telling us a minute before ;- -mere stupidity, but they might have broken our noddles. Got to Thoun in the evening; the weather has been tolerable the whole day. But as the wild part of our tour is finished, it don't matter to us; in all the desirable part, we have been most lucky in warmth and clearness of atmosphere." September 26. "Being out of the mountains, my journal must be as flat as my journey. From Thoun to Berne, good road, hedges, villages, industry, property, and all sorts of tokens of insipid civilisation. From Berne to Fribourg; different canton; Catholics; passed a field of battle; Swiss beat the French in one of the late wars against the French republic. Bought a dog. The greater part of this tour has been on horseback, on foot, and on mule." "September 28. "Saw the tree planted in honour of the battle of Morat; three hundred and forty years old; a good deal decayed. Left Fribourg, but first saw the cathedral; high tower. Overtook the baggage of the nuns of La Trappe, who are removing to Normandy; afterwards a coach, with a quantity of nuns in it. Proceeded along the banks of the lake of Neuchâtel; very pleasing and soft, but not so mountainous-at least, the Jura, not appearing so, after the Bernese Alps. Reached Yverdun in the dusk; a long line of large trees on the border of the lake; fine and sombre; the auberge nearly full -a German princess and suite; got rooms. 66 September 29. "Passed through a fine and flourishing country, but not mountainous. In the evening reached Aubonne (the entrance and bridge something like that of Durham), which commands by far the fairest view of the Lake of Geneva; twilight; the moon on the lake; a grove on the height, and of very noble trees. Here Tavernier (the eastern traveller) bought (or built) the château, because the site resembled and equalled that of Erivan, a frontier city of Persia; here he finished his voyages', and I this little excursion,- for I am within a few hours of Diodati, and have little more to see, and no more to say." With the following melancholy passage this Journal concludes: : "In the weather for this tour (of 13 days), [This is not correct. To retrieve his finances, which had suffered through the misconduct of a nephew, Tavernier set out once more on his travels in 1689. He succeeded in reaching Moscow, but died there in the I have been very fortunate fortunate in a companion (Mr. H.) - fortunate in our prospects, and exempt from even the little petty accidents and delays which often render journeys in a less wild country disappointing. I was disposed to be pleased. I am a lover of nature and an admirer of beauty. I can bear fatigue and welcome privation, and have seen some of the noblest views in the world. But in all this - the recollection of bitterness, and more especially of recent and more home desolation, which must accompany me through life, have preyed upon me here; and neither the music of the shepherd, the crashing of the avalanche, nor the torrent, the mountain, the glacier, the forest, nor the cloud, have for one moment lightened the weight upon my heart, nor enabled me to lose my own wretched identity in the majesty, and the power, and the glory, around, above, and beneath me." CHAPTER XXVII. 1816. GENEVA. ACQUAINTANCE WITH SHELLEY. LETTERS TO MURRAY.-MILAN.VE- AMONG the inmates of Sécheron, on his arrival at Geneva, Lord Byron had found Mr. and Mrs. Shelley, and a female relative of the latter, who had about a fortnight before taken up their residence at this hotel. It was the first time that Lord Byron and Mr. Shelley ever met; though, long before, when the latter was quite a youth, being the younger of the two by four or five years, he had sent to the noble poet a copy of his Queen Mab, accompanied by a letter, in which, after detailing at full length all the accusations he had heard brought against his character, he added, that, should these charges not have been true, it would make him happy to be honoured with his acquaint summer of that year. His "Travels through Turkey into Persia and the East Indies for the Space of Forty Years" were published in 1678. They will be found in Harris's Collection.] ance. The book alone, it appears, reached its destination, - the letter having miscarried, and Lord Byron was known to have expressed warm admiration of the opening lines of the poem. There was, therefore, on their present meeting at Geneva, no want of disposition towards acquaintance on either side, and an intimacy almost immediately sprung up between them. Among the tastes common to both, that for boating was not the least strong; and in this beautiful region they had more than ordinary temptations to indulge in it. Every evening, during their residence under the same roof at Sécheron, they embarked, accompanied by the ladies and Polidori, on the Lake; and to the feelings and fancies inspired by these excursions, which were not unfrequently prolonged into the hours of moonlight, we are indebted for some of those enchanting stanzas', in which the poet has given way to his passionate love of Nature so fervidly. "There breathes a living fragrance from the shore Of flowers yet fresh with childhood; on the ear Drips the light drop of the suspended oar. * At intervals, some bird from out the brakes A person who was of these parties has thus described to me one of their evenings: "When the bise or north-east wind blows, the waters of the Lake are driven towards the town, and with the stream of the Rhone, which sets strongly in the same direction, combine to make a very rapid current towards the harbour. Carelessly, one evening, we had yielded to its course, till we found ourselves almost driven on the piles; and it required all our rowers' strength to master the tide. The waves were high and inspiriting-we were all animated by our contest with the elements. I will sing you an Albanian song,' cried Lord Byron; now, be sentimental and give me all your attention.' It was a strange, wild howl that he gave forth; but such as, he declared, was an exact imitation of the savage Albanian mode, laughing, the while, at our disappointment, who had expected a wild Eastern melody." shape. Often too, when in the boat, he would lean abstractedly over the side, and surrender himself up, in silence, to the same absorbing task. The conversation of Mr. Shelley, from the extent of his poetic reading, and the strange, mystic speculations into which his system of philosophy led him, was of a nature strongly to arrest and 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 Mr. 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 subtile creations of his brain still the life-blood of truth and reality circulates. With Shelley it was far otherwise; his fancy (and he had sufficient for a whole generation of poets) 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 distilled through the same over-refining and unrealising alembic. Having started as a teacher and reformer of the world, at an age when he could know nothing of the world but from fancy, the persecution he met with on the threshold of this boyish enterprise but confirmed him in their remedies; and, instead of waiting to his first paradoxical views of human ills and take lessons of authority and experience, he, with a courage, admirable had it been but wisely directed, made war upon both. From this sort of self-willed start in the world, an impulse was at once given to his opinions and powers directly contrary, it would seem, to their natural bias, and from which his life was too short to allow him time to recover. With a mind, by nature, fervidly pious, he Sometimes the party landed, for a walk yet refused to acknowledge a Supreme Proupon the shore, and on such occasions, Lord vidence, and substituted some airy abstraction Byron would loiter behind the rest, lazily of" Universal Love" in its place. An aristrailing his sword-stick along, and mould-tocrat by birth, and, as I understand, also in ing, as he went, his thronging thoughts into 1 Childe Harold, canto 3. appearance and manners, he was yet a leveller in politics, and to such an Utopian extent as to be, seriously, the advocate of a com munity of property. With a delicacy and even romance of sentiment, which lends such grace to some of his lesser poems, he could notwithstanding contemplate a change in the relations of the sexes, which would have led to results fully as gross as his arguments for it were fastidious and refined; and though benevolent and generous to an extent that seemed to exclude all idea of selfishness, he yet scrupled not, in the pride of system, to disturb wantonly the faith of his fellow-men, and, without substituting any equivalent good in its place, to rob the wretched of a hope, which, even if false, would be worth all this world's best truths. lections, appears in the tinge, if not something deeper, of the manner and cast of thinking of Mr. Wordsworth, which is traceable through so many of his most beautiful stanzas. Being naturally, from his love of the abstract and imaginative, an admirer of the great poet of the Lakes, Mr. Shelley omitted no opportunity of bringing the beauties of his favourite writer under the notice of Lord Byron; and it is not surprising that, once persuaded into a fair perusal, the mind of the noble poet should in spite of some personal and political prejudices which unluckily survived this short access of admiration, — not only feel the influence, but, in some degree, even reflect the hues of one of the very few real and original poets that this age (fertile as it is in rhymers quales ego et Cluvienus) has had the glory of producing. Upon no point were the opposite tendencies of the two friends, to long-established opinions and matter of fact on one side, and to all that was most innovating and visionary on the other,- more observable than When Polidori was of their party, (which, in their notions on philosophical subjects; till he found attractions elsewhere, was geLord Byron being, with the great bulk of nerally the case,) their more elevated subjects mankind, a believer in the existence of of conversation were almost always put to Matter and Evil, while Shelley so far refined flight by the strange sallies of this eccentric upon the theory of Berkeley as not only to young man, whose vanity made him a conresolve the whole of Creation into spirit, but stant butt for Lord Byron's sarcasm and to add also to this immaterial system some merriment. The son of a highly respectable pervading principle, some abstract nonentity Italian gentleman, who was in early life, I of Love and Beauty, of which as a sub- understand, the secretary of Alfieri, Polidori stitute, at least, for Deity the philosophic seems to have possessed both talents and bishop had never dreamed. On such sub-dispositions which, had he lived, might have jects, and on poetry, their conversation ge- rendered him a useful member of his pronerally turned; and, as might be expected, fession and of society. At the time, however, from Lord Byron's facility in receiving new of which we are speaking, his ambition of impressions, the opinions of his companion distinction far outwent both his powers and were not altogether without some influence opportunities of attaining it. His mind, acon his mind. Here and there, among those cordingly, between ardour and weakness, fine bursts of passion and description that was kept in a constant hectic of vanity, and abound in the third canto of Childe Harold, he seems to have alternately provoked and may be discovered traces of that mysticism amused his noble employer, leaving him selof meaning,—that sublimity, losing itself in dom any escape from anger but in laughter. its own vagueness, which so much charac- Among other pretensions, he had set his terised the writings of his extraordinary heart upon shining as an author; and one friend; and in one of the notes we find evening at Mr. Shelley's, producing a tragedy Shelley's favourite Pantheism of Love thus of his own writing, insisted that they should glanced at:-"But this is not all: the undergo the operation of hearing it. To feeling with which all around Clarens and lighten the infliction, Lord Byron took upon the opposite rocks of Meillerie is invested, himself the task of reader; and the whole is of a still higher and more comprehensive scene, from the description I have heard of order than the mere sympathy with indi- it, must have been not a little trying to gravidual passion; it is a sense of the exist- vity. In spite of the jealous watch kept ence of love in its most extended and sublime upon every countenance by the author, it capacity, and of our own participation of its was impossible to withstand the smile lurking good and of its glory: it is the great prin- in the eye of the reader, whose only resource ciple of the universe, which is there more against the outbreak of his own laughter lay condensed, but not less manifested; and of in lauding, from time to time, most vehe. which, though knowing ourselves a part, we mently, the sublimity of the verses ; — - partilose our individuality, and mingle in the cularly some that began "Tis thus the goibeauty of the whole." ter'd idiot of the Alps," and then adding, at the close of every such_eulogy, “I assure you, when I was in the Drury Lane Com Another proof of the ductility with which he fell into his new friend's tastes and predi mittee, much worse things were offered to us." After passing a fortnight under the same roof with Lord Byron at Sécheron, Mr. and Mrs. Shelley removed to a small house on the Mont-Blanc side of the Lake, within about ten minutes' walk of the villa which their noble friend had taken, upon the high banks, called Belle Rive, that rose immediately behind them. During the fortnight that Lord Byron outstaid them at Sécheron, though the weather had changed and was become windy and cloudy, he every evening crossed the Lake, with Polidori, to visit them; and " as he returned again (says my informant) over the darkened waters, the wind, from far across, bore us his voice singing your Tyrolese Song of Liberty, which I then first heard, and which is to me inextricably linked with his remembrance." In the mean time, Polidori had become jealous of the growing intimacy of his noble patron with Shelley; and the plan which he now understood them to have formed of making a tour of the Lake without him completed his mortification. In the soreness of his feelings on this subject he indulged in some intemperate remonstrances, which Lord Byron indignantly resented; and the usual bounds of courtesy being passed on both sides, the dismissal of Polidori appeared, even to himself, inevitable. With this prospect, which he considered nothing less than ruin, before his eyes, the poor young man was, it seems, on the point of committing that fatal act which, two or three years afterwards, he actually did perpetrate. Retiring to his own room, he had already drawn forth the poison from his medicine chest, and was pausing to consider whether he should write a letter before he took it, when Lord Byron (without, however, the least suspicion of his intention), tapped at the door and entered, with his hand held forth in sign of reconciliation. The sudden revulsion was too much for poor Polidori, who burst into tears; and, in relating all the circumstances of the occurrence afterwards, he declared that nothing could exceed the gentle kindness of Lord Byron in soothing his mind and restoring him to composure. Soon after this the noble poet removed to Diodati. He had, on his first coming to Geneva, with the good-natured view of introducing Polidori into company, gone to several Genevese parties; but, this task per ["The song of war shall echo through our mountains, formed, he retired altogether from society till late in the summer, when, as we have seen, he visited Copet. His means were at this time very limited; and though he lived by no means parsimoniously, all unnecessary expenses were avoided in his establishment. The young physician had been, at first, a source of much expense to him, being in the habit of hiring a carriage, at a louis a day (Lord Byron not then keeping horses), to take him to his evening parties; and it was some time before his noble patron had the courage to put this luxury down. The liberty, indeed, which this young person allowed himself was, on one occasion, the means of bringing an imputation upon the poet's hospitality and good breeding, which, like every thing else, true or false, tending to cast a shade upon his character, was for some time circulated with the most industrious zeal. Without any authority from the noble owner of the mansion, he took upon himself to invite some Genevese gentlemen (M. Pictet, and, I believe, M. Bonstetten) to dine at Diodati; and the punishment which Lord Byron thought it right to inflict upon him for such freedom was, he had invited the guests, to leave him also to entertain them." This step, though merely a consequence of the physician's indiscretion, it was not difficult, of course, to convert into a serious charge of caprice and rudeness against the host himself. as By such repeated instances of thoughtlessness (to use no harsher term), it is not wonderful that Lord Byron should at last be driven into a feeling of distaste towards his medical companion, of whom he one day remarked, that "he was exactly the kind of person to whom, if he fell overboard, one would hold out a straw, to know if the adage be true that drowning men catch at straws." A few more anecdotes of this young man, while in the service of Lord Byron, may, as throwinglight upon the character of the latter, be not inappropriately introduced. While the whole party were, one day, out boating, Polidori, by some accident, in rowing, struck Lord Byron violently on the knee-pan with his oar; and the latter, without speaking, turned his face away to hide the pain. After a moment he said, "Be so kind, Polidori, another time, to take more care, for you hurt me very much."—" I am glad of it," answered the other; "I am glad to see you can suffer pain." In a calm suppressed tone, Lord Byron replied, "Let me advise you, Polidori, when you, another time, hurt any one, not to express your satisfaction. People don't like to be told that those who give them pain are glad of it; and they cannot always com mand their anger. It was with some difficulty that I refrained from throwing you into the water; and, but for Mrs. Shelley's presence, I should probably have done some such rash thing." This was said without ill temper, and the cloud soon passed away. Another time, when the lady just mentioned was, after a shower of rain, walking up the hill to Diodati, Lord Byron, who saw her from his balcony where he was standing with Polidori, said to the latter," Now, you who wish to be gallant ought to jump down this small height, and offer your arm." Polidori chose the easiest part of the declivity, and leaped ;- -but the ground being wet, his foot slipped, and he sprained his ankle. 1 Lord Byron instantly helped to carry him in and procure cold water for the foot; and, after he was laid on the sofa, perceiving that he was uneasy, went up stairs himself (an exertion which his lameness made painful and disagreeable) to fetch a pillow for him. 'Well, I did not believe you had so much feeling," was Polidori's gracious remark, which, it may be supposed, not a little clouded the noble poet's brow. 66 66 A dialogue which Lord Byron himself used to mention as having taken place between them, during their journey on the Rhine, is amusingly characteristic of both the persons concerned. "After all," said the physician, "what is there you can do that I cannot ?"Why, since you force me to say," answered the other, "I think there are three things I can do which you cannot." Polidori defied him to name them. "I can," said Lord Byron, "swim across that river-I can snuff out that candle with a pistol-shot at the distance of twenty paces. - and I have written a poem 2 of which 14,000 copies were sold in one day." The jealous pique of the Doctor against Shelley was constantly breaking out; and on the occasion of some victory which the latter had gained over him in a sailing-match, he took it into his head that his antagonist had treated him with contempt; and went so far, in consequence, notwithstanding Shelley's known sentiments against duelling, as to proffer him a sort of challenge, at which Shelley, as might be expected, only laughed. Lord Byron, however, fearing that the vivacious physician might still further take advantage of this peculiarity of his friend, said to him, “Recollect, that though Shelley has some scruples about duelling, I have none; and shall be, at all times, ready to take his place." At Diodati, his life was passed in the same regular round of habits and occupations into which, when left to himself, he always naturally fell; a late breakfast, then a visit to the Shelleys' cottage and an excursion on the Lake; - at five, dinner 3 (when he usually preferred being alone), and then, if the weather permitted, an excursion again. He and Shelley had joined in purchasing a boat, for which they gave twenty-five louis, - a small sailing vessel, fitted to stand the usual squalls of the climate, and, at that time, the only keeled boat on the Lake. When the weather did not allow of their excursions after dinner, an occurrence not unfrequent during this very wet summer, the inmates of the cottage passed their evenings at Diodati; and, when the rain rendered it inconvenient for them to return home, remained there to sleep. "We often," says one, who was not the least ornamental of the party, "sat up in conversation till the morning light. There was never any lack of subjects, and, grave or gay, we were always interested." 4 During a week of rain at this time, having amused themselves with reading German ghost-stories, they agreed, at last, to write something in imitation of them. "You and | I," said Lord Byron to Mrs. Shelley," will publish ours together. He then began his tale of the Vampire; and, having the whole arranged in his head, repeated to them a sketch of the story one evening,-but, from the narrative being in prose, made but little progress in filling up his outline. The most memorable result, indeed, of their story-telling compact, was Mrs. Shelley's wild and powerful romance of Frankenstein, one of those original conceptions that take hold of the public mind at once, and for ever. To this lameness of Polidori, one of the preceding he appeased by privately chewing tobacco and smoking letters of Lord Byron alludes. 2 The Corsair. 3 His system of diet here was regulated by an abstinence almost incredible. A thin slice of bread, with tea, at breakfast a light, vegetable dinner, with a bottle or two of Seltzer water, tinged with vin de Grave, and in the evening a cup of green tea, without milk or sugar, formed the whole of his sustenance. The pangs of hunger cigars. 4 From his remembrance of this sketch, Polidori afterwards vamped up his strange novel of the Vampire, which, under the supposition of its being Lord Byron's, was received with such enthusiasm in France. It would, indeed, not a little deduct from our value of foreign fame, if, what some French writers have asserted be true, that the appearance of this extravagant novel among our neighbours first attracted their attention to the genius of Byron. |