Yet, though dull Hate as duty should be taught, I know that thou wilt love me; though my name Should be shut from thee, as a spell still fraught With desolation, and a broken claim: Though the grave closed between us,--'twere the same, I know that thou wilt love me; though to drain _My_ blood from out thy being were an aim, And an attainment,--all would be in vain,-- Still thou wouldst love me, still that more than life retain. The child of love, though born in bitterness, And nurtured in convulsion. Of thy sire These were the elements, and thine no less. As yet such are around thee, but thy fire Shall be more temper'd, and thy hope far higher. Sweet be thy cradled slumbers! O'er the sea And from the mountains where I now respire, Fain would I waft such blessing upon thee, As, with a sigh, I deem thou might'st have been to me." "Ah!" remarked Madame de Staël (the poor exile who, standing by the Lake of Geneva, sighed for the gutter that ran in the rue du Bac),--"ah! I would not mind being unhappy if I were Lady Byron, to have inspired such lines as those in my husband's brain!" May be; but Lord Byron and Madame de Staël would have made an extraordinary couple, and no mistake. Byron was not in such a hurry to travel far afield this time; perhaps he only wanted to stretch the double cord that bound him to England, and not to snap it altogether. He landed in Belgium, visited the field of Waterloo, still wet with the blood of three nations; sailed down the Rhine and settled for a time on the borders of the Lake of Geneva. Here it was that he met Madame de Staël, who was almost as much of an exile under the Restoration as under the Empire. "My greatest pleasure amidst the magnificent pictures round Lake Geneva was to gaze upon the author of _Corinne_." At Diodati, Byron renewed his swimming feat of Abydos by crossing the Lake of Geneva where it is four leagues wide. And it was at Diodati that he wrote the third canto of _Childe Harold_, _The Prisoner of Chillon_ and _Manfred._ Goethe in a German journal laid claim to the original idea of _Manfred_, as though _Manfred_ did not descend as directly from Satan as _Faust_ had from Polichinelle! O thou poor rich man! with all thy European fame and thy world-wide reputation, wouldst thou snatch back the leaf that thy brother-poet so sinfully plucked from thy laurel crown! Can we not almost hear what D'Alembert said of the author of _Zaïre_ and of the _Dictionnaire philosophique_:-- "This man is past comprehending! he has fame that would satisfy a million of men, and yet he wants another ha'porth." Byron took his revenge by dedicating some of his poems to Goethe.