"I was seated near a woman to whom, when a boy, I was as much attached as boys generally are, and more than a man should be. I knew this before I went, and was determined to be valiant and converse with _sang froid_; but instead I forgot my valour and my nonchalance, and never opened my lips even to laugh, far less to speak, and the lady was almost as absurd as myself, which made both the object of more observation than if we had conducted ourselves with easy indifference. You will think all this great nonsense; if you had seen it, you would have thought it still more ridiculous. What fools we are! We cry for a plaything which, like children, we are never satisfied with till we break open, though, like them, we cannot get rid of it by putting it on the fire." That is the prose record of the meeting, and there is also a record in verse. There are lines "to a lady on being asked my reason for quitting England in the Spring"; there is the piece beginning, "Well! thou art happy": "_Mary, adieu! I must away: While thou art blest I'll not repine; But near thee I can never stay; My heart would soon again be thine._" And also: "_In flight I shall be surely wise, Escaping from temptation's snare; I cannot view my Paradise Without the wish of dwelling there._" Poor stuff, as poetry, it will be agreed. Any one who wrote poetry at all might have written it. The sentiment rendered in it is just the sentiment which any sentimental youth would have felt to be proper to the occasion. We can find in it, at most, only the faint fore-running shadow of the Byronic pose. It rings very insincerely if we set it beside the lines in which Walter Savage Landor, at about the same period, commemorated a similar moment of emotion: "_Rose Aylmer, whom these waking eyes May weep but never see; A night of memories and of sighs I consecrate to thee._" In that comparison, most decidedly, all the advantage is with Landor--inevitably, because his were the feelings of a man, whereas Byron's were the feelings of a boy. He was only twenty, and his age is the explanation of a good deal. It explains his startled timidity, described in the letter to Hodgson, in a novel, romantic situation. It explains his hugging his grief as a precious possession on no account to be let go. It also explains the zest with which, when grief had had its sacred hour, he could turn from it and throw himself into other activities.