'Sweet Thyrza! waking as in sleep, Thou art but now a lovely dream; _A Star_ that trembled o'er the deep, Then turned from earth its tender beam. But he who through Life's dreary way Must pass, when Heaven is veiled in wrath, Will long lament the vanished ray That scattered gladness o'er his path.' In Byron's imagination Mary Chaworth was always hovering over him like a star. She was the 'starlight of his boyhood,' the 'star of his destiny,' and three years later the poet, in his unpublished fragment 'Harmodia,' speaks of Mary as his 'melancholy star Whose tearful beam shoots trembling from afar.' The third and last of the 'Thyrza' poems must have been written at about the same time as the other two. It appeared with 'Childe Harold' in 1812. Byron, weary of the gloom of solitude, and tortured by 'pangs that rent his heart in twain,' now determined to break away and seek inspiration for that mental energy which formed part of his nature. Man, he says, was not made to live alone. 'I'll be that light unmeaning thing That smiles with all, and weeps with none. It was not thus in days more dear, It never would have been, _but thou Hast fled, and left me lonely here_.' Byron's thoughts went back to the days when he was sailing over the bright waters of the blue Ægean, in the _Salsette_ frigate, commanded by 'good old Bathurst'[35]--those halcyon days when he was weaving his visions into stanzas for 'Childe Harold.' 'On many a lone and lovely night It soothed to gaze upon the sky; For then I deemed the heavenly light Shone sweetly on thy pensive eye: And oft I thought at Cynthia's noon, When sailing o'er the Ægean wave, "Now Thyrza gazes on that moon"-- Alas! it gleamed upon her grave! 'When stretched on Fever's sleepless bed, And sickness shrunk my throbbing veins, "'Tis comfort still," I faintly said, "That Thyrza cannot know my pains." Like freedom to the timeworn slave-- A boon 'tis idle then to give-- Relenting Nature vainly gave My life, when Thyrza ceased to live! 'My Thyrza's pledge in better days, _When Love and Life alike were new_! How different now thou meet'st my gaze! How tinged by time with Sorrow's hue! The heart that gave itself with thee Is silent--ah, were mine as still! Though cold as e'en the dead can be, It feels, it sickens with the chill.' Byron here suggests that the pledge in question was given with the giver's heart. Lovers are apt to interpret such gifts as 'love-tokens,' without suspicion that they may possibly have been due to a feeling far less flattering to their hopes.