Byron’s first Love was at the age of eight. Concerning this he wrote at twenty-five: “How the deuce did all this occur so early? Where could it originate? I certainly had no sexual ideas for years afterwards; and yet my misery, my love for that girl [Mary Duff] were so violent that I sometimes wonder if I have ever been really attached since.’” Of his second Love-affair Byron says: “My first dash into poetry was as early as 1800. It was the ebullition of a passion for my first cousin, Margaret Parker, one of the most beautiful of evanescent beings. I have long forgotten the verses, but it would be difficult for me to forget her—her dark eyes [Byron had a passion for black eyes]—her long eyelashes—her completely Greek cast of face and figure. I was then about twelve—she rather older, perhaps a year. She died about a year or two afterwards.” Burns was somewhat older when Love and poetry were born in his soul simultaneously: “You know our country custom,” he writes, “of coupling a man and woman together as partners in the labours of the harvest. In my fifteenth summer my partner was a bewitching creature, a year younger than myself. My scarcity of English denies me the power of doing her justice in that language, but you know the Scottish idiom. She was a bonnie, sweet, sonsie lass. In short, she, altogether unwittingly to herself, initiated me in that delicious passion, which, in spite of acid disappointment, gin-horse prudence, and bookworm philosophy, I hold to be the first of human joys here below.” Heine’s first boyish love appears to have been a girl who died as a child, and is alluded to in his _Pictures of Travel_ as the “little Veronica.” His second love was a most extraordinary case of Love at Sight. It was at a school examination, Robert Proelsz relates, “and Harry was just declaiming Schiller’s _Taucher_, when the lovely girl entered the room by the side of her father, who was one of the inspectors. The boy stuttered, gazed with large eyes on the beautiful figure, mechanically repeated the verse he had just recited—‘And the King his lovely daughter beckoned’—and was unable to proceed. In vain the teacher prompted him, the poor fellow’s senses failed him, and he fell on the floor in a swoon.” Of another early visitation of sudden Love he gives an account in his posthumous memoirs. The girl on this occasion was the red-haired Sefchen, the sheriff’s daughter, who, when she was only eight years old, had witnessed the mysterious burial of her grandfather’s sword, which had done its duty a hundred times, and which some years later her aunt had dug out and secreted in the garret. “One day, when we were alone, I begged Sefchen to show me that curiosity. She willingly complied, went into the room, and soon came out with an enormous sword, which she swung vigorously despite her weak arms, while with a roguish, threatening tone she sang— “‘Will you kiss the naked sword Which the Lord has given us?’