I pondered a whole night on these expressive words of Lord Byron, in his "Childe Harold": Our life is a false nature, 'tis not in The harmony of things--this hard decree, This uneradicable taint of sin, This boundless Upas, this all blasting tree, Whose root is earth, whose leaves and branches The skies, which rain their plagues on me like dew, Disease, death, bondage--all the woes we see not, which throbs through The immedicable soul, with heart-aches ever new. Yet, let us ponder boldly--'tis a base Abandonment of reason, to resign Our right of thought--our last and only place Of refuge; this at least, shall still be mine: Though, from our birth, the faculty divine Is charmed and tortured--cabin'd, cribb'd, confined, And bred in darkness, lest the truth should shine Too brightly, in the unprepared mind, The beam pours in, for time and skill will couch the blind. However all my time, and all my pondering, and all my skill, only confirmed me the more steadily in this opinion--that I know nothing about it. I had long been sentimentally in love with Lord Byron, and some years previous to the publication of the last canto of "Childe Harold," I had written to him to solicit the honour of his acquaintance. "If, my lord," said I, in my letter, "to have been cold and indifferent to every other modern poet, while I have passed whole nights in studying your productions with the eagerness of one who has discovered a new source of enjoyment as surprising as it was delightful, deserves gratitude from the vanity of an author, or the gallantry of a gentleman, you will honour me with a little of your friendship." Would you believe, reader, this eloquent epistle obtained me no answer during three long days? I was furious, and wrote again to tell him that he was a mere pedant; that my common sense was a match for his fine rhymes; that the best of us poor weak mortals--and I acknowledged him to be at the head of the list--must still be ignorant, subject to sickness, ill-temper, and various errors in judgment, therefore was there little excuse for his impertinence, in presuming to find fault with the whole world, as he had done in his "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers," at an age when his natural judgment could not be matured. It was vulgar, and showed the littleness which some want of philanthropy towards our poor fellow creatures always must evince. Was he really so superior, and would he crush the poor worms which dared not aspire to his perfections? Or was he but a mere upstart man, of extraordinary genius, without strength of mind to know what he would be at? Could he not, at least, have declined the honour I wanted to confer on him, civilly?