ns who are talking scandal, the poet says,--

''Tis true, he saw Aurora look as though
She approved his silence: she perhaps mistook
Its motive for that charity we owe,
But seldom pay, the absent.

. . . .

He gained esteem where it was worth the most;
And certainly Aurora had renewed
In him some feelings he had lately lost
Or hardened,--feelings which, perhaps ideal,
Are so divine that I must deem them real:--

The love of higher things and better days;
The unbounded hope and heavenly ignorance
Of what is called the world and the world's ways;
The moments when we gather from a glance
More joy than from all future pride or praise,
Which kindled manhood, but can ne'er entrance
The heart in an existence of its own
Of which another's bosom is the zone.

And full of sentiments sublime as billows
Heaving between this world and worlds beyond,
Don Juan, when the midnight hour of pillows
Arrived, retired to his.' . . .

In all these descriptions of a spiritual unworldly nature acting on the
spiritual and unworldly part of his own nature, every one who ever knew
Lady Byron intimately must have recognised the model from which he drew,
and the experience from which he spoke, even though nothing was further
from his mind than to pay this tribute to the woman he had injured, and
though before these lines, which showed how truly he knew her real
character, had come one stanza of ribald, vulgar caricature, designed as
a slight to her:--

'There was Miss Millpond, smooth as summer's sea,
That usual paragon, an only daughter,
Who seemed the cream of equanimity
'Till skimmed; and then there was some milk and water;
With a slight shade of blue, too, it might be,
Beneath the surface: but what did it matter?
Love's riotous; but marriage should have quiet,
And, being consumptive, live on a milk diet.'

The result of Byron's intimacy with Miss Milbanke and the enkindling of
his nobler feelings was an offer of marriage, which she, though at the
time deeply interested in him, declined with many expressions of
friendship and interest. In fact, she already loved him, but had that
doubt of her power to be to him all that a wife should be, which would be
likely to arise in a mind so sensitively constituted and so unworldly.
They, however, continued a correspondence as friends; on h