ed to the strength
of the moral nature. Byron, more than any other one writer, may be
called the poet of remorse. His passionate pictures of this feeling seem
to give new power to the English language:--

'There is a war, a chaos of the mind,
When all its elements convulsed--combined,
Lie dark and jarring with perturbed force,
And gnashing with impenitent remorse,
That juggling fiend, who never spake before,
But cries, "I warned thee!" when the deed is o'er.'

It was this remorse that formed the only redeeming feature of the case.
Its eloquence, its agonies, won from all hearts the interest that we give
to a powerful nature in a state of danger and ruin; and it may be hoped
that this feeling, which tempers the stern justice of human judgments,
may prove only a faint image of the wider charity of Him whose thoughts
are as far above ours as the heaven is above the earth.

CHAPTER VII. HOW COULD SHE LOVE HIM?

It has seemed, to some, wholly inconsistent, that Lady Byron, if this
story were true, could retain any kindly feeling for Lord Byron, or any
tenderness for his memory; that the profession implied a certain
hypocrisy: but, in this sad review, we may see how the woman who once had
loved him, might, in spite of every wrong he had heaped upon her, still
have looked on this awful wreck and ruin chiefly with pity. While she
stood afar, and refused to justify or join in the polluted idolatry which
defended his vices, there is evidence in her writings that her mind often
went back mournfully, as a mother's would, to the early days when he
might have been saved.

One of her letters in Robinson's Memoirs, in regard to his religious
opinions, shows with what intense earnestness she dwelt upon the unhappy
influences of his childhood and youth, and those early theologies which
led him to regard himself as one of the reprobate. She says,--

'Not merely from casual expressions, but from the whole tenor of Lord
Byron's feelings, I could not but conclude that he was a believer in
the inspiration of the Bible, and had the gloomiest Calvinistic
tenets. To that unhappy view of the relation of the creature to the
Creator I have always ascribed the misery of his life.

'It is enough for me to know that he who thinks his transgression
beyond forgiveness . . . has righteousness beyond that of the self-
satisfied sinner. It is impossible for me to doubt, that, could he
once