,
And all the Change can be but dreaming!’

He could not believe that her resolve was serious. Time taught him better. Love died, and friendship took its place. The same love that tempted her to sin was that true love that works out its redemption.

Between April 15 and 21, 1816, before signing the deed of separation, Byron went into the country to take leave of Mary Chaworth. It was their last meeting, and the parting must have been a sad one. The hopes that Mary had formed for his peace and happiness in marriage had suddenly been dashed to the ground. And now he was about to leave England under a cloud, which threatened for a time to overwhelm them both. A terrible anxiety as to the issue of investigations, which were being made into his conduct previous to and during his marriage, oppressed her with the gravest apprehension. Everything seemed to depend upon the silence both of Byron and Augusta. Under this awful strain the mind of Mary Chaworth was flickering towards collapse. By the following verses, which must have been written soon after their final meeting, we find Byron,

‘Seared in heart—and lone—and blighted,’

reproaching, with a lover’s injustice, the woman he adored, for that act of renunciation which, under happier auspices, might have proved his own salvation:

I.
‘When we two parted
In silence and tears,
Half broken-hearted
To sever for years,
Pale grew thy cheek and cold,
Colder thy kiss;
Truly that hour foretold
Sorrow to this.
II.
‘The dew of the morning
Sunk chill on my brow—
It felt like the warning
Of what I feel now.
Thy vows are all broken,
And light is thy fame:
I hear thy name spoken,
And share in its shame.
III.
‘They name thee before me,
A knell to mine ear;
A shudder comes o’er me—
Why wert thou so dear?
They know not I knew thee,
Who knew thee too well:
Long, long shall I rue thee,
Too deeply to tell.
IV.
‘In secret we met—
In silence I grieve,
That thy heart could forget,
Thy spirit deceive.
If I should meet thee
After long years,
How should I greet thee?
With silence and tears.’In the first draft Byron had written, after the second verse, the following words:

‘Our secret lies hidden,
But never forgot.’

In ‘Fare Thee Well,’ written on March 17, 1816, there are only four lines which have any bearing on the point under consideration.

Byron tells his wife that if she really knew the truth, if every inmost thought of his breast were bared before her, she would not have forsaken him.

That is true. Lady Byron might, in time, have forgiven everything if the doctors had been able to declare that her husband was not wholly accountable for his actions. But when they pronounced him to be of sound mind, and, as will be seen presently, she subsequently convinced herself that he had committed, and might even then be committing adultery with his sister under her own roof, she resolved never again to place herself in his power. If, in the early stages of disagreement, without betraying Mary Chaworth, it could have been avowed that Mrs. Leigh was not the mother of Medora, Lady Byron might not have seen in her husband’s strange conduct towards herself ‘signs of a deep remorse.’ She would certainly have been far more patient under suffering, and the separation might have been avoided. But this avowal was impracticable. Augusta had committed herself too far for that, and the idle gossip of her servants subsequently convinced Lady Byron that Byron was the father of Augusta’s child. It is clear that neither Augusta nor Byron made any attempts to remove those suspicions; in fact, they acted in a manner most certain to confirm them. Whether the secret, which they had pledged themselves to keep, could long have been withheld from Lady Byron, if matters had been patched up, is doubtful. Meanwhile, as everything depended on premat nox alta, they dared not risk even a partial avowal of the truth.

The separation was inevitable, and in this case it was eternal. It is hard to believe that there had ever been any real love on either side. Under these circumstances we feel sure that any attempts at reconciliation would have ended disastrously for both. Byron’s love for Mary Chaworth was strong as death. Many waters could not have quenched it, ‘neither could the floods drown it.’

The last verses written by Byron before he left England for ever were addressed to his sister. The deed of separation had been signed, and Augusta Leigh, who had stood at his side in those dark hours when all the world had forsaken him, was about to leave London.

‘When all around grew drear and dark,
And Reason half withheld her ray—
And Hope but shed a dying spark
Which more misled my lonely way;
When Fortune changed, and Love fled far,
And Hatred’s shafts flew thick and fast,
Thou wert the solitary star
Which rose, and set not to the last.
And when the cloud upon us came
Which strove to blacken o’er thy ray—
Then purer spread its gentle flame
And dashed the darkness all away.
Still may thy Spirit dwell on mine,
And teach it what to brave or brook—
There’s more in one soft word of thine
Than in the world’s defied rebuke.
******
Then let the ties of baffled love
Be broken—thine will never break;
Thy heart can feel.’These ingenuous words show that Byron’s affection for his sister, and his gratitude for her loyalty, were both deep and sincere. If, as Lord Lovelace asserts, Byron had been her lover, we know enough of his character to be certain that he would never have written these lines. He was not a hypocrite—far from it—and it was foreign to his naturally combative nature to attempt to conciliate public opinion. These lines were written currente calamo, and are only interesting to us on account of the light they cast upon the situation at the time of the separation. Evidently Byron had heard a rumour of the baseless charge that was afterwards openly made. He reminds Augusta that a cloud threatened to darken her existence, but the bright rays of her purity dispelled it. He hopes that even in absence she will guide and direct him as in the past; and he compliments her by saying that one word from her had more influence over him than the whole world’s censure. Although his love-episode with Mary was over, yet so long as Augusta loves him he will still have something to live for, as she alone can feel for him and understand his position.

In speaking of his sister, in the third canto of ‘Childe Harold,’ he says:

‘For there was soft Remembrance, and sweet Trust
In one fond breast, to which his own would melt.’
‘And he had learned to love—I know not why,
For this in such as him seems strange of mood—
The helpless looks of blooming Infancy,
Even in its earliest nurture; what subdued,
To change like this, a mind so far imbued
With scorn of man, it little boots to know;
But thus it was; and though in solitude
Small power the nipped affections have to grow,
In him this glowed when all beside had ceased to glow.’If these words bear any significance, Byron must mean that, since the preceding canto of ‘Childe Harold’ was written, he had formed (learned to love) a strong attachment to some child, and, in spite of absence, this affection still glowed. That child may possibly have been Ada, as the opening lines seem to suggest. But this is not quite certain. According to Lord Lovelace, Byron never saw his child after January 3, 1816, when the babe was only twenty-four days old. Byron himself states that it was not granted to him ‘to watch her dawn of little joys, or hold her lightly on his knee, and print on her soft cheek a parent’s kiss.’ All this, he tells us, ‘was in his nature,’ but was denied to him. His sole consolation was the hope that some day Ada would learn to love him. On the other hand, the child mentioned in ‘Childe Harold’ had won his love by means which ‘it little boots to know.’ If Byron had alluded to his daughter Ada, there need have been no ambiguity. Possibly the child here indicated may have been little Medora, then three years old, with whom he had often played, and who was then living with that sister of ‘Soft Remembrance and sweet Trust.’

If that conjecture be correct, this is the only allusion to Medora in Byron’s poetry. But she is indicated in prose. In reference to the death of one of Moore’s children, Byron wrote (February 2, 1818):

In the one before Moore will have recognized Medora. In spite of the ‘scarlet cloak and double figure,’ Moore had no belief in the story that Byron became a father while at Harrow School!

‘The Dream,’ which was written in July, 1816, is perhaps more widely known than any of Byron’s poems. Its theme is the remembrance of a hopeless passion, which neither Time nor Reason could extinguish. Similar notes of lamentation permeate most of his poems, but in ‘The Dream’ Byron, for the first time, takes the world into his confidence, and tells his tale of woe with such distinctness that we realize its truth, its passion, and its calamity. The publication of that poem was an indiscretion which must have been very disconcerting to his sister. Fortunately, it had no disastrous consequences. It apparently awakened no suspicions, and its sole effect was to incense Mary Chaworth’s husband, who, in order to stop all prattle, caused the ‘peculiar diadem of trees’ to be cut down. In Byron’s early poems we see how deeply Mary Chaworth’s marriage affected him; but this was known only to a small circle of Southwell friends. In ‘The Dream’ we realize that she was in fact a portion of his life, and that his own marriage had not in the least affected his feelings towards her. He had tried hard to forget her, but in vain; she was his destiny. Whether Byron, when he wrote this poem, had any idea of publishing it to the world is not known. It may possibly have been written to relieve his overburdened mind, and would not have seen the light but for Lady Byron’s treatment of Mrs. Leigh on the memorable occasion when she extracted, under promise of secrecy, the so-called ‘Confession,’ to which we shall allude presently. In any case, Byron became aware of what had happened in September, 1816. In some lines addressed to his wife, he tells her that she bought others’ grief at any price, adding:

‘The means were worthy, and the end is won;
I would not do by thee as thou hast done.’

Possibly, Byron may have thought that the publication of this poem would act as a barb, and would wound Lady Byron’s stubborn pride. Its appearance in the circumstances was certainly contra bonos mores, but we must remember that ‘men in rage often strike those who wish them best.’ Whatever may have been Byron’s intention, ‘The Dream’ affords a proof that Mary Chaworth was never long absent from his thoughts. At this time, when he felt a deep remorse for his conduct towards Mary Chaworth, he asks himself:

‘What is this Death? a quiet of the heart?
The whole of that of which we are a part?
For Life is but a vision—what I see
Of all which lives alone is Life to me,
And being so—the absent are the dead
Who haunt us from tranquillity, and spread
A dreary shroud around us, and invest
With sad remembrancers our hours of rest.
The absent are the dead—for they are cold,
And ne’er can be what once we did behold;
And they are changed, and cheerless,—or if yet
The unforgotten do not all forget,
Since thus divided—equal must it be
If the deep barrier be of earth, or sea;
It may be both—but one day end it must
In the dark union of insensate dust.’

It was at this time also that Byron wrote his ‘Stanzas to Augusta,’ which show his complete confidence in her loyalty:

‘Though human, thou didst not deceive me,
Though woman, thou didst not forsake,
Though loved, thou forborest to grieve me,
Though tempted, thou never couldst shake;
Though trusted, thou didst not betray me,
Though parted, it was not to fly,
Though watchful, ’twas not to defame me,
Nor, mute, that the world might belie.’

Byron’s remorse also found expression in ‘Manfred,’ where contrition is but slightly veiled by words of mysterious import, breathed in an atmosphere of mountains, magic, and ghost-lore. People in society, whose ears had been poisoned by insinuations against Mrs. Leigh, and who knew nothing of Byron’s intercourse with Mary Chaworth, came to the conclusion that ‘Manfred’ revealed a criminal attachment between Byron and his sister. Byron was aware of this, and, conscious of his innocence, held his head in proud defiance, and laughed his enemies to scorn. He did not deign to defend himself; and the public—forgetful of the maxim that where there is a sense of guilt there is a jealousy of drawing attention to it—believed the worst. When a critique of ‘Manfred,’ giving an account of the supposed origin of the story, was sent to Byron, he wrote to Murray:

‘The conjecturer is out, and knows nothing of the matter. I had a better origin than he can devise or divine for the soul of him.’

That was the simple truth. The cruel allegation against Mrs. Leigh seemed to be beneath contempt. As Sir Egerton Brydges pointed out at the time, Byron, being of a strong temperament, did not reply to the injuries heaped upon him by whining complaints and cowardly protestations of innocence; he became desperate, and broke out into indignation, sarcasm, and exposure of his opponents, in a manner so severe as to seem inexcusably cruel to those who did not realize the provocation. It was ‘war to the knife,’ and Byron had the best of it.We propose to examine ‘Manfred’ closely, to see whether Astarte in any degree resembles the description which Lord Lovelace has given of Augusta Leigh.

Manfred tells us that his slumbers are ‘a continuance of enduring thought,’ since that ‘all-nameless hour’ when he committed the crime for which he suffers. He asks ‘Forgetfulness of that which is within him—a crime which he cannot utter.’ When told by the Seven Spirits that he cannot have self-oblivion, Manfred asks if Death would give it to him; and receives the sad reply that, being immortal, the spirit after death cannot forget the past.

Eventually the Seventh Spirit—typifying, possibly, a Magdalen—appears before Manfred, in the shape of a beautiful woman.

‘Manfred. Oh God! if it be thus, and thou
Art not a madness and a mockery,
I yet might be most happy.’

When the figure vanishes, Manfred falls senseless. In the second act, Manfred, in reply to the chamois-hunter, who offers him a cup of wine, says:

‘Away, away! there’s blood upon the brim!
Will it then never—never sink in the earth?
’Tis blood—my blood! the pure warm stream
Which ran in the veins of my fathers, and in ours
When we were in our youth, and had one heart,
And loved each other as we should not love,
And this was shed: but still it rises up.
Colouring the clouds that shut me out from Heaven.’

One may well wonder what all this has to do with Augusta. The blood that ran in Byron’s veins also ran in the veins of Mary Chaworth, and that blood, shed by Byron’s kinsman, had caused a feud, which was not broken until Byron came upon the scene, and fell hopelessly in love with ‘the last of a time-honoured race.’ Byron from his boyhood always believed that there was a blood-curse upon him.

When, two years later, he wrote ‘The Duel’ (December, 1818), he again alludes to the subject:

‘I loved thee—I will not say how,
Since things like these are best forgot:
Perhaps thou mayst imagine now
Who loved thee and who loved thee not.
And thou wert wedded to another,
And I at last another wedded:
I am a father, thou a mother,
To strangers vowed, with strangers bedded.
***** *
‘Many a bar, and many a feud,
Though never told, well understood,
Rolled like a river wide between—
And then there was the curse of blood,
Which even my Heart’s can not remove.
***** *
‘I’ve seen the sword that slew him; he,
The slain, stood in a like degree
To thee, as he, the Slayer stood
(Oh, had it been but other blood!)
In Kin and Chieftainship to me.
Thus came the Heritage to thee.’

Clearly, then, the Spirit, which appeared to Manfred in the form of a beautiful female figure, was Mary Chaworth; the crime for which he suffered was his conduct towards her; and the blood, which his fancy beheld on the cup’s brim, was the blood of William Chaworth, which his predecessor, Lord Byron, had shed. When asked by the chamois-hunter whether he had wreaked revenge upon his enemies, Manfred replies:

‘No, no, no!
My injuries came down on those who loved me—
On those whom I best loved: I never quelled
An enemy, save in my just defence—
But my embrace was fatal.’In speaking of the ‘core of his heart’s grief,’ Manfred says:

‘Yet there was One—
She was like me in lineaments—her eyes—
Her hair—her features—all, to the very tone
Even of her voice, they said were like to mine;
But softened all, and tempered into beauty:
She had the same lone thoughts and wanderings,[52]
The quest of hidden knowledge, and a mind
To comprehend the Universe: nor these
Alone, but with them gentler powers than mine,
Pity, and smiles, and tears—which I had not;
And tenderness—but that I had for her;
Humility—and that I never had.
Her faults were mine—her virtues were her own—
I loved her, and destroyed her!
Not with my hand, but heart, which broke her heart;
It gazed on mine, and withered.’

In order to appreciate the absurdity of connecting this description with Augusta, we will quote her noble accuser, Lord Lovelace:

‘The character of Augusta is seen in her letters and actions. She was a woman of that great family which is vague about facts, unconscious of duties, impulsive in conduct. The course of her life could not be otherwise explained, by those who had looked into it with close intimacy, than by a kind of moral idiotcy from birth. She was of a sanguine and buoyant disposition, childishly fond and playful, ready to laugh at anything, loving to talk nonsense.’