mountains where I now respire,
Fain would I waft such blessing upon thee,
As, with a sigh, I deem thou might'st have been to me."

Who ever read "Childe Harold" and was not touched by the delightful
stanzas of the third canto,--a perfect _chef-d'oeuvre_ of tenderness
and kindness, inclosed, as it were, in another master-piece, like, were
it possible, a jewel found in a diamond?

Those only, however, who lived with him in Greece and in Italy are able
to bear witness to his paternal tenderness. This sentiment really
developed itself on his leaving England, and only appears from that time
forward in his poems. Byron loved all children, but his heart beat
really when he met children of Ada's age.

Hearing at Venice that Moore had lost a child, he wrote to him, "I enter
fully into your misery, for I feel myself entirely absorbed in my
children. I have such tenderness for my little Ada."

Both at Ravenna and at Pisa he was miserable if he did not hear from
Ada. Whenever he received any portraits of her or a piece of her hair,
these were solemn days of rejoicing for him, but they usually increased
his melancholy. When in Greece he heard of Ada's illness, he was seized
with such anxiety that he could no longer give his attention to any
thing. "His journal (which, by-the-by, was lost or destroyed after his
death) was interrupted on account of the news of his child's illness,"
says Count Gamba, in his narrative of Byron's last voyage to Greece.

The thought of his child was ever present to him when he wrote, and she
was the centre of all his hopes and his fears.

The persecution to which he was subjected for having written "Don Juan,"
having made him fear one day at Pisa that its effect upon his daughter
might be to diminish her affection for him, he said:--

"I am so jealous of my daughter's entire sympathy, that, were this work,
'Don Juan'--(written to while away hours of pain and sorrow),--to
diminish her affection for me, I would never write a word more; and
would to God I had not written a word of it!"

He likewise said that he was often wont to think of the time when his
daughter would know her father by his works. "Then," said he, "shall I
triumph, and the tears which my daughter will then shed, together with
the knowledge that she will share the feelings with which the various
allusions to herself and me have been written, will console me in my
darkest hours. Ada's mother may have enjoyed the smiles of her