by Thomas Moore
At Diodati, his life was passed in the same regular round of habits and occupations into which, when left to himself, he always naturally fell; a late breakfast, then a visit to the Shelleys’ cottage and an excursion on the Lake; — at five, dinner (when he usually preferred being alone), and then, if the weather permitted, an excursion again. He and Shelley had joined in purchasing a boat, for which they gave twenty-five louis, — a small sailing vessel, fitted to stand the usual squalls of the climate, and, at that time, the only keeled boat on the Lake. When the weather did not allow of their excursions after dinner, — an occurrence not unfrequent during this very wet summer, — the inmates of the cottage passed their evenings at Diodati, and, when the rain rendered it inconvenient for them to return home, remained there to sleep. “We often,” says one, who was not the least ornamental of the party, “sat up in conversation till the morning light. There was never any lack of subjects, and, grave or gay, we were always interested.”
During a week of rain at this time, having amused themselves with reading German ghost-stories, they agreed, at last, to write something in imitation of them. “You and I,” said Lord Byron to Mrs. Shelley, “will publish ours together.” He then began his tale of the Vampire; and, having the whole arranged in his head, repeated to them a sketch of the story one evening, — but, from the narrative being in prose, made but little progress in filling up his outline. The most memorable result, indeed, of their story-telling compact, was Mrs. Shelley’s wild and powerful romance of Frankenstein, — one of those original conceptions that take hold of the public mind at once, and for ever.
Towards the latter end of June, as we have seen in one of the preceding letters, Lord Byron, accompanied by his friend Shelley, made a tour in his boat round the Lake, and visited, “with the Heloise before him,” all those scenes around Meillerie and Clarens, which have become consecrated for ever by ideal passion, and by that power which Genius alone possesses, of giving such life to its dreams as to make them seem realities. In the squall off Meillerie, which he mentions, their danger was considerable. In the expectation, every moment, of being obliged to swim for his life, Lord Byron had already thrown off his coat, and, as Shelley was no swimmer, insisted upon endeavouring, by some means, to save him. This offer, however, Shelley positively refused; and seating himself quietly upon a locker, and grasping the rings at each end firmly in his hands, declared his determination to go down in that position, without a struggle.
Subjoined to that interesting little work, the “Six Weeks’ Tour,” there is a letter by Shelley himself, giving an account of this excursion round the Lake, and written with all the enthusiasm such scenes should inspire. In describing a beautiful child they saw at the village of Nerni, he says, “My companion gave him a piece of money, which he took without speaking, with a sweet smile of easy thankfulness, and then with an unembarrassed air turned to his play.” There were, indeed, few things Lord Byron more delighted in than to watch beautiful children at play;— “many a lovely Swiss child (says a person who saw him daily at this time) received crowns from him as the reward of their grace and sweetness.”
Speaking of their lodgings at Nerni, which were gloomy and dirty, Mr. Shelley says, “On returning to our inn, we found that the servant had arranged our rooms, and deprived them of the greater portion of their former disconsolate appearance. They reminded my companion of Greece: — it was five years, he said, since he had slept in such beds.”
Luckily for Shelley’s full enjoyment of these scenes, he had never before happened to read the Heloise; and though his companion had long been familiar with that romance, the sight of the region itself, the “birth-place of deep Love,” every spot of which seemed instinct with the passion of the story, gave to the whole a fresh and actual existence in his mind. Both were under the spell of the Genius of the place, — both full of emotion; and as they walked silently through the vineyards that were once the “bosquet de Julie,” Lord Byron suddenly exclaimed, “Thank God, Polidori is not here.”
That the glowing stanzas suggested to him by this scene were written upon the spot itself appears almost certain, from the letter addressed to Mr. Murray on his way back to Diodati, in which he announces the third Canto as complete, and consisting of 117 stanzas. At Ouchy, near Lausanne, — the place from which that letter is dated — he and his friend were detained two days, in a small inn, by the weather: and it was there, in that short interval, that he wrote his “Prisoner of Chillon,” adding one more deathless association to the already immortalised localities of the Lake.
On his return from this excursion to Diodati, an occasion was afforded for the gratification of his jesting propensities by the avowal of the young physician that — he had fallen in love. On the evening of this tender confession they both appeared at Shelley’s cottage — Lord Byron, in the highest and most boyish spirits, rubbing his hands as he walked about the room, and in that utter incapacity of retention which was one of his foibles, making jesting allusions to the secret he had just heard. The brow of the Doctor darkened as this pleasantry went on, and, at last, he angrily accused Lord Byron of hardness of heart. “I never,” said he, “met with a person so unfeeling.” This sally, though the poet had evidently brought it upon himself, annoyed him most deeply. “Call me cold-hearted — me insensible!” he exclaimed, with manifest emotion— “as well might you say that glass is not brittle, which has been cast down a precipice, and lies dashed to pieces at the foot!”
In the month of July he paid a visit to Copet, and was received by the distinguished hostess with a cordiality the more sensibly felt by him as, from his personal unpopularity at this time, he had hardly ventured to count upon it. In her usual frank style, she took him to task upon his matrimonial conduct — but in a way that won upon his mind, and disposed him to yield to her suggestions. He must endeavour, she told him, to bring about a reconciliation with his wife, and must submit to contend no longer with the opinion of the world. In vain did he quote her own motto to Delphine, “Un homme peut braver, une femme doit se succomber aux opinions du monde;” — her reply was, that all this might be very well to say, but that, in real life, the duty and necessity of yielding belonged also to the man. Her eloquence, in short, so far succeeded, that he was prevailed upon to write a letter to a friend in England, declaring himself still willing to be reconciled to Lady Byron, — a concession not a little startling to those who had so often, lately, heard him declare that, “having done all in his power to persuade Lady Byron to return, and with this view put off as long as he could signing the deed of separation, that step being once taken, they were now divided for ever.”
Of the particulars of this brief negotiation that ensued upon Madame de Staël’s suggestion, I have no very accurate remembrance; but there can be little doubt that its failure, after the violence he had done his own pride in the overture, was what first infused any mixture of resentment or bitterness into the feelings hitherto entertained by him throughout these painful differences. He had, indeed, since his arrival in Geneva, invariably spoken of his lady with kindness and regret, imputing the course she had taken, in leaving him, not to herself but others, and assigning whatever little share of blame he would allow her to bear in the transaction to the simple and, doubtless, true cause — her not at all understanding him. “I have no doubt,” he would sometimes say, “that she really did believe me to be mad.”
Another resolution connected with his matrimonial affairs, in which he often, at this time, professed his fixed intention to persevere, was that of never allowing himself to touch any part of his wife’s fortune. Such a sacrifice, there is no doubt, would have been, in his situation, delicate and manly; but though the natural bent of his disposition led him to make the resolution, he wanted, — what few, perhaps, could have attained, — the fortitude to keep it.
The effects of the late struggle on his mind, in stirring up all its resources and energies, was visible in the great activity of his genius during the whole of this period, and the rich variety, both in
character and colouring, of the works with which it teemed. Besides the third Canto of Childe Harold and the Prisoner of Chillon, he produced also his two poems, “Darkness” and “The Dream,” the latter of which cost him many a tear in writing, — being, indeed, the most mournful, as well as picturesque, “story of a wandering life” that ever came from the pen and heart of man. Those verses, too, entitled “The Incantation,” which he introduced afterwards, without any connection with the subject, into Manfred, were also (at least, the less bitter portion of them) the production of this period; and as they were written soon after the last fruitless attempt at reconciliation, it is needless to say who was in his thoughts while he penned some of the opening stanzas.
“Though thy slumber must be deep, Yet thy spirit shall not sleep; There are shades which will not vanish, There are thoughts thou canst not banish; By a power to thee unknown, Thou canst never be alone; Thou art wrapt as with a shroud, Thou art gather’d in a cloud; And for ever shalt thou dwell In the spirit of this spell.
“Though thou see’st me not pass by, Thou shalt feel me with thine eye, As a thing that, though unseen, Must be near thee, and hath been; And when, in that secret dread, Thou hast turn’d around thy head, Thou shalt marvel I am not As thy shadow on the spot, And the power which thou dost feel Shall be what thou must conceal.”
Besides the unfinished “Vampire,” he began also, at this time, another romance in prose, founded upon the story of the Marriage of Belphegor, and intended to shadow out his own matrimonial fate. The wife of this satanic personage he described much in the same spirit that pervades his delineation of Donna Inez in the first Canto of Don Juan. While engaged, however, in writing this story, he heard from England that Lady Byron was ill, and, his heart softening at the intelligence, he threw the manuscript into the fire. So constantly were the good and evil principles of his nature conflicting for mastery over him.
The two following Poems, so different from each other in their character, — the first prying with an awful scepticism into the darkness of another world, and the second breathing all that is most natural and tender in the affections of this, — were also written at this time, and have never before been published.
EXTRACT FROM AN UNPUBLISHED POEM.
“Could I remount the river of my years To the first fountain of our smiles and tears, I would not trace again the stream of hours Between their outworn banks of wither’d flowers, But bid it flow as now — until it glides Into the number of the nameless tides. * * * 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 remembrances 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. “The under-earth inhabitants — are they But mingled millions decomposed to clay? The ashes of a thousand ages spread Wherever man has trodden or shall tread? Or do they in their silent cities dwell Each in his incommunicative cell? Or have they their own language? and a sense Of breathless being? — darken’d and intense As midnight in her solitude? — Oh Earth! Where are the past? — and wherefore had they birth? The dead are thy inheritors — and we But bubbles on thy surface; and the key Of thy profundity is in the grave, The ebon portal of thy peopled cave, Where I would walk in spirit, and behold Our elements resolved to things untold, And fathom hidden wonders, and explore The essence of great bosoms now no more.” * *
TO AUGUSTA.
“My sister! my sweet sister! if a name Dearer and purer were, it should be thine. Mountains and seas divide us, but I claim No tears, but tenderness to answer mine: Go where I will, to me thou art the same — A loved regret which I would not resign. There yet are two things in my destiny, — A world to roam through, and a home with thee.
“The first were nothing — had I still the last, It were the haven of my happiness; But other claims and other ties thou hast, And mine is not the wish to make them less. A strange doom is thy father’s son’s, and past Recalling, as it lies beyond redress; Reversed for him our grandsire’s fate of yore, — He had no rest at sea, nor I on shore.
“If my inheritance of storms hath been In other elements, and on the rocks Of perils, overlook’d or unforeseen, I have sustain’d my share of worldly shocks, The fault was mine; nor do I seek to screen My errors with defensive paradox; I have been cunning in mine overthrow, The careful pilot of my proper woe,
“Mine were my faults, and mine be their reward. My whole life was a contest, since the day That gave me being, gave me that which marr’d The gift, — a fate, or will that walk’d astray; And I at times have found the struggle hard, And thought of shaking off my bonds of clay: But now I fain would for a time survive, If but to see what next can well arrive.
“Kingdoms and empires in my little day I have outlived, and yet I am not old; And when I look on this, the petty spray Of my own years of trouble, which have roll’d Like a wild bay of breakers, melts away: Something — I know not what — does still uphold A spirit of slight patience; not in vain, Even for its own sake, do we purchase pain.
“Perhaps the workings of defiance stir Within me, — or perhaps a cold despair, Brought on when ills habitually recur, — Perhaps a kinder clime, or purer air, (For even to this may change of soul refer, And with light armour we may learn to bear,) Have taught me a strange quiet, which was not The chief companion of a calmer lot.
“I feel almost at times as I have felt In happy childhood; trees, and flowers, and brooks, Which do remember me of where I dwelt Ere my young mind was sacrificed to books, Come as of yore upon me, and can melt My heart with recognition of their looks; And even at moments I could think I see Some living thing to love — but none like thee.
“Here are the Alpine landscapes which create A fund for contemplation; — to admire Is a brief feeling of a trivial date; But something worthier do such scenes inspire: Here to be lonely is not desolate, For much I view which I could most desire, And, above all, a lake I can behold Lovelier, not dearer, than our own of old.
“Oh that thou wert but with me! — but I grow The fool of my own wishes, and forget The solitude which I have vaunted so Has lost its praise in this but one regret; There may be others which I less may show; — I am not of the plaintive mood, and yet I feel an ebb in my philosophy, And the tide rising in my alter’d eye.
“I did remind thee of our own dear lake, By the old hall which may be mine no more. Leman’s is fair; but think not I forsake The sweet remembrance of a dearer shore: Sad havoc Time must with my memory make Ere that or thou can fade these eyes before; Though, like all things which I have loved, they are Resign’d for ever, or divided far.
“The world is all before me; I but ask Of nature that with which she will comply — It is but in her summer’s sun to bask, To mingle with the quiet of her sky, To see her gentle face without a mask, And never gaze on it with apathy. She was my early friend, and now shall be My sister — till I look again on thee.
“I can reduce all feelings but this one; And that I would not; — for at length I see Such scenes as those wherein my life begun. The earliest — even the only paths for me — 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 suffer’d, and thou hadst not wept.
“With false ambition what had I to do? Little with love, and least of all with fame; And yet they came unsought, and with me grew, And made me all which they can make — a name. Yet this was not the end I did pursue; Surely I once beheld a nobler aim. But all is over — I am one the more To baffled millions which have gone before.
“And for the future, this world’s future may F
rom me demand but little of my care; I have outlived myself by many a day; Having survived so many things that were; My years have been no slumber, but the prey Of ceaseless vigils; for I had the share Of life which might have fill’d a century, Before its fourth in time had pass’d me by.
“And for the remnant which may be to come I am content; and for the past I feel Not thankless, — for within the crowded sum Of struggles, happiness at times would steal, And for the present, I would not benumb My feelings farther. — Nor shall I conceal That with all this I still can look around And worship Nature with a thought profound.
“For thee, my own sweet sister, in thy heart I know myself secure, as thou in mine: We were and are — I am, even as thou art — Beings who ne’er each other can resign; It is the same, together or apart, From life’s commencement to its slow decline We are entwined — let death come slow or fast, The tie which bound the first endures the last!”
In the month of August, Mr. M.G. Lewis arrived to pass some time with him; and he was soon after visited by Mr. Richard Sharpe, of whom he makes such honourable mention in the Journal already given, and with whom, as I have heard this gentleman say, it now gave him evident pleasure to converse about their common friends in England. Among those who appeared to have left the strongest impressions of interest and admiration on his mind was (as easily will be believed by all who know this distinguished person) Sir James Mackintosh.
Soon after the arrival of his friends, Mr. Hobhouse and Mr. S. Davies, he set out, as we have seen, with the former on a tour through the Bernese Alps, — after accomplishing which journey, about the beginning of October he took his departure, accompanied by the same gentleman, for Italy.
The first letter of the following series was, it will be seen, written a few days before he left Diodati.
