It is God's will, let us mention it no more." Her remains rest beneath
the elm-tree at Harrow which her father used to haunt in boyhood, with the
date of birth and death, and the scripture--
I shall go to her, but she shall not return to me.
The most interesting of the visits paid to Byron during the period of his
life at Venice was that of Shelley, who, leaving his wife and children at
Bagni di Lucca, came to see him in August, 1818. He arrived late, in the
midst of a thunderstorm; and next day they sailed to the Lido, and rode
together along the sands. The attitude of the two poets towards each other
is curious; the comparatively shrewd man of the world often relied on the
idealist for guidance and help in practical matters, admired his courage
and independence, spoke of him invariably as the best of men, but never
paid a sufficiently warm tribute in public to his work. Shelley, on the
other hand, certainly the most modest of great poets, contemplates Byron
in the fixed attitude of a literary worshipper.
The introduction to _Julian and Maddalo_, directly suggested by this
visit, under the slight veil of a change in the name, gives a summary of
the view of his friend's character which he continued to entertain. "He is
a person of the most consummate genius, and capable if he would direct his
energies to such an end, of becoming the redeemer of his degraded country.
But it is his weakness to be proud; he derives, from a comparison of his
own extraordinary mind with the dwarfish intellects that surround him, an
intense apprehension of the nothingness of human life. His passions and
his powers are incomparably greater than those of other men; and instead
of the latter having been employed in curbing the former, they have
mutually lent each other strength;" but "in social life no human being can
be more gentle, patient, and unassuming. He is cheerful, frank, and witty.
His more serious conversation is a sort of intoxication; men are held by
it as by a spell."
Subsequently to this visit Byron lent the villa at Este to his friend, and
during the autumn weeks of their residence there were written the lines
among the Euganean hills, where, in the same strain of reverence, Shelley
refers to the "tempest-cleaving swan of Albion," to the "music flung o'er
a mighty thunder-fit," and to the sunlike soul destined to immortalize his
ocean refuge,--
As the ghost of Homer clings
Round Seamander's wasting springs,
As divinest Shakespeare's might
Fills Avon and the world with light.
"The sun," he says, at a later date, "has extinguished the glowworm;" and
again, "I despair of rivalling Lord Byron, as well I may; and there is no
other with whom it is worth contending."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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