Recently we went to see Byron’s home, villa “Diadati,” a few miles out from Geneva. It is a handsome house with windows and balconies opening on to the lake. Here he wrote “Manfred,” “The Dream,” parts of “Childe Harold” and “Darkness.” [Illustration: Byron’s Home on Lake Geneva.--_Page 240._] I could not help thinking of him and Shelley and Shelley’s wife, sitting out there on the veranda nights, telling ghost stories. I came across some letters the other day, long out of print, written by a Swiss, who also was whiling his days away on this lake in 1816. The first one says, “Last night I met Lord Byron at Madame de Stael’s. I can compare no creature to him. His tones are music, and his features the features of an angel. One sees, though, a little Satan shining in his eyes which, however, is itself half pious. The ladies are mad after him. They surround him like little bacchantes, and nearly tear him to pieces. I hold him as the greatest living poet. Every stormy passion is witnessed in his glance. One sees the corsair in his look, which, though, often is good, tender, and even melancholy.” I also have followed Byron’s footsteps in his trips in the higher Alps. He went up into the Simmenthal to Thun, to Interlacken, and the heights near to the Jungfrau. “These scenes,” he wrote, “are beyond all description or previous conception.” My boy made a picture of the old ruin of a tower near Interlacken, pointed out as the scene where the “Manfred” of the poem struggled with the spirits. Manfred was Byron’s best work, but the printers left the best line of it out, by accident. What would Tennyson nowadays say to a publisher’s leaving the best line out of his best poem? Byron liked the Jungfrau better than Mt. Blanc, and the scenes about the upper end of Lake Geneva inspired him. “All about here,” he exclaimed once, “is a sense of existence of love in its most extended and sublime capacity, and of our participation of its good and its glory.” His trip among the grandeur of the higher Alps did not tear him away from his wretched self. He could not forget that he was Byron, and his “Manfred,” arguing with ghosts in the old ruin by Lake Thun, might have been a photograph of himself. That’s what Goethe believed it to be, anyway.