[Or the six following poems, the first three were written immediately before Lord Byron's final departure from England; the others, during the earlier part of his residence in the neighbourhood of Geneva. They al! refer to the unhappy event, which will for ever mark the chief crisis of his personal story, -- that separation from Lady Byron, of which, after all that has been said and written, the real motives and circumstances remain as obscure as ever.

It is only, of course, with Lord Byron's part in the transaction that the public have any sort of title to concern themselves. He has given us this right, by making a domestic occurrence the subject of printed verses; but, so long as the other party chooses to guard that reserve, which few can be so uncharitable as not to ascribe, in the main, to a high feeling, it is entirely impossible to arrive at any clear and definite judgment on the case as a whole. Each reader must, therefore, be content to interpret for himself, as fairly as he may, an already bulky collection of evidence, which will probably be doubled before it has any claim to be considered as complete. There are, however, two important points which seem to us to be placed beyond all chance of dispute hereafter: namely, first, that Lord Byron himself never knew the precise origin of his Lady's resolution to quit his society, in 1816; and, secondly, that, down to the last, he never despaired of being ultimately reconciled to her. Both of these facts appear to be established, in the clearest manner, by Mr. Moore's narrative, and the whole subsequent tenour of the Poet's own diaries, letters, and conversations. Mr. Kennedy, in his account of Lord Byron's last residence in Cephalonia, represents him as saying,-"Lady Byron deserves every respect from me : I do not indeed know the cause of the separation, and I have remained, and ever will remain, ready for a reconciliation, whenever circumstances open and point out the way to it." Mr. Moore has preserved evidence of one attempt which Lord Byron made to bring about an explanation with his Lady, ere he left Switzerland for Italy. Whether he ever repeated the experiment we are uncertain: but that failed, and the failure must be borne in mind, when the reader considers some of the smaller pieces included in this Section. See MOORE's Notices, antè, Vol. III. p. 286. — E.]

1

FARE THEE WELL. (1)

"Alas! they had been friends in Youth;
But whispering tongues can poison truth;
And constancy lives in realms above;
And Life is thorny; and youth is vain :
And to be wroth with one we love,
Doth work like madness in the brain;

*

But never either found another

To free the hollow heart from paining—
They stood aloof, the scars remaining,
Like cliffs, which had been rent asunder;
A dreary sea now flows between,

But neither heat, nor frost, nor thunder
Shall wholly do away, I ween,

The marks of that which once hath been."

COLERIDGE'S Christabel.

FARE thee well! and if for ever,
Still for ever, fare thee well:
Even though unforgiving, never

'Gainst thee shall my heart rebel.

(1) [It was about the middle of April that his two celebrated copies of verses, "Fare thee well," and "A Sketch," made their appearance in the newspapers; and while the latter poem was generally, and, it must be owned, justly condemned, as a sort of literary assault on an obscure female, whose situation ought to have placed her as much beneath his satire, as the undignified mode of his attack certainly raised her above it, with regard to the other poem, opinions were a good deal more divided. To many it appeared a strain of true conjugal tenderness, a kind of appeal which no woman with a heart could resist; while, by others, on the contrary, it was considered to be a mere showy effusion of sentiment, as difficult for real feeling to have produced as it was easy for fancy and art, and altogether unworthy of the deep interests involved in the subject. To this latter opinion I confess iny own to have, at first, strongly inclined; and suspicious as I could

Would that breast were bared before thee
Where thy head so oft hath lain,
While that placid sleep came o'er thee
Which thou ne'er canst know again:

Would that breast, by thee glanced over,
Every inmost thought could show!
Then thou would'st at last discover
'Twas not well to spurn it so.

Though the world for this commend thee—
Though it smile upon the blow,
Even its praises must offend thee,
Founded on another's woe:

Though my many faults defaced me,
Could no other arm be found,
Than the one which once embraced me,
To inflict a cureless wound?

But by sudden wrench, believe not

Hearts can thus be torn away:

not help thinking the sentiment that could, at such a moment, indulge in such verses, the taste that prompted or sanctioned their publication appeared to me even still more questionable. On reading, however, his own account of all the circumstances in the Memoranda, I found that on both points I had, in common with a large portion of the public, done him in. Justice. He there described, and in a manner whose sincerity there was no doubting, the swell of tender recollections under the influence of which, as he sat one night musing in his study, these stanzas were produced,—the tears, as he said, falling fast over the paper as he wrote them. Neither did it appear, from that account, to have been from any wish or intention of his own, but through the injudicious zeal of a friend whom he had suffered to take a copy, that the verses met the public eye. — MOORE.]