It is the hour when Byron's brain becomes thronged with a glowing phantasmagoria of ideas that cry aloud for visible expression. He forgets, under the stress of creative impulse, the sources and causes of his inherent melancholy,--the miserable days of his childhood, with a Fury for a mother,--the wound, never to be healed, of his unrequited love for Mary Chaworth,--the inimical wife from whom he is eternally alienated,--the little daughter that he may never hold in his arms,--the beloved sister separated from his side,--the ancestral home of his forefathers now passed into a stranger's hold,--the meteoric glory and total eclipse of his unparalleled popularity in England,--the follies, and worse than follies, which have made him what he is, "consistent in nothing but his passion and his pride." These memories, like poisonous exhalations, are banished from his mind, and leave a clear horizon for a while,--a fertile landscape peopled with great words and images. Something akin to inspiration seizes upon him: and he throws himself to work with all the zest and nerve of his impulsive nature. This is a man who writes, in his own phrase, "with rapidity and rarely with pains.... When I once take pen in hand, I _must_ say what comes uppermost or fling it away." Not for him that careful polishing of sentences, which other writers meticulously bestow. "I have always written as fast as I could put pen to paper, and never revised but in the proofs.... I can never recast anything. I am like the tiger; if I miss the first spring, I go grumbling back to my jungle." And to this impetuous directness of onslaught, his finest poems bear witness. Some critic has remarked that Byron is too much of the earth earthy to be a great lyrical writer: yet a Promethean fire, stolen from heaven, burns immortally through some of his shorter lyrics. In Greek, it is said, there are 1632 ways of expressing the simple fact _I love you_: yet who has ever put it in a more convincing form than Byron does in _Maid of Athens_? [Illustration] MAID OF ATHENS. By those tresses unconfined, Woo'd by each Ægean wind; By those lids whose jetty fringe Kiss thy soft cheeks' blooming tinge; By those wild eyes like the roe, _Zöe mou, sas agapo_. * * * * * Maid of Athens, ere we part, Give, oh give me back my heart! Or, since that has left my breast, Keep it now, and take the rest! Hear my vow before I go. _Zöe mou, sas agapo._ (My life, I love you!) By those tresses unconfined, Woo'd by each Ægean wind; By those lids whose jetty fringe Kiss thy soft cheeks' blooming tinge; By those wild eyes like the roe, _Zöe mou, sas agapo_. By that lip I long to taste; By that zone-encircled waist; By all the token-flowers that tell What words can never speak so well; By love's alternate joy and woe, _Zöe mou, sas agapo_.