mined him to persist in it.

In the evening of that day they set sail;--and now, fairly launched
in the cause, and disengaged, as it were, from his former state of
existence, the natural power of his spirit to shake off pressure,
whether from within or without, began instantly to display itself.
According to the report of one of his fellow-voyagers, though so
clouded while on shore, no sooner did he find himself, once more,
bounding over the waters, than all the light and life of his better
nature shone forth. In the breeze that now bore him towards his
beloved Greece, the voice of his youth seemed again to speak. Before
the titles of hero, of benefactor, to which he now aspired, that of
poet, however pre-eminent, faded into nothing. His love of freedom,
his generosity, his thirst for the new and adventurous,--all were
re-awakened; and even the bodings that still lingered at the bottom
of his heart but made the course before him more precious from his
consciousness of its brevity, and from the high and self-ennobling
resolution he had now taken to turn what yet remained of it
gloriously to account.

"Parte, e porta un desio d'eterna ed alma
Gloria che a nobil cuor e sferza e sprone;
A magnanime imprese intenta ha l'alma,
Ed _insolite cose oprar_ dispone.
Gir fra i nemici--_ivi o cipresso o palma_
Acquistar."

After a passage of five days, they reached Leghorn, at which place it
was thought necessary to touch, for the purpose of taking on board a
supply of gunpowder, and other English goods, not to be had
elsewhere.

It would have been the wish of Lord Byron, in the new path he had now
marked out for himself, to disconnect from his name, if possible, all
those poetical associations, which, by throwing a character of
romance over the step he was now taking, might have a tendency, as he
feared, to impair its practical utility; and it is, perhaps, hardly
saying too much for his sincere zeal in the cause to assert, that he
would willingly at this moment have sacrificed his whole fame, as
poet, for even the prospect of an equivalent renown, as
philanthropist and liberator. How vain, however, was the thought that
he could thus supersede his own glory, or cause the fame of the lyre
to be forgotten in that of the sword, was made manifest to him by a
mark of homage which reached him, while at Leghorn, from the hands of
one of the only two men of the age who could contend with him in the
universality of his lit