the other, but Shelley was not
yet free to marry Miss Godwin. He separated from the wife he had chosen
only from grateful motives, although he had two children by her, and he
left England for the first time, where he had become the object of
persecutions of all kinds, and of a hatred which at a later period
culminated in taking away his right to the guardianship of his children.

Such was his position when Lord Byron arrived in Switzerland, and
alighted at the Hotel Secheron. To make acquaintance, therefore, with
the author of "Queen Mab," and with the daughter of Godwin, for whom he
entertained great regard, was a natural consequence on the part of the
author of "Childe Harold."

Notwithstanding their difference of character, their diversity of taste,
and their different habits, owing to the very opposite mode of living
which they had followed, the two poets felt drawn to one another by that
irresistible sympathy which springs up in the souls of two persecuted
beings, however just that persecution may have been, as regards Shelley,
but which was wholly unjust as regards Byron. Here we must allow Moore
to speak:--

"The conversation of Shelley, from the extent of his poetic reading, and
the strange, mystic speculations into which his systems of philosophy
led him, was of a nature strongly to interest the attention of Lord
Byron, and to turn him away from worldly associations and topics into
more abstract and untrodden ways of thought. As far as contrast indeed
is an enlivening ingredient of such intercourse, it would be difficult
to find two persons more formed to whet each other's faculties by
discussion, as on few points of common interest between them did their
opinions agree: and that this difference had its root deep in the
conformation of their respective minds, needs but a glance through the
rich, glittering labyrinth of Shelley's pages to assure us.

"In Lord Byron, the real was never forgotten in the fanciful. However
Imagination had placed her whole realm at his disposal, he was no less a
man of this world than a ruler of hers: and, accordingly, through the
airiest and most subtle creations of his brain, still the life-blood of
truth and reality circulates. With Shelley it was far otherwise: his
fancy was the medium through which he saw all things, his facts as well
as his theories; and not only the greater part of his poetry, but the
political and philosophical speculations in which he indulged, were all