Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 05: Little Journeys to the Homes of English AuthorsHubbard, Elbert
History
Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 05: Little Journeys to the Homes of English Authors
Hubbard, Elbert
Authors, English -- Homes and haunts -- Great Britain; English literature -- History and criticism
At Athens the trio made a sudden resolve to be respectable, and practise
economy. To this end they hired rooms of a worthy widow, who accommodated
travelers with a transient home for a moderate stipend. This widow had
three daughters: the eldest, Theresa by name, lives in letters as the Maid
of Athens, and the glory that came to her was achieved without any special
danger to either her heart or the poet's. The young woman, we know,
assisted in the household affairs; and probably often dusted the mantel in
the poet's room while he sat smoking with one foot on the table, making
irrelevant remarks to her about this or that.
Suddenly he wrote a poem, "Maid of Athens, ere we part, give, O give me
back my heart." * * *
With the genuine literary thrift that marked all of Byron's career, he
preserved a copy of the lines, and some years after recast them, touched
them up a bit, included the stuff in a book—and there you are.
The other incident is that of Hobhouse recording in his journal the bare
and barren fact that outside the city wall in Persia they once saw two
dogs gnawing a human body. Byron saw the sight, but made no mention of it
at the time. He waited, the scene sealed up in his brain-cells. Years
after he wrote thus:
"And he saw the lean dogs beneath the wall,
Hold o'er the dead their carnival;
Gorging and growling o'er carcass and limb,
They were too busy to bark at him.
From a Tartar's skull they stripped the flesh,
As ye peel the fig when its fruit is fresh;
And their white tusks crunched on the whiter skull,
As it slipped through their jaws when the edge grew dull."
And this only proves that Hobhouse was not a poet and Byron was. The poet
is never content to state the mere facts—facts are only valuable as
suggestions for poetry.
Travel often excites the spirit to the point of expression. Good travelers
carry pads and pencils. Byron reached England with fragments of marbles,
skulls, pictures, shells, spears, guns, curios beyond count, and many
manuscripts in process.
Upon arriving on the English coast the first news that reached him was
that his mother had just died. He hastened to Newstead and reached there
in time to attend the funeral, but refrained from following the cortege
to the grave because he could not master his emotions. Their quarrels were
at last ended.
A diversion to his feelings came soon after, in the way of a blunt letter
from Tom Moore demanding if Lord Byron was the author of "English Bards
and Scotch Reviewers."
Byron replied very stiffly that he was, but he really had intended no
insult to Mr. Moore, with whom he had not the honor of being acquainted.
Furthermore, if Mr. Moore felt himself aggrieved, why, the author of
"English Bards" was at his service to supply him such satisfaction as he
required.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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