ver flies,
Whose heart and not whose fancy sings;
Simple and young, I dare not feign;
Mine be the rude yet heartfelt strain,
"Friendship is Love without his wings!"
_December_, 1806.

These early poems are well characterized by the impression which they
produced upon Sir Robert Dallas, a man of taste and talent, who, though
a bigot and a prey to prejudices of all kinds, hastened, nevertheless,
after reading them, to compliment the author in the following
words:--"Your poems are not only beautiful as compositions, but they
also denote an honorable and upright heart, and one prone to virtue."

This eulogium is well deserved, and I pity those who could read the
"Hours of Idleness" without liking their youthful writer. If we had
space enough, we fain would follow the young man from Cambridge to the
mysterious Abbey of Newstead, where he loved to invite his friends and
institute with them a monastery of which he proclaimed himself the
Abbot--an amusement really most innocent in itself, and which bigotry
and folly alone could consider reprehensible. With what pleasure he
would show that in the monastery of Newstead its abbot lived the
simplest and most austere existence,--"a life of study," as Washington
Irving describes it, from what he heard Nanna Smyth say of it some
years after Byron's death. How delighted we should be to follow him in
his first travels in search of experience of life, and when his genius
revealed itself in that light which was shortly to make him the idol of
the public and the hatred of the envious. We could show him to have been
always the same kind-hearted man, by whom severity and injustice were
never had recourse to except against himself, and whose melancholy was
too often the result of broken illusions and disappointments. His simple
and noble character, having always before it an ideal perfection,
perpetually by comparison, thought itself at fault; and the world, who
could not comprehend the exquisite delicacy of his mind, took for
granted the reputation he gave himself, and made him a martyr till
heaven should give him time to become a saint.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 20: See chapter upon Generosity.]

[Footnote 21: Marston Moor, where the adherents of Charles I. were
defeated. Prince Rupert, son of the Elector Palatine, and nephew to
Charles I. He afterward commanded the fleet in the reign of Charles II.]

[Footnote 22: This alludes to the