th a woman's weapons for
the heart of her husband.

There are indications scattered through the letters of Lord Byron, which,
though brief indeed, showed that his young wife was making every effort
to accommodate herself to him, and to give him a cheerful home. One of
the poems that he sends to his publisher about this time, he speaks of as
being copied by her. He had always the highest regard for her literary
judgments and opinions; and this little incident shows that she was
already associating herself in a wifely fashion with his aims as an
author.

The poem copied by her, however, has a sad meaning, which she afterwards
learned to understand only too well:--

'There's not a joy the world can give like that it takes away
When the glow of early thought declines in feeling's dull decay:
'Tis not on youth's smooth cheek the blush alone that fades so fast;
But the tender bloom of heart is gone e'er youth itself be past.
Then the few whose spirits float above the wreck of happiness
Are driven o'er the shoals of guilt, or ocean of excess:
The magnet of their course is gone, or only points in vain
The shore to which their shivered sail shall never stretch again.'

Only a few days before she left him for ever, Lord Byron sent Murray
manuscripts, in Lady Byron's handwriting, of the 'Siege of Corinth,' and
'Parisina,' and wrote,--

'I am very glad that the handwriting was a favourable omen of the morale
of the piece: but you must not trust to that; for my copyist would write
out anything I desired, in all the ignorance of innocence.'

There were lucid intervals in which Lord Byron felt the charm of his
wife's mind, and the strength of her powers. 'Bell, you could be a poet
too, if you only thought so,' he would say. There were summer-hours in
her stormy life, the memory of which never left her, when Byron was as
gentle and tender as he was beautiful; when he seemed to be possessed by
a good angel: and then for a little time all the ideal possibilities of
his nature stood revealed.

The most dreadful men to live with are those who thus alternate between
angel and devil. The buds of hope and love called out by a day or two of
sunshine are frozen again and again, till the tree is killed.

But there came an hour of revelation,--an hour when, in a manner which
left no kind of room for doubt, Lady Byron saw the full depth of the
abyss of infamy which her marriage was expected to cover, and under