Spot of my youth! whose hoary branches sigh, Swept by the breeze that fans thy cloudless sky; Where now alone I muse, who oft have trod, With those I loved, thy soft and verdant sod. . . . . . . . . When fate shall chill, at length, this fever'd breast, And calm its cares and passions into rest, . . . . . . . . . . . . here my heart might lie; Here might I sleep where all my hopes arose, . . . . . . . . Mix'd with the earth o'er which my footsteps moved; . . . . . . . . Deplored by those in early days allied, And unremembered by the world beside[306]. And I shall say: Hail, ancient elm, at whose foot the child Byron indulged in the fancies of his age, while I was dreaming of _René_ beneath thy shade, the same shade beneath which later, in his turn, the poet came to dream of _Childe Harold!_ Byron asked of the churchyard, which witnessed the first sports of his life, an unknown grave: a useless prayer, which fame will not grant. Nevertheless, Byron is no longer what he has been; I had come across him in all directions living at Venice: at the end of a few years, in the same town where I had met with his name on every hand, I found him everywhere eclipsed and unknown. The echoes of the Lido no longer repeat his name and, if you ask after him of the Venetians, they no longer know of whom you speak. Lord Byron is entirely dead for them; they no longer hear the neighing of his horse: it is the same thing in London, where his memory is fading. That is what we become. If I have passed by Harrow without knowing that the child Byron was drawing breath there, Englishmen have passed by Combourg without suspecting that a little vagabond, brought up in those woods, would leave any trace. Arthur Young[307], the traveller, when passing through Combourg, wrote: "To Combourg [from Pontorson] the country has a savage aspect; husbandry has not much further advanced, at least in skill, than among the Hurons, which appears incredible amidst inclosures; the people almost as wild as their country, and their town of Combourg one of the most brutal filthy places that can be seen; mud houses, no windows, and a pavement so broken as to impede all passengers, but ease none-yet here is a chateau, and inhabited; who is this Mons. de Chateaubriand, the owner, that has nerves strung for a residence amidst such filth and poverty? Below this hideous heap of wretchedness is a fine lake, surrounded by well-wooded inclosures[308]."