[550] [See letter to Murray, September 24, 1818: "What does 'thy waters wasted them' mean (in the Canto)? That is not me. Consult the MS. always." Nevertheless, the misreading appeared in several editions. (For a correspondence on the subject, see Notes and Queries, first series, vol. i. pp. 182, 278, 324, 508; vol. ix. p. 481; vol. x. pp. 314, 434.)]
[qh] Thy waters wasted them while they were free.—[Editions 1818, 1819, 1823, and Galignani, 1825.]
[qi] Unchangeable save calm thy tempests ply.—[MS. M., D.]
The image of Eternity and Space
For who hath fixed thy limits——.—[MS. M. erased.]
[551] [Compare Tennyson's In Memoriam, lv. stanza 6—
"Dragons of the prime,
That tare each other in their slime,
Were mellow music match'd with him.">[
[552] ["While at Aberdeen, he used often to steal from home unperceived; sometimes he would find his way to the seaside" (Life, p. 9). For an account of his feats in swimming, see Letters, 1898, i. 263, note 1; and letter to Murray, February 21, 1821. See, too, for a "more perilous, but less celebrated passage" (from Old Lisbon to Belem Castle), Travels in Albania, ii. 195.]
[553] ["It was a thought worthy of the great spirit of Byron, after exhibiting to us his Pilgrim amidst all the most striking scenes of earthly grandeur and earthly decay ... to conduct him and us at last to the borders of 'the Great Deep.' ... The image of the wanderer may well be associated, for a time, with the rock of Calpe, the shattered temples of Athens, or the gigantic fragments of Rome; but when we wish to think of this dark personification as of a thing which is, where can we so well imagine him to have his daily haunt as by the roaring of the waves? It was thus that Homer represented Achilles in his moments of ungovernable and inconsolable grief for the loss of Patroclus. It was thus he chose to depict the paternal despair of Chryseus—" Βή δ' ἀκέων παρὰ θῖνα πολυφλοίσβοιο θαλάσσης." Note by Professor Wilson, ed. 1837.]