thian creed. Moreover he was an
inspiration in himself. Intimacy with Shelley left Byron a greater poet
than he was before. Byron passed the summer at the Villa Diodati, where he
also wrote the _Monody on the Death of Sheridan_, published September 9,
1816. The second half of September was spent and devoted to "an excursion
in the mountains." His journal (September 18-29), which was written for and
sent to Mrs Leigh, is a great prose poem, the source of the word pictures
of Alpine scenery in _Manfred_. His old friend Hobhouse was with him and he
enjoyed himself, but at the close he confesses that he could not lose his
"own wretched identity" in the "majesty and the power and the glory" of
nature. Remorse was scotched, not [v.04 p.0901] killed. On the 6th of
October Byron and Hobhouse started via Milan and Verona for Venice, which
was reached early in November. For the next three years Byron lived in or
near Venice--at first, 1816-1817, in apartments in the Frezzeria, and after
January 1818 in the central block of the Mocenigo palace. Venice appealed
both to his higher and his lower nature. He set himself to study her
history, to understand her constitution, to learn her language. The sights
and scenes with which Shakespeare and Otway, Schiller's _Ghostseer_, and
Madame de Stael's _Corinne_ had made him familiar, were before his eyes,
not dreams but realities. He would "repeople" her with her own past, and
"stamp her image" on the creations of his pen. But he had no one to live
for but himself, and that self he gave over to a reprobate mind. He planned
and pursued a life of deliberate profligacy. Of two of his amours we learn
enough or too much from his letters to Murray and to Moore--the first with
his landlord's wife, Marianna Segati, the second with Margarita Cogni (the
"Fornarina"), a Venetian of the lower class, who amused him with her
savagery and her wit. But, if Shelley may be trusted, there was a limit to
his candour. There is abundant humour, but there is an economy of detail in
his pornographic chronicle. He could not touch pitch without being defiled.
But to do him justice he was never idle. He kept his brains at work, and
for this reason, perhaps, he seems for a time to have recovered his spirits
and sinned with a good courage. His song of carnival, "So we'll go no more
a-roving," is a hymn of triumph. About the middle of April he set out for
Rome. His first halt was at Ferrara, which inspired the "Lament of Tas