Harrow. The
change of life came over him, and when the vegetable period of
boyhood was past, the animal passions mastered all the softer
affections of his character.

In the summer of 1801 he accompanied his mother to Cheltenham, and
while he resided there the views of the Malvern hills recalled to his
memory his enjoyments amid the wilder scenery of Aberdeenshire. The
recollections were reimpressed on his heart and interwoven with his
strengthened feelings. But a boy gazing with emotion on the hills at
sunset, because they remind him of the mountains where he passed his
childhood, is no proof that he is already in heart and imagination a
poet. To suppose so is to mistake the materials for the building.

The delight of Byron in contemplating the Malvern hills, was not
because they resembled the scenery of Lochynagar, but because they
awoke trains of thought and fancy, associated with recollections of
that scenery. The poesy of the feeling lay not in the beauty of the
objects, but in the moral effect of the traditions, to which these
objects served as talismans of the memory. The scene at sunset
reminded him of the Highlands, but it was those reminiscences which
similar scenes recalled, that constituted the impulse which gave life
and elevation to his reflections. There is not more poesy in the
sight of mountains than of plains; it is the local associations that
throw enchantment over all scenes, and resemblance that awakens them,
binding them to new connections: nor does this admit of much
controversy; for mountainous regions, however favourable to musical
feeling, are but little to poetical.

The Welsh have no eminent bard; the Swiss have no renown as poets;
nor are the mountainous regions of Greece, nor of the Apennines,
celebrated for poetry. The Highlands of Scotland, save the equivocal
bastardy of Ossian, have produced no poet of any fame, and yet
mountainous countries abound in local legends, which would seem to be
at variance with this opinion, were it not certain, though I cannot
explain the cause, that local poetry, like local language or local
melody, is in proportion to the interest it awakens among the local
inhabitants, weak and ineffectual in its influence on the sentiments
of the general world. The "Rans de Vaches," the most celebrated of
all local airs, is tame and commonplace,--unmelodious, to all ears
but those of the Swiss "forlorn in a foreign land."

While in Cheltenham, Mrs Byron co