"about the third day, Byron relented from his rapt mood, as if he felt it was out of place, and became playful, and disposed to contribute his fair proportion to the general endeavour to while away the tediousness of the dull voyage."
But yet throughout the whole passage,
"if," says Galt, "my remembrance is not treacherous, he only spent one evening in the cabin with us — the evening before we came to anchor at Cagliari; for, when the lights were placed, he made himself a man forbid, took his station on the railing, between the pegs on which the sheets are belayed and the shrouds, and there, for hours, sat in silence, enamoured, it may be, of the moon. All these peculiarities, with his caprices, and something inexplicable in the cast of his metaphysics, while they served to awaken interest, contributed little to conciliate esteem. He was often strangely rapt — it may have been from his genius; and, had its grandeur and darkness been then divulged, susceptible of explanation; but, at the time, it threw, as it were, around him the sackcloth of penitence. Sitting amid the shrouds and rattlings, in the tranquillity of the moonlight, churning an inarticulate melody, he seemed almost apparitional, suggesting dim reminiscences of him who shot the albatross"
(Galt's
Life of Byron
, pp. 57-61).
[cross-reference: return to Footnote 5 of Letter 149]
Byron's "new Calypso." Mrs. Spencer Smith (born about 1785) was the daughter of Baron Herbert, Austrian Ambassador at Constantinople, wife of Spencer Smith, the British Minister at Stuttgart, and sister-in-law of Sir Sidney Smith, the hero of Acre. In 1805 she was staying, for her health, at the baths of Valdagno, near Vicenza, when the Napoleonic wars overspread Northern Italy, and she took refuge with her sister, the Countess Attems, at Venice. In 1806 General Lauriston took over the government of the city in the name of Napoleon, and M. de La Garde was appointed Prefect of the Police. A few days after their arrival, on April 18, Mrs. Smith was arrested, and, guarded by