for
solitude, the silence of his library, which he sometimes preferred to
every thing, even to the society of the woman he loved. It was wrong to
wish by force to shut him up to read the Bible, or to make him come to
tea and regulate all his hours as a good priest might do. When he was
plunged in the delights of Plato's "Banquet," or conversing with his own
ideas, it was folly to interrupt him. But this state was exceptional
with him. "_One does not have fever habitually_," said he of himself,
characterizing this state of excitement that belongs to composition; and
as soon as he returned to his usual state, and that his mind, disengaged
from itself, came down from the heights to which it had soared, what
amiability then, what a charm in all he said and did! Was not one hour
passed with him then a payment with rich usury for all the little
concessions his genius required? And lastly, if we descend well into the
depths of his soul, by all he said and did, by all his sadness, joy,
tenderness, we may be well convinced that none more than he was
susceptible of domestic happiness.

"If I could have been the husband of the Countess G----," said he to
Mrs. B----, a few days only before setting out for Greece, "we should
have been cited, I am certain, as samples of conjugal happiness, and our
retired domestic life would have made us respectable! But alas! I can
not marry her."

It is also by his latest affections that he proved how, if he had been
united to a woman after his own heart, he might have enjoyed and given
all the domestic happiness that God vouchsafes us here below, and that
when love should have undergone the transformations produced by time and
custom, he would have known how to replace the poetic enchantments of
love's first days, by feelings graver, more unchanging too, and no less
tender and sacred.

But we must interrogate those who knew and saw him personally, and in
the first place Moore; for not only was Moore acquainted with Lord
Byron's secret soul, but to him had the poet confided the treasure of
his memoirs, whose principal object was to throw light on the most fatal
event of his life, and whose sacrifice, made in deference to the
susceptibilities of a few living nullities, will be an eternal remorse
for England. Now this is how Moore expresses himself on this subject:--

"With respect to the causes that may be supposed to have led to this
separation, it seems needless, with the characters of both pa