lian, and wrote two Sonnets.... I never wrote but
one sonnet before, and that was not in earnest, and many years ago, as
an exercise--and I will never write another. They are the most puling,
petrifying, stupidly platonic compositions."--_Diary_, December 18,
1813; _Letters_, 1898, ii. 379.]

[cf] {71} ----_Hope whispers not from woe_.--[MS. M.]

[54]
["In moments to delight devoted
'My Life!' is still the name you give,
Dear words! on which my heart had doted
Had Man an endless term to live.
But, ah! so swift the seasons roll
That name must be repeated never,
For 'Life' in future say, 'My Soul,'
Which like my love exists for ever."

Byron wrote these lines in 1815, in Lady Lansdowne's album, at
Bowood.--Note by Mr. Richard Edgecombe, _Notes and Queries_, Sixth
Series, vii. 46.]

THE GIAOUR:

A FRAGMENT OF A TURKISH TALE.

"One fatal remembrance--one sorrow that throws
Its bleak shade alike o'er our joys and our woes--
To which Life nothing darker nor brighter can bring,
For which joy hath no balm--and affliction no sting."

MOORE.
["As a beam o'er the face," etc.--_Irish Melodies_.]

INTRODUCTION TO _THE GIAOUR_

In a letter to Murray, dated Pisa, December 12, 1821 (_Life_, p. 545),
Byron avows that the "Giaour Story" had actually "some foundation on
facts." Soon after the poem appeared (June 5, 1813), "a story was
circulated by some gentlewomen ... a little too close to the text"
(Letters to Moore, September 1, 1813, _Letters_, 1898, ii. 258), and in
order to put himself right with his friends or posterity, Byron wrote to
his friend Lord Sligo, who in July, 1810, was anchored off Athens in "a
twelve-gun brig, with a crew of fifty men" (see _Letters_, 1898, i. 289,
note 1), requesting him to put on paper not so much the narrative of an
actual event, but "what he had heard at Athens about the affair of that
girl who was so near being put an end to while you were there."
According to the letter which Moore published (_Life_, p. 178), and
which is reprinted in the present issue (_Letters_, 1898, ii. 257),
Byron interposed on behalf of a girl, who "in compliance with the strict
letter of the Mohammedan law," had been sewn in a sack and was about to
be thrown into the sea. "I