Chapter 4

[ah] _And think of such things with a childish eye._--[MS.]

[89] {61}[Compare--

"He who first met the Highland's swelling blue, Will love each peak, that shows a kindred hue, Hail in each crag a friend's familiar face, And clasp the mountain in his mind's embrace."

_The Island_, Canto II. stanza xii. lines 9-12.

His "friends are mountains." He comes back to them as to a "holier land," where he may find not happiness, but peace.

Moore was inclined to attribute Byron's "love of mountain prospects" in his childhood to the "after-result of his imaginative recollections of that period," but (as Wilson, commenting on Moore, suggests) it is easier to believe that the "high instincts" of the "poetic child" did not wait for association to consecrate the vision (_Life_, p. 8).]

[ai]

_The earliest were the only paths for me._ _The earliest were the paths and meant for me._--[MS. erased.]

[aj]

_Yet could I but expunge from out the book_ _Of my existence all that was entwined._--[MS. erased.]

[ak]

_My life has been too long--if in a day_ _I have survived_----.--[MS. erased.]

[90] {62}[Byron often insists on this compression of life into a yet briefer span than even mortality allows. Compare--

"He, who grown aged in this world of woe, In deeds, not years, piercing the depths of life," etc.

_Childe Harold_, Canto III. stanza v. lines 1, 2, _Poetical Works_, 1899, ii. 218, note 1.

Compare, too--

"My life is not dated by years-- There are moments which act as a plough," etc.

_Lines to the Countess of Blessington_, stanza 4.]

[al] _And for the remnants_----.--[MS.]

[am] _Whate'er betide_----.--[MS.]

[an] _We have been and we shall be_----.--[MS. erased.]

[91] {63}["These verses," says John Wright (ed. 1832, x. 207), "of which the opening lines (1-6) are given in Moore's _Notices_, etc. (1830, ii. 36), were written immediately after the failure of the negotiation ... [i.e. the intervention] of Madame de Staël, who had persuaded Byron 'to write a letter to a friend in England, declaring himself still willing to be reconciled to Lady Byron' (_Life_, p. 321), but were not intended for the public eye." The verses were written in September, and it is evident that since the composition of _The Dream_ in July, another "change had come over" his spirit, and that the mild and courteous depreciation of his wife as "a gentle bride," etc., had given place to passionate reproach and bitter reviling. The failure of Madame de Staël's negotiations must have been to some extent anticipated, and it is more reasonable to suppose that it was a rumour or report of the "one serious calumny" of Shelley's letter of September 29, 1816, which provoked him to fury, and drove him into the open maledictions of _The Incantation_ (published together with the _Prisoner of Chillon_, but afterwards incorporated with _Manfred_, act i. sc. 1, _vide post_, p. 91), and the suppressed "lines," written, so he told Lady Blessington (_Conversations, etc._, 1834, p. 79) "on reading in a newspaper" that Lady Byron had been ill.]

[92] [Compare--

" ... that unnatural retribution--just, Had it but been from hands less near."

_Childe Harold_, Canto IV. stanza cxxxii. lines 6, 7, _Poetical Works_, 1899, ii. 427.]

[93] {64}[Compare--

"Though thy slumber may be deep, Yet thy Spirit shall not sleep.

* * * * *

Nor to slumber nor to die, Shall be in thy destiny."

_The Incantation_, lines 201, 202, 254, 255, _Manfred_,