ng
him to embellish them with an appropriate vignette to the following
passage:--

"'Here his last flight the haughty eagle flew,
Then tore, with bloody beak, the fatal plain;
Pierced with the shafts of banded nations through,
Ambition's life, and labours, all were vain--
He wears the shatter'd links of the world's broken chain.'

Mr. Reinagle sketched with a pencil a spirited chained eagle, grasping
the earth with his talons.

"I had occasion to write to his Lordship, and mentioned having got this
clever artist to draw a vignette to his beautiful lines, and the liberty
he had taken by altering the action of the eagle. In reply to this, he
wrote to me,--'Reinagle is a better poet and a better ornithologist than
I am; eagles, and all birds of prey, attack with their talons, and not
with their beaks, and I have altered the line thus:--

"'Then tore, with bloody talon, the rent plain.'

This is, I think, a better line, besides its poetical justice.' I need
hardly add, when I communicated this flattering compliment to the
painter, that he was highly gratified."

From Brussels the noble traveller pursued his course along the Rhine,--a
line of road which he has strewed over with all the riches of poesy;
and, arriving at Geneva, took up his abode at the well-known hotel,
Secheron. After a stay of a few weeks at this place, he removed to a
villa, in the neighbourhood, called Diodati, very beautifully situated
on the high banks of the Lake, where he established his residence for
the remainder of the summer.

I shall now give the few letters in my possession written by him at this
time, and then subjoin to them such anecdotes as I have been able to
collect relative to the same period.

[Footnote 103: Dated April 16.]

[Footnote 104: It will be seen, from a subsequent letter, that the first
stanza of that most cordial of Farewells, "My boat is on the shore," was
also written at this time.]

[Footnote 105: In one of his letters to Mr. Hunt, he declares it to be
his own opinion that "an addiction to poetry is very generally the
result of 'an uneasy mind in an uneasy body;' disease or deformity," he
adds, "have been the attendants of many of our best. Collins
mad--Chatterton, _I_ think, mad--Cowper mad--Pope crooked--Milton
blind," &c. &c.]

[Footnote 106: The Deformed Transformed.]

[Footnote 107: Childe Harold, Canto iii. stanza 17.]

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LETT