The Bride of Abydos,' the
first of the brilliant and rapid series of poems which began in the
period immediately preceding his marriage, was, in its first composition,
an intense story of love between a brother and sister in a Turkish harem;
that Lord Byron declared, in a letter to Galt, that it was drawn from
real life; that, in compliance with the prejudices of the age, he altered
the relationship to that of cousins before publication.

This same writer goes on to show, by a series of extracts from Lord
Byron's published letters and journals, that his mind about this time was
in a fearfully unnatural state, and suffering singular and inexplicable
agonies of remorse; that, though he was accustomed fearlessly to confide
to his friends immoralities which would be looked upon as damning, there
was now a secret to which he could not help alluding in his letters, but
which he told Moore he could not tell now, but 'some day or other when we
are veterans.' He speaks of his heart as eating itself out; of a
mysterious person, whom he says, 'God knows I love too well, and the
Devil probably too.' He wrote a song, and sent it to Moore, addressed to
a partner in some awful guilt, whose very name he dares not mention,
because

'There is grief in the sound, there is guilt in the fame.'

He speaks of struggles of remorse, of efforts at repentance, and returns
to guilt, with a sort of horror very different from the well-pleased air
with which he relates to Medwin his common intrigues and adulteries. He
speaks of himself generally as oppressed by a frightful, unnatural gloom
and horror, and, when occasionally happy, 'not in a way that can or ought
to last.'

'The Giaour,' 'The Corsair,' 'Lara,' 'Parisina,' 'The Siege of Corinth,'
and 'Manfred,' all written or conceived about this period of his life,
give one picture of a desperate, despairing, unrepentant soul, whom
suffering maddens, but cannot reclaim.

In all these he paints only the one woman, of concentrated, unconsidering
passion, ready to sacrifice heaven and defy hell for a guilty man,
beloved in spite of religion or reason. In this unnatural literature,
the stimulus of crime is represented as intensifying love. Medora,
Gulnare, the Page in 'Lara,' Parisina, and the lost sister of Manfred,
love the more intensely because the object of the love is a criminal, out-
lawed by God and man. The next step beyond this is--madness.

The work of Dr. Forbes Winslow on 'O