Shortly after this letter was written Byron visited Cambridge, where, among the many memories which that place awakened, a remembrance of the young chorister and their ardent friendship was most vivid. Byron recollected the Cornelian that Edleston gave him as a token of friendship, and, now that the giver had passed away for ever, he regretted that he had parted with it. The following letter to Mrs. Pigot explains itself: 'CAMBRIDGE, '_October 28, 1811_. 'DEAR MADAM, 'I am about to write to you on a silly subject, and yet I cannot well do otherwise. You may remember a _cornelian_ which some years ago I consigned to Miss Pigot--indeed I _gave_ to her--and now I am going to make the most selfish and rude of requests. The person who gave it to me, when I was very young, is _dead_, and though a long time has elapsed since we met, as it was the only memorial I possessed of that person (in whom I was very much interested), it has acquired a value by this event I could have wished it never to have borne in my eyes. If, therefore, Miss Pigot should have preserved it, I must, under these circumstances, beg her to excuse my requesting it to be transmitted to me at No. 8, St. James' Street, London, and I will replace it by something she may remember me by equally well. As she was always so kind as to feel interested in the fate of him that formed the subject of our conversation, you may tell her that the giver of that cornelian died in May last of a consumption at the age of twenty-one, making the sixth, within four months, of friends and relatives that I have lost between May and the end of August. 'Believe me, dear madam, 'Yours very sincerely, 'BYRON.' The cornelian when found, was returned to Byron, but apparently in a broken condition. 'Ill-fated Heart! and can it be, That thou shouldst thus be rent in twain?' It was through the depressing influence of solitude that the idea entered Byron's mind to depict his (possibly eternal) separation from Mary Chaworth in terms synonymous with death. With a deep feeling of desolation he recalled every incident of his boyish love. We have seen how the image of his lost Mary, now the wife of his rival, deepened the gloom caused by the sudden death of his mother, and of some of his college friends. It was to Mary, whom he dared not name, that he cried in his agony: 'By many a shore and many a sea Divided, yet beloved in vain; The Past, the Future fled to thee, To bid us meet--no, ne'er again!' Her absence from Annesley, where he had hoped to find her on his return home, was a great disappointment to him.