"I ... have seen some of the noblest views in the world. But in all this--the recollections of bitterness, and more especially of recent and more home desolation, which must accompany me through life, have preyed upon me here; and neither the music of the Shepherd, the crashing of the Avalanche, nor the torrent, the mountain, the Glacier, the Forest, nor the Cloud, have for one moment lightened the weight upon my heart, nor enabled me to lose my old wretched identity in the majesty, and the power and the glory, around, above, and beneath me." A striking admission truly of the unreality and insincerity of the Byronic presentation of Wordsworth's Pantheism, and concluding with an exclamation which shows clearly how distinct a thing Byron's individuality was to him, and how far he was from picturing himself, in sober prose, as "a portion of the tempest" or anything but his passionate and suffering self: "I am past reproaches; and there is a time for all things. I am past the wish of vengeance, and I know of none like for what I have suffered; but the hour will come when what I feel must be felt, and the--but enough." And so up the Rhone valley and over the Simplon to Italy, where his life was to enter upon yet another phase. CHAPTER XXIV FROM GENEVA TO VENICE--THE AFFAIR WITH THE DRAPER'S WIFE As long as Hobhouse remained with Byron nothing memorable happened. There was a good deal of the schoolmaster about Hobhouse, though he could sometimes unbend in a non-committal way; and in the presence of schoolmasters life is seldom a drama and never an extravaganza. The change, therefore, in the manner of Byron's life did not occur until, tiring of his friend's supervision, he declined to accompany him to Rome. In the meantime, first at Milan and then at Verona, he held up his head, and passed like a pageant through the salons of the best continental society. Milan, he told Murray, was "very polite and hospitable." He parted there from Polidori, who was expelled from the territory on account of a brawl with an Austrian officer in a theatre; and he dined with the Marquis de Brême--an Italian nobleman equally famous for his endeavours to popularise vaccination and suppress mendicity--to meet Monti the Italian poet and Stendhal the French novelist. "Never," wrote Stendhal of that meeting, "shall I forget the sublime expression of his countenance; it was the peaceful look of power united with genius." And a long account of Byron's sojourn at Milan was contributed by Stendhal to the _Foreign Literary Gazette_.