[114] [Byron was wont to let his imagination dwell on these details of the charnel-house. In a letter to Dallas, August 12, 1811, he writes, "I am already too familiar with the dead. It is strange that I look on the skulls which stand beside me (I have always had four in my study) without emotion, but I cannot strip the features of those I have known of their fleshy covering, even in idea, without a hideous sensation; but the worms are less ceremonious." See, too, his "Lines inscribed upon a Cup formed from a Skull," _Poetical Works_, 1898, i. 276.] [115] {130} The pelican is, I believe, the bird so libelled, by the imputation of feeding her chickens with her blood. [It has been suggested that the curious bloody secretion ejected from the mouth of the flamingo may have given rise to the belief, through that bird having been mistaken for the "pelican of the wilderness."--_Encycl. Brit._, art. "Pelican" (by Professor A. Newton), xviii. 474.] [ea] _Than feeling we must feel no more_.--[MS.] [116] {131} [Compare-- "I'd rather be a toad, And live upon the vapours of a dungeon." _Othello_, act iii. sc. 3, lines 274, 275.] [eb] _Though hope hath long withdrawn her beam_.--[MS.] [This line was omitted in the Third and following Editions.] [ec] {132} _Through ranks of steel and tracks of fire_, _And all she threatens in her ire;_ _And these are but the words of one_ _Who thus would do--who thus hath done_.--[MS. erased.] [ed] {134} _My hope a tomb, our foe a grave_.--[MS.]