"I stood in Venice on the Bridge of Sighs; A palace and a prison on each hand: I saw from out the wave her structures rise As from the stroke of the enchanter's wand! A thousand years their cloudy wings expand Around me, and a dying glory smiles O'er the far times, when many a subject land Looked to the wingèd Lion's marble piles, Where Venice sate in state, throned on her hundred isles!" Byron's correspondence was small, being chiefly confined to his publisher, to Moore, and to a few intimate friends. These letters are interesting because of their frankness and wit, although they are not models of fine writing. Indeed, I do not know where to find any specimens of masterly prose in all his compositions. He was simply a poet, facile in every form of measure from Spenser to Campbell. No remarkable prose writings appeared in England at all, at that time, until Sir Walter Scott's novels were written, and until Macaulay, Carlyle, and Lamb wrote their inimitable essays. Nothing is more heavy and unartistic than Moore's "Life of Byron;" there is hardly a brilliant paragraph in it,--and yet Moore is one of the most musical and melodious of all the English poets. Milton, indeed, was equally great in prose and verse, but very few men have been distinguished as prose writers and poets at the same time. Sir Walter Scott and Southey are the most remarkable exceptions. I think that Macaulay could have been distinguished as a poet, if he had so pleased; but he would have been a literary poet like Wordsworth or Tennyson or Coleridge,--not a man who sings out of his soul because he cannot help it, like Byron or Burns, or like Whittier among our American poets. It was not until 1819, when Byron had been three years in Venice, that he fell in love with the Countess Guiccioli, the wife of one of the richest nobles of Italy,--young, beautiful, and interesting. This love seems to have been disinterested and lasting; and while it was a violation of all the rules of morality, and would not have been allowed in any other country than Italy, it did not further degrade him. It was pretty much such a love as Voltaire had for Madame de Châtelet; and with it he was at last content. There is no evidence that Byron ever afterward loved any other woman; and what is very singular about the affair is that it was condoned by the husband, until it became a scandal even in Italy. The countess was taken ill on her way to Ravenna, and thither Byron followed her, and lived in the same palace with her,--the palace of her husband, who courted the poet's society, and who afterward left his young countess to free intercourse with Byron at Bologna,--not without a compensation in revenue, which was more disgraceful than the amour itself. About this time Byron would probably have returned to England but for the enchantment which enslaved him. He could not part from the countess, nor she from him.