"_Thou too art gone, thou loved and lovely one! Whom Youth and Youth's affections bound to me; Who did for me what none beside have done, Nor shrank from one albeit unworthy thee. What is my Being! thou has ceased to be! Nor staid to welcome here thy wanderer home, Who mourns o'er hours which we no more shall see-- Would they had never been, or were to come! Would he had ne'er returned to find fresh cause to roam._ "_Oh, ever loving, lovely, and beloved! How selfish Sorrow ponders on the past. And clings to thoughts now better far removed! But Time shall tear thy shadow from me last. All thou couldst have of mine, stern Death, thou hast; The Parent, Friend, and now the more than Friend, Ne'er yet for one thine arrows flew so fast, And grief with grief continuing still to blend, Hath snatched the little joy that Life hath yet to lend._" These stanzas, with three others, were sent to Dallas after "Childe Harold" was in the press, together with a letter which must have mystified him though, as a "poor relation," he would not well ask impertinent questions; a letter to the effect that Byron has "supped full of horrors" and "become callous" and "has not a tear left." The "Thyrza" sequence of poems belongs to the same period--almost to the same day. They have puzzled many generations of editors and commentators because "Thyrza" is addressed in them as one who is dead, and because, though Byron spoke of Thyrza to his friends as a real person and showed a lock of her hair, no trace of any woman answering to her description can be discovered in any chronicle of his life. The explanation is that Thyrza was not really dead, though Byron chose so to write of her. Thyrza was Mary Chaworth who was dead to Byron in the sense that she had passed out of his life, as he had every reason to think (though he thought wrongly) for ever. The poems expressed, according to Moore, "the essence, the abstract spirit, as it were, of many griefs," with which was mingled the memory of her who "though living was for him as much lost as" any of the dead friends for whom he mourned. They expressed, in fact, his despair at finding the secret orchard tenanted only by a ghost; and if we read the poems by the light of that clue, we can get a clear meaning out of every line. They are too long to be quoted. Readers must refer to them and judge. The note is the note of bitter despair, working up, at the end, into the note of recklessness. The contrast is there--that contrast as old as the world--between the things that are and the things that might, and should, have been; and then there follows the declaration that, as things are what they are, and as their consequences will be what they will be, there is nothing for it but to plunge into pleasure, albeit with the full knowledge that pleasure cannot please: